Abstract
Simple SummaryIn South Africa, lions are farmed, and a product of that farming is lion skeletons that form part of an international trade to supply traditional medicine markets in Southeast Asia with felid bones. As a matter of public policy, the practice is a complicated nexus of concerns for entrepreneurial freedom, wildlife conservation, and the fair treatment of animals. We used this case to demonstrate how public discourse about ethically-charged policies can be aided by a technique from the academic field of applied ethics, i.e., formal argument analysis. We showed how the technique can be integrated into existing frameworks for public decision-making. To further facilitate the application of this technique to other cases, we also offered ten general lessons for formal analysis of ethical arguments.Conservation and natural resource management are increasingly attending the ethical elements of public decisions. Ethical considerations are challenging, in part, because they typically require accounting for the moral consideration of various human and nonhuman forms of life, whose interests sometimes conflict (or seem to conflict). A valuable tool for such evaluations is the formal analysis of ethical arguments. An ethical argument is a collection of premises, logically interrelated, to yield a conclusion that can be expressed in the form, “We ought to…” According to the rules of logic, a conclusion is supported by an argument if all its premises are true or appropriate and when it contains no mistaken inferences. We showed how the formal analysis of ethical arguments can be used to engage stakeholders and decision-makers in decision-making processes. We summarised the method with ten specific guidelines that would be applicable to any case. We illustrated the technique using a case study focused on captive-bred lions, the skeletons of which form part of an international trade to supply traditional medicine markets in Southeast Asia with felid bones. As a matter of public policy, the practice is a complicated nexus of concerns for entrepreneurial freedom, wildlife conservation, and the fair treatment of animals.
Highlights
Public decisions pertaining to relationships between humans and other animals routinely involve transdisciplinary synthesis of ideas that spans a breath-taking range of knowledge—ecology, organismal sciences, sciences pertaining to human behavior, politics, economics, ethics, and more [1,2,3].Heaped upon that challenge are different parties engaged in the decision-making process who routinely have different understandings of the various empirical and normative claims that pertain to a decision, and sometimes even a different understanding of the relevance of various claims to the decision
We presented a set of arguments for and against lion farming that focused on a variety of reasons, including conservation, intrinsic value, and economics
Some of these untended concerns include the cultural value of lion farming for traditional medicine in Africa and Southeast Asia or the sociopolitical history of South Africa
Summary
Heaped upon that challenge are different parties engaged in the decision-making process who routinely have different understandings of the various empirical and normative claims that pertain to a decision, and sometimes even a different understanding of the relevance of various claims to the decision. That inadequacy is a dreadful hindrance to discovery of common ground that can lead to a wise decision—whether that common ground be made via discovery of perspectives that transcend differences or through one party persuading a decision-maker of the limits of a perspective held by another party. Often the more pernicious complications are differences in the ethical values among parties to a decision-making process. The challenge here may not be so much whether an engaged party acknowledges the moral value of nonhuman organisms or the collectives they form—populations, species, and ecosystems
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