Moral Status Of Animals Research Articles

120 Gene editing: From the general public perspective

Abstract The public controversy around genetically engineered (GE) products, aka genetically modified organisms (GMO), has been ongoing for almost 40 yr fueled in part by well-funded misinformation campaigns disseminated by activist organizations. Polls reveal that public perception of GE animals is generally negative, with biomedical applications being more positively perceived than agricultural applications. Opposition to GE animals is often conflated with opposition to use of animals in research in general, as well as opposition to aspects of intensive animal agriculture. In general, concerns about animal biotechnology are influenced by views around the moral status of animals, the boundary between “natural” and “unnatural,” and perceived risks and benefits of GE animals to health and the environment (personal and cultural characteristics); the purpose of the application (e.g., disease resistance > fast growth), the method(s) being used, and the motivation of the research group making the genetic modification (public or private); and the species being modified (animal characteristics). There were three factors that aggravated opposition to GE products including 1) a lengthy and expensive regulatory step uniquely associated with commercializing products developed using that breeding method, 2) competing business interests (e.g., organic, non-GMO project) that were able to monetarize fear around the method to extract value (rent seeking) and selling their value-added (more expensive) product that avoided the use of GE, and 3) there is a mandatory labeling requirement to track/differentiate products produced with (or without) that breeding method to enable value-added marketing. Even so, when GE products that people wanted were allowed to reach the market (e.g., Impossible Burger with GE heme, GloFish, AquAdvantage salmon), they met with commercial acceptance. Now it has been suggested that the public will similarly reject animal products derived from gene edited (GnEd) animals, but that idea has only recently been put to the test as such food products were not previously available. A 2022 Japanese paper noted that with regard to GnEd food (gene knock-out tomatoes and fish) there was a “gap between anticipated and actual public response”. They noted that “even though there were some petitions against the use of genome-editing made by consumer groups; they did not develop into a mass mobilization, and media coverage was mostly positive.” These GnEd food products were developed by startups from Japanese universities, required no unique regulatory step before commercialization or mandatory labeling with Japanese regulatory agencies transparently sharing a summary of the information and notification on their websites, and businesses were encouraged to share information on products to respect The right of consumers to know. Successful commercialization of GnEd animal products has so far occurred in countries (e.g., Argentina, Brazil, Japan) where regulations treat simple GnEd products with no “foreign DNA” to be “non-GMO” and analogous to conventional breeding.

How to do robots with words: a performative view of the moral status of humans and nonhumans

Moral status arguments are typically formulated as descriptive statements that tell us something about the world. But philosophy of language teaches us that language can also be used performatively: we do things with words and use words to try to get others to do things. Does and should this theory extend to what we say about moral status, and what does it mean? Drawing on Austin, Searle, and Butler and further developing relational views of moral status, this article explores what it means to conceptualize moral status in a performative way and in a way that reaches deep down to its basis, proposes a distinction between strong and weak versions of this view, and discusses the implications for thinking about the moral status of humans and nonhumans. Next to contributing to theory about performativity in the moral domain in general, this effort helps to reveal, understand, and evaluate the performative dimension of utterances made in public discussions about the moral status of animals and artificial agents such as robots and artificial intelligence.

Toward a Moderate Hierarchical View About the Moral Status of Animals

In this essay, I develop a moderate hierarchical position about the moral status of animals that is based on two factors: on the level of mental development of a being who is affected and on the significance of the interests that are affected. I argue that this view accommodates two different sets of moral intuitions. On one hand, it explains why, in general, humans have the special moral standing that is typically attributed to us. On the other hand, it also allows us to accommodate much of our intuition about how animals ought to be treated. In addition, this view is supported also by plausible general theoretical considerations. Subsequently, I explore some implications of this view for some real-life examples of our interactions with animals, especially, for the practice of raising them for food using industrial methods. I argue that this practice is morally wrong and that the correct approach is to adopt a (nearly) plant-based lifestyle.

Developing Animal Theology: An Engagement with Leonardo Boff

Developing Animal Theology: An Engagement with Leonardo Boff

A Reading of the Animal Defender Art in Terms of Ethics and Political Economy

This research tries to explain the place of animals in the process of ethics and political economy and based on selected examples, studies and analyzes the art of protecting the animals. It should be noted that although the moral status of animals has been developing in recent decades, economic systems determine the hierarchy of beings in societies. According to the modern philosophers, art as a tool of knowledge has a great ability to know the world and its related matters. In addition, by producing various works in defense of animal rights, artists also play a significant role in raising awareness and development, which is worthy of attention. This research tries to describe and analyze a selection of posters, illustrations, and graffiti by artists such as Sue Coe, Arabo Sargsian, Banksy, and Hamidreza Pourakbar based on library data. The findings of this research indicates that the idea of creating the desired works in accordance with the life experience of the artist is an effort to recognize the rights of animals, which significantly plays a role in promoting public awareness in parallel with philosophical and economic studies.

Are the folk utilitarian about animals?

Robert Nozick famously raised the possibility that there is a sense in which both deontology and utilitarianism are true: deontology applies to humans while utilitarianism applies to animals. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in such a hybrid views of ethics. Discussions of this Nozickian Hybrid View, and similar approaches to animal ethics, often assume that such an approach reflects the commonsense view, and best captures common moral intuitions. However, recent psychological work challenges this empirical assumption. We review evidence suggesting that the folk is deontological all the way down—it is just that the moral side constraints that protect animals from harm are much weaker than those that protect humans. In fact, it appears that people even attribute some deontological protections, albeit extremely weak ones, to inanimate objects. We call this view Multi-level Weighted Deontology. While such empirical findings cannot show that the Nozickian Hybrid View is false, or that it is unjustified, they do remove its core intuitive support. That support belongs to Multi-level Weighted Deontology, a view that is also in line with the view that Nozick himself seemed to favour. To complicate things, however, we also review evidence that our intuitions about the moral status of humans are, at least in significant part, shaped by factors relating to mere species membership that seem morally irrelevant. We end by considering the potential debunking upshot of such findings about the sources of common moral intuitions about the moral status of animals.

Materialism and the Moral Status of Animals

AbstractConsciousness has an important role in ethics: when a being consciously experiences the frustration or satisfaction of its interests, those interests deserve higher moral priority than those of a behaviourally similar but non-conscious being. I consider the relationship between this ethical role and an a posteriori (or ‘type-B’) materialist solution to the mind-body problem. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, if type-B materialism is correct, then the reference of the concept Phenomenal Consciousness is radically indeterminate between a neuronal-level property that is distinctive to mammals and a high-level functional property that is much more widely shared. This would leave many non-mammalian animals (such as birds, fish, insects and octopuses) with indeterminate moral status. There are ways to manage this radical moral indeterminacy, but all of these ways lead to profoundly troubling consequences.

Regional Expansion as a Constitutional Notion in the Environmental Sector

The expansion of a new autonomous region in its regulations does not include aspects of fulfilling the environment as a requirement for regional capacity so that it contradicts one of the environmental principles, namely the principle of sustainability. Therefore, the author wants to analyze the new concept of the environment in which this concept aims to make the environment an important part or main prerequisite in terms of regional expansion. The method used in finding the legal concept of regional expansion, especially on the fulfillment of environmental aspects, is by studying and analyzing environmental philosophy and determining its meaning so that it needs to be a consideration in order to fulfill the requirements for new autonomous regions to be expanded. Regarding the legal concept of regional expansion in the environmental field, it begins with determining the environment and nature, ways to respect the environment, clarity on the moral status of animals and plants, restoration of nature, and considering environmental sustainability for future generations. Referring to the philosophical aspect, the author includes environmental aspects as a basic requirement for regional capacity in the formation of an area, especially for the expansion of preparatory areas. Thus, the existence of the environment can still be felt along with the times.

The Moral Foundations of Care and Authority and the Perception of Animal Mind in Relation to Violence Against Animals

ABSTRACT Violence against animals, derived from human domination over them, is limited by the moral judgment of perpetrators and by public opinion. The current study investigated whether the moral foundations of Care and Authority and the perception of animal mind are associated with instrumental violence against animals, as well as the function of perception of animal mind in the context of this phenomenon. To this end, 504 participants from Poland completed paper-based questionnaires that measured acceptance and participation in instrumental violence against animals, moral foundations, and perception of the experience dimension of animal mind. The results of structural equation modeling, performed using four smaller sub-models, suggest that Care and Authority are predictors of instrumental violence against animals, with Care being negatively predictive and Authority being positively predictive (either as the acceptance of or participation in such violence). Perception of the experience dimension of animal mind is negatively associated with instrumental violence and plays an indirect role in the relationship between morality and violence as a mutual mediator of Care and Authority. These findings suggest that perception of animal mind is a mechanism that is activated during the moral judgment of intention and behavior by changing the moral status of animals. Moreover, Care and Authority were significant as direct predictors of instrumental violence. Thus, the availability of these moral foundations in society is important for animal welfare during farm-animal husbandry, pet breeding, transport, training, and treatment. These findings broaden our knowledge about the intuitive, rather than only the deliberative, paths responsible for violence against animals.

The moral status of animals: Degrees of moral status and the interest-based approach

This paper addresses the issue of the moral status of non-human animals, or the question whether sentient animals are morally considerable. The arguments for and against the moral status of animals are discussed, above all the argument from marginal cases. It is argued that sentient animals have moral status based on their having interests in their experiential well-being, but that there are degrees of moral status. Two interest-based approaches are presented and discussed: DeGrazia?s view that sentient animals have interests in continuing to live, and that their interests should be granted moral weight; and McMahan?s TRIA which similarly postulates that animals have interests and that in a given situation we should compare the human and animal interests at stake. Finally, the paper concludes that the anthropocentric approach to animal ethics should be abandoned in favour of the biocentric ethics.

“We are Human Beings, and We Value Human Life”: Glock and Diamond on Mental Capacities and Animal Ethics

How should a philosophical inquiry into the moral status of (nonhuman) animals proceed? Many philosophers maintain that by examining the “morally relevant” psychological or physiological capacities possessed by the members of different species, and comparing them with similar capacities possessed by human beings, the moral status of the animals in question can be established. Others contend that such an approach runs into serious moral and conceptual problems, a crucial one being that of how to give a coherent account of the natural sense of concern for profoundly cognitively impaired human beings if moral status is assumed to depend on features that centrally include cognitive capacities. The present article discusses this debate with reference to Wittgenstein-influenced philosophers whose respective approaches, on the face of it, diverge dramatically. With a primary focus on Hans-Johann Glock and Cora Diamond, and a secondary focus on recent work by Alice Crary, I argue that, despite an overt disavowal of the kind of approach favoured by Diamond and Crary, Glock’s affirmation that we simply do “value human life” brings him closer to that approach than he acknowledges.

Non‐Human Animals and Educational Policy: Philosophical Post‐humanism, Critical Pedagogy, and Ecopedagogy1

Questions about the conscious, conative and cognitive life, as well as the status and treatment of other-than-animals have been receiving systematic consideration by philosophers for close to fifty years. It is all the more puzzling, then, that it is only in recent years that these issues have been addressed by educational philosophers and scholars of moral education, the focus being mainly on the eating of animals. This essay examines some of the approaches that have been suggested for including the ethical treatment and moral status of animals as an urgent concern within educational policy, pedagogy, and teaching and learning generally

Artificial Beings Worthy of Moral Consideration in Virtual Environments: An Analysis of Ethical Viability

This article explores whether and under which circumstances it is ethically viable to include artificial beings worthy of moral consideration in virtual environments. In particular, the article focuses on virtual environments such as those in digital games and training simulations – interactive and persistent digital artifacts designed to fulfill specific purposes, such as entertainment, education, training, or persuasion.The article introduces the criteria for moral consideration that serve as a framework for this analysis. Adopting this framework, the article tackles the question of whether including artificial intelligences that are entitled to moral consideration in virtual environments constitutes an immoral action on the part of human creators. To address this problem, the article draws on three conceptual lenses from the philosophical branch of ethics: the problem of parenthood and procreation, the question concerning the moral status of animals, and the classical problem of evil.Using a thought experiment, the concluding section proposes a contractualist answer to the question posed in this article. The same section also emphasizes the potential need to reframe our understanding of the design of virtual environments and their future stakeholders.

Hsiao on the Moral Status of Animals: Two Simple Responses

According to a common view, animals have moral status. Further, a standard defense of this view is the Argument from Consciousness: animals have moral status because they are conscious and can experience pain and it would be bad were they to experience pain. In a series of papers (J Agric Environ Ethics 28(2):277–291, 2015a, J Agric Environ Ethics 28(11):11270–1138, 2015b, J Agric Environ Ethics 30(1):37–54, 2017), Timothy Hsiao claims that animals do not have moral status and criticizes the Argument from Consciousness. This short paper defends the Argument from Consciousness by providing two simple responses to Hsiao’s criticism.

Are Zoos and Aquariums Justifiable? A Utilitarian Evaluation of Two Prominent Arguments

Abstract Keeping animals captive in zoos and aquariums is commonly justified by claiming that doing so produces worthwhile consequences in terms of public education and animal conservation. I take a utilitarian approach to the issue, and, after establishing a view on the moral status of animals, assert that these arguments in favor of zoos and aquariums fail. Furthermore, if, as I suspect they are, these two justifications turn out to form the foundation of the argument justifying these institutions, then we ought to seriously reconsider the continued existence of zoos and aquariums altogether.

Animal Ethics and Behavioral Science: An Overdue Discussion

AbstractAnimal ethics—the field of philosophy concerned with the moral status of animals—is experiencing a momentum unprecedented in its history. Surprisingly, animal behavior science remains on the sidelines, despite producing critical evidence on which many arguments in animal ethics rest. In the present article, we explore the origins of the divide between animal behavior science and animal ethics before considering whether behavioral scientists should concern themselves with it. We finally envision tangible steps that could be taken to bridge the gap, encouraging scientists to be aware of, and to more actively engage with, an ethical revolution that is partly fueled by the evidence they generate.

An exploration of Peter Singer and Richard Posner's ethical arguments regarding the moral status of animals, with a specific focus on the use of animals for the consumption of food

The use of animals for the consumption of food is becoming a focus in recent times, due to environmental and animal welfare concerns. There has been an increase in research around the environmental concerns of the mass scale of the production of meat, with meat production in 2018 estimated at 330.51 million metric tons. In the UK alone, 182,000 cows were slaughtered in November 2018 and 108.4 million broiler chickens were slaughtered in October 2018. Many animal welfare groups argue against the inhumane conditions animals go through before they reach our plate. Due to this, a record number of people are reducing meat and animal product consumption, with some research indicating over 1.6 million people in the UK are vegan or vegetarian in 2016. With the questions and concerns around eating meat becoming so prominent today, it seems like the perfect time to revisit the philosophical arguments. This article will explore the global scale of using animals for the consumption of food, through the ethical arguments advocated by philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, of affording animals an equal moral status to humans. It will then consider the arguments advanced by Judge Richard Posner, as a tool to offer a critical analysis of Singer’s ideas.

A debunking argument against speciesism

Many people believe that human interests matter much more than the like interests of non-human animals, and this “speciesist belief” plays a crucial role in the philosophical debate over the moral status of animals. In this paper, I develop a debunking argument against it. My contention is that this belief is unjustified because it is largely due to an off-track process: our attempt to reduce the cognitive dissonance generated by the “meat paradox”. Most meat-eaters believe that it is wrong to harm animals unnecessarily, yet they routinely and deliberately behave in ways that cause great unnecessary suffering to animals. As recent research suggests, this practical inconsistency puts them in an unpleasant state of dissonance, which they try to escape by resolving the paradox. And they do so in part by adopting the speciesist belief—if animal suffering matters much less than human suffering, then harming animals cannot be so wrong after all. Since this belief-forming process does not track moral truth, I conclude that we are not justified in believing that human interests matter more than the similar interests of non-humans.

Thinking by Drawing

The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (EJPE) interviewed Kagan about his formative years; his work on death, the moral status of animals, and desert; his views on changing one’s mind and convergence in philosophy; and his advice for graduate students in moral philosophy.

The negative impact of scientific ideology on education about the moral status of animals

The article presents an analysis of the ethical views of Bernard Rollin, an American zoologist and philosopher who examined how the education about the moral status of animals has been affected by the so-called scientific ideology. This way of thinking denies animal suffering and consciousness in stark contrast with our commonsense knowledge and collective human experience. Rollin points to positivism and behaviourism as twin philosophical and psychological sources of this scientific ideology. Positivism rejected the concept of consciousness as a subjective, metaphysical, unscientific, non-measurable state and separated science from values and ethics. Behaviourism further obstructed moral reflection on the acceptable methods of treatment of animals not only by eliminating the category of animal consciousness, but also by replacing the vocabulary to describe its experimental manifestations with one of observable actions (reinforcement and aversion). Behaviourism denies animal suffering and other states of consciousness on the epistemological principle that they are difficult to verify. This paradigm continues to be successfully applied in modern biomedical laboratories and blinds scientists to both the pain inflicted on animals and the moral repercussions of animal consciousness. Positivism and behaviourism alike cast animals as models and biological mechanisms to distort our understanding of their nature and justify their harm. The article presents an analysis of the ethical views of Bernard Rollin, an American zoologist and philosopher who examined how the education about the moral status of animals has been affected by the so-called scientific ideology. This way of thinking denies animal suffering and consciousness in stark contrast with our commonsense knowledge and collective human experience. Rollin points to positivism and behaviourism as twin philosophical and psychological sources of this scientific ideology. Positivism rejected the concept of consciousness as a subjective, metaphysical, unscientific, non-measurable state and separated science from values and ethics. Behaviourism further obstructed moral reflection on the acceptable methods of treatment of animals not only by eliminating the category of animal consciousness, but also by replacing the vocabulary to describe its experimental manifestations with one of observable actions (reinforcement and aversion). Behaviourism denies animal suffering and other states of consciousness on the epistemological principle that they are difficult to verify. This paradigm continues to be successfully applied in modern biomedical laboratories and blinds scientists to both the pain inflicted on animals and the moral repercussions of animal consciousness. Positivism and behaviourism alike cast animals as models and biological mechanisms to distort our understanding of their nature and justify their harm.