Animal Ethics

In this paper I revisit previous critiques that I have made of much, though by no means all, bioethical discourse. These pertain to faithfulness to dualistic ontology, a taken-for-granted normative anthropocentrism, and the exclusion of a consideration of how political economy shapes the conditions for bioethical discourse (Twine Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 8(3):285-295, 2005; International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 16(3):1-18, 2007, 2010). Part of my argument around bioethical dualist ontology is to critique the assumption of a division between the “medical” (human) and “agricultural” (nonhuman) and to show various ways in which they are interrelated. I deepen this analysis with a focus on transnational pharmaceutical companies, with specific attention to their role in enhancing agricultural production through animal drug administration. I employ the topical case of antibiotics in order to speak to current debates in not only the interdisciplinary field of bioethics but also that of animal studies. More generally, the animal-industrial complex (Twine Journal for Critical Animal Studies 10(1):12-39, 2012) is underlined as a highly relevant bioethical object that deserves more conceptual and empirical attention.

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Is attention both necessary and sufficient for consciousness? Call this central question of this treatise, “Q.” We commonly have the experience of consciously paying attention to something, but is it possible to be conscious of something you are not attending to, or to attend to something of which you are not conscious? Where might we find examples of these?
This treatise is a quest to find an answer to Q in two parts. Part I reviews the foundations upon which the discourse on Q is built. Different inputs to Q produce different answers. After consideration of the many ways “attention” and “consciousness” have been defined, I settle upon phenomenal consciousness and Executive Attention (defined as a suite of strategies for structuring cognition for further processing implemented by the executive of working memory) as the most interesting inputs to Q, and the ones on which Part II focuses.
Attention without consciousness seems relatively easy to establish empirically, but consciousness without attention is much harder. The putative candidates all seem to have major problems, but I build a strong abductive case for the hitherto ignored case of foveal phenomenal overflow. We consciously see far more detail in our foveal fields than we can Executively Attend, although there is a serious obstacle to our ever confirming that empirically—identifying conscious content relies on Executive Attentional report. Triangulating the capacity limitations of attention, consciousness, and working memory strengthens this case for consciousness without attention, and suggests that cognition must work something like my “Witches’ Hat Model,” on which content can become conscious outside of Executive Attention or working memory. I conclude with some reflections on the implications of my arguments for the discourse on Q, and for other discourses such as the ontologies of attention and consciousness, theories of consciousness, some other cognitive concepts, and ethical considerations in humans, animals, and machines. A conclusive answer to Q continues to elude us. It may perhaps be an ultimately insoluble conundrum. But it is the very essence of humanity to seek an answer, and in so doing, to improve our understanding of our own nature:
“The proper study of mankind is man.”

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

La tesi presenta inizialmente il pensiero di Jacques Derrida sull'animalità. Il tema affrontato è la sovranità dell'uomo sul resto dei viventi, in particolare nei riguardi della discriminazione dell'animalità. Nei capitoli a seguire si attua un'emancipazione dell'animalità e non dall'animalità come la corrente umanista voleva. Attraverso l'ontogenesi del concetto di "umanità" viene decostruito il costrutto che sorregge la soglia che divide l'uomo dagli animali, laddove essi partecipano all'animalità in maniere differenti. L'emergenza di questa composizione dei temi trattati si erge ad azione esemplare con cui Derrida, prima di morire, ha lasciato delle tracce da seguire durante il ricevimento del premio Adorno.

Presentación de la traducción del capítulo 5 del libro de Piers Beirne, Confrontando el abuso a animales. Ley, criminología y relaciones humano-animal (2009). Incluye la traducción realizada por Ana Zacil Vieyra Ramírez y revisada por Itzia Cristina Vieyra Ramírez y Cristina Barragán. El capítulo traducido y la presentación están publicadas en Devenires, Vol. 17, No. 33, 2016, pp. 237-275.

Modern-day zoos and aquariums market themselves as places of education and conservation. A recent study conducted by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA) (Falk et al., 2007) is being widely heralded as the first direct evidence that visits to zoos and aquariums produce long-term positive effects on people’s attitudes toward other animals. In this paper, we address whether this conclusion is warranted by analyzing the study’s methodological soundness. We conclude that Falk et al. (2007) contains at least six major threats to methodological validity that undermine the authors’ conclusions. There remains no compelling evidence for the claim that zoos and aquariums promote attitude change, education, or interest in conservation in visitors, although further investigation of this possibility using methodologically sophisticated designs is warranted.

This is an early paper that reviews approaches to animal ethics and discusses their applicability to transformation of food animals using rDNA techniques. Although it may be useful to many readers, the content of the paper has been superseded by my subsequent publications on the topic.

According to the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities, 53,786 horses raced flat in the US, 30,271 in Australia and 22,995 in Japan in 2013 alone.(1) Horse racing is a lucrative business with $682,811,690 in prize money being doled out in flat and jump races in the US in 2013. (1) Unfortunately, there are numerous ethical and welfare issues associated with the practice which this poster will briefly present, arguing that the potential benefits simply do not outweigh the potential welfare costs suffered by the many equines currently racing. Welfare principles based on the Five Freedoms, such as the animal-based measures used in Welfare Quality© provide a way to assess the welfare of individual race horses. The issues include injury (See Figure 1), negative affective states, wastage, overpopulation, drug abuse and early death. While welfare measures can be particularly helpful in determining and improving the welfare of horses used intensively for sport, there still exists the ethical dilemma of using horses that may be injured, have negative affective states or potentially die in the process of providing humans entertainment and/or profit.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction stands at the juncture of international law and animal law and promises to open a path to understanding and resolving the global problems that challenge the core of animal law. As corporations have relocated and the animal industry (agriculture, medical research, entertainment, etc.) has dispersed its production facilities across the territories of multiple states, regulatory gaps and fears of a race to the bottom have become a pressing issue of global policy. This book provides enough background to allow readers to understand why extraterritorial jurisdiction must respond to these developments, counters objections that readers might raise, and describes how to improve animal law in tandem. The heart of the work is a fully-fledged catalogue of options for extraterritorial jurisdiction, which states can employ to strengthen their animal laws. The book offers top-down perspectives drawn from general international law and trade law, and complements them by a bottom-up up view from the perspective of animal law. The approach connects the law of jurisdiction to substantive law and opens up deeper questions about moral directionality, state and corporate duties owed animals, and the comparative advantages of constitutional, criminal, and administrative animal law. To ensure that extraterritorial animal law does not become complicit in oppressing ethnic and cultural minorities, the book offers critical interdisciplinary perspectives, informed by posthumanist and postcolonialist discourse. Readers will further learn when and how extraterritorial jurisdiction violates international law, and the consequences of exercising it illegally under international law. This work answers questions about how and why extraterritorial jurisdiction can overcome the steepest hurdles for animal law and help move us toward a just global interspecies community.

Depuis son passage de l'utilitarisme des préférences à l'utilitarisme hédoniste, Peter Singer est exposé à l'argument du remplacement, fréquemment cité en éthique animale. Le philosophe l'accepte, il va jusqu'à affirmer qu'en théorie l'argument s'applique également aux humains. Un autre argument, qui est davantage traité en éthique des populations et auquel il a toujours dû faire face, est la conclusion répugnante de Derek Parfit. Là encore, l'Australien estime ne pas avoir de solution satisfaisante. Les difficultés que ces deux arguments posent à la position de Singer ont été vues et revues, mais ce n'est pas le cas du résultat de leur combinaison qui a des implications majeures en éthique animale. Si l'industrialisation permet d'augmenter le nombre d'animaux systématiquement remplacés dans l'élevage, elle tend à diminuer leur niveau de bien-être individuel. L'augmentation du nombre d'animaux étant proportionnellement plus importante que la diminution de leur niveau de bien-être individuel, nous retrouvons la logique de la conclusion répugnante. Dès lors, jusqu'à un certain point, l'industrialisation de l'élevage est synonyme d'augmentation de la quantité de bien-être générée dans le monde, d'un point de vue total. Nous pouvons alors énoncer la conclusion du remplacement répugnant : « Il existe un élevage X, industrialisé de sorte à pouvoir rassembler et remplacer un nombre x de vaches et de taureaux dont la qualité de vie est fortement inférieure par rapport à d’autres élevages, mais qui d’un point de vue total génère la plus importante quantité de bien-être possible. ». Contrairement aux populations fictives de la conclusion de Parfit, de tels élevages industriels existent et le remplacement répugnant est une réalité. Selon ce dernier, au-delà des considérations écologiques, économiques ou sanitaires, Singer est forcé de conclure que l'élevage idéal est industriel.

In this chapter, I argue that we must think about justice for all animals through the cosmopolitan lens. After some preliminary remarks about global justice and cosmopolitanism, I explore the ways in which the current global order maintains and exacerbates systems of violence and oppression that target nonhuman animals. I argue that the theoretical foundations of cosmopolitanism necessitate the inclusion of many, if not all, sentient animals. Furthermore, I suggest that defenders of nonhuman animal rights should be cosmopolitans about global justice and explain why this does not require us to forsake our special relationships. I conclude with a plea to both mainstream defenders of cosmopolitanism and defenders of political justice for nonhuman animals to unite in developing genuinely inclusive theories of justice.

Despite their centrality to the operation of contemporary accredited zoo and aquarium institutions, the work of zoo veterinarians has rarely been the focus of a critical analysis in the social science and humanities. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, mainly in Europe and North America, this book highlights the recent transformation that has occurred in the zoo veterinarian profession during a time of ecological crisis, and what these changes can teach us about our rapidly changing planet.

Zoo vets, Braverman instructs us with a wink, have "gone wild." Originally an individual welfare-centered profession, these experts are increasingly concerned with the sustainability of wild animal populations and with ecological health. The story of zoo vets going wild—in their subjects of care, their motivations, and their ethical standards, as well as in their professional practices and scientific techniques—is also a story about zoo animals gone wild, wild animals encroaching the zoo, and, more generally, a wild world that is becoming "zoo-ified." Such transformations have challenged existing veterinary standards and practices. Exploring the regulatory landscape that governs the work of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, Braverman traverses the gap between the hard and soft sciences and between humans and nonhumans.

At the intersection of animal studies, socio-legal studies, and science and technology studies, this book will appeal not only to those interested in zoos and in animal welfare, but also to scholars in the posthumanities.

The article uses the example of Kevin Warwick’s robot with the living brain (Robot Gordon) to review the phenomenon of brain organoids creation, one of the applications of which is to replace animals in neurological experiments. However, in this context the question whether it is possible to compare brain and non-cerebral organoids (organ-on-chip) arises. The author thinks that use of an isolated brain is dangerous from the ethical point of view. Along with the progress of technology, laboratory brain organoids are going to become more sophisticated, which can lead to the creation of a conscious subject which suffering will go unnoticed.

This chapter highlights several criticisms of zoos, then provides a vision for new zoos: “nooz.” Offering a new name to these institutions makes a clear break from the old model, which is fundamentally exploitative. The common denominator between zoos and nooz is that both foster nonhumans who are neither domestic pets nor farmed animals—they keep “wild” animals. Nooz are nonexploitative, benevolent, and are designed for nonhumans, to provide safe-haven for those individuals who have been misused by zoos or science, or injured by humans. This essay also explores “benevolent” reasons for keeping nonhuman animals in zoos, such as captive breeding programs and injured wildlife, and acceptable parameters for nooz, including such topics as retribution for previous exploitation and the problem of carnivory.

The essential difficulty about Computer Ethics’ (CE) philosophical status is a methodological problem: standard ethical theories cannot easily be adapted to deal with CE-problems, which appear to strain their conceptual resources, and CE requires a conceptual foundation as an ethical theory. Information Ethics (IE), the philosophical foundational counterpart of CE, can be seen as a particular case of ‘environmental’ ethics or ethics of the infosphere. What is good for an information entity and the infosphere in general? This is the ethical question asked by IE. The answer is provided by a minimalist theory of deserts: IE argues that there is something more elementary and fundamental than life and pain, namely being, understood as information, and entropy, and that any information entity is to be recognised as the centre of a minimal moral claim, which deserves recognition and should help to regulate the implementation of any information process involving it. IE can provide a valuable perspective from which to approach, with insight and adequate discernment, not only moral problems in CE, but also the whole range of conceptual and moral phenomena that form the ethical discourse.

This 5-part series of articles  (written as an undergraduate major in Philosophy and Government) at the College of William and Mary) is the first major study of the animal rights and animal liberation movement that was fully emerging in the United States.  It examines the organization, structure, goals, and ideas of those working to protect non-human animals.  (Note: unpublished but also available upon request from the author or though the library at the College of William and Mary—and a separate part of this work— is an original theory and analysis of "Inter-specific Justice" (i.e., for both human and non-human animals).

This book presents a series of possible future scenarios in wildlife and animal tourism by combining critical thinking and imagination to stimulate reflection and ways forward. The future of wildlife tourism faces uncertainties that revolve around many factors, including climate change, mass wildlife extinction, human population growth, deforestation, sustainability and ethical assumptions. For wildlife tourism to meet these challenges, new ways of thinking are necessary. The chapters in this volume focus on future wildlife tourism development and management; the experiental value, educational components and ethical relevance of tourism-animal encounters; and the technology applied to wildlife tourism. They offer critically-imagined futures in order to encourage readers to reflect on the possibility of shaping a better future. The book will appeal to researchers, students and practitioners in wildlife tourism, environmental studies, sustainability and conservation. MORE info about the content and possibility to order here: https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?k=9781845418168

Pre-order Wildlife Tourism Futures book, DISCOUNT
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The books includes 13 intriguing and creative chapters that will make you reflect on important issues such as sustainability, ethics, human-animal relations, wildlife, nature, tourism, the tragedy of the commons, technology, innovation, alternative futures and dragons.

David J. Gunkel was a keynote speaker for “Identity, Agency, and the Digital Nexus”, April 2013, SSHRC funded  international symposium hosted by Athabasca University. His talk challenged the audience to reframe and rethink the “human-machine” binary in 21st century understandings of ethics and agency. Later that year Gunkel talked with Paul Kellogg over Skype to discuss some of the points raised in the presentation, and other key ideas embedded in Gunkel's 2012 publication, "The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots and Ethics." Gunkel is the Presidential Teaching Professor of Communication Studies at Northern Illinois University. The symposium was funded by a Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and organized by Dr. Raphael Foshay, MA-IS Program Director at Athabasca University.

Introdução: O emprego de animais vertebrados para obter-se o conhecimento existe há mais de 2.000 anos1, enquanto que o uso de invertebrados remonta desde século XIX2. Devido à crença que os animais eram inferiores ao homem, cientistas do século XVII realizavam vivissecção sem qualquer questionamento sobre o sofrimento dos animais, acreditando que seriam desprovidos de senciência3. Ao longo da história, essa percepção foi modificada e questões inerentes ao bem-estar animal tornaram-se essenciais na condução de pesquisas. Diretrizes e legislações foram adotadas com essa finalidade, porém centram-se apenas nos vertebrados, deixando os invertebrados em desamparo legal4, como ocorre na Lei Arouca (Lei n. 11.794/08). Objetivos: Promover uma reflexão acerca da do uso de invertebrados, considerando a Declaração Universal dos Direitos dos Animais (DUDA) e o Princípio dos 3R. Metodologia: Revisão Crítica da literatura. Resultados e Discussão: Artigos da DUDA são violados quanto ao agir ético no uso de invertebrados. Nessa Declaração, não há distinção entre vertebrados e invertebrados, e nela os animais têm direito ao respeito. O homem não pode exterminá-los ou explorá-los e nem submetê-los a maus tratos e a atos cruéis. A privação da liberdade, ainda que para fins educativos não deve ser admitida; a experimentação não deve implicar em sofrimento físico. A morte, quando necessária, deve ser instantânea, sem dor, sem ansiedade e/ou sem angústia. Na DUDA considera-se biocídio qualquer ato que leve à morte de um ou vários animais sem necessidade e aponta que os direitos dos animais devem ser defendidos por lei, assim como os direitos dos homem. No uso dos invertebrados, os princípios dos 3Rs: Redução, Substituição e Refinamento, ficam comprometidos. Os invertebrados, em sua maioria, se reproduzem rapidamente e tem um período de vida curto, o que estimula o uso em larga escala em diversos experimentos, favorecendo inclusive a substituição ao uso de animais vertebrados. Considerações finais: O desenvolvimento de uma legislação para o uso de invertebrados ainda dependerá da sensibilização dos pesquisadores e sociedade. A DUDA torna-se um caminho para nortear a proteção aos animais, inclusive invertebrados. Na prática, o Princípio dos 3R não consegue protegê-los e pode sinalizar para o uso em substituição aos vertebrados. As questões éticas desse contexto devem ser abordadas à luz de diferentes parâmetros como o valor econômico e ecológico de muitas espécies para se estruturar uma legislação que seja adequada. Também deve-se adotar medidas de políticas públicas para que os invertebrados saiam do ponto cego da legislação brasileira.

Commentary for "The Psychology of Cows" by Lori Marino and Kristin Allen

If we come to find that cows have rich mental lives, are there ethically important consequences for how we relate to and treat them? A positive answer to this question motivates the review paper, but the question itself remains unexamined. While it might seem obvious that anything with a mental life is worthy of moral considerability, what that moral considerability amounts to will differ depending on the moral theory we accept, the context, and the particular mental capacities that the individual has. Furthermore, as we learn more about plants, it has become tempting to talk about plant minds, feelings, learning and cognition, and to examine the ethical implications (

Ethics of Animal Use by Peter Sandøe, Stine B. Christiansen is reviewed. Sande and Christiansen offer a helpful introductory book on ethics and animal use that is geared primarily toward teaching ethics in veterinary and animal science courses. Anyone in search of a readable and rounded introduction to the ethics of animal use would be well served in reading this book.

Animal Assisted Play Therapy® is a unique, theoretically integrative approach developed by coauthors Dr. Risë VanFleet and Tracie Faa-Thompson. It refers to the involvement of animals in professional mental health, allied health, and educational work. This volume presents a comprehensive approach to the inclusion of animals in psychotherapy in general, and play therapy in particular. The book goes beyond describing the inclusion of animals in sessions to describe the nature of the relationship between the animal, the therapist and the client. Extensive attention is paid to the competencies the therapist must have in order to engage in AAPT as well as guidance in selecting and training animals. One of the most unique aspects of the book is the degree to which it focuses on the welfare of the animal as essential to both ethical practice and to the success of any AAPT intervention. It is a useful resource for those new to the field as well as seasoned practitioners. This posting provides a description of this book, which has received high acclaim from practitioners and academics alike. It won a Maxwell Award for "best book in the human-animal bond category."

Prosocial behaviours (providing benefits to a recipient with or without cost for the donor) have been found to be highly influenced by sex and by hierarchy. Rodents, in particular, are good model for studying prosocial responses , as they were found to exhibit intentional prosocial behaviours to reward a conspecific, and are very sensitive to reciprocity. In our study, we conducted a Prosocial Choice Test (PCT) in which four capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) living in a social group could choose between three tokens: choosing the prosocial token rewarded simultaneously the subject and a recipient, while choosing the selfish token only rewarded the subject; and choosing the null token provided no reward to anyone. Dominance within each dyad was also studied, both before and during the PCT experiment. Our results showed an influence of hierarchy: subjects were more prosocial towards the recipient when it was a subordinate than when it was a dominant individual. These results could be interpreted as a desire of strengthening a hierarchical rank regarding the subordinate, of punishing aggressive conspecifics (usually the subject's direct dominant), and of weakening dominant individuals in order to modify the pre-existing hierarchy. Additionally, our results highlighted a direct reciprocity phenomenon , a subject being more likely to be prosocial towards a prosocial recipient. All these findings suggest that prosociality could be well developed in other taxa than Primates and that, in long enough PCT experiments, subtle rules could influence individual prosocial strategies.

The cover of Multicultural Citizenship, Will Kymlicka’s influential defence of special rights for cultural minorities, reproduces Edward Hicks’s beautiful painting The Peaceable Kingdom. Hicks’s painting commemorates a treaty thepainter saw as the beginning of the kingdom prophesied in Isaiah, where “thelion will lie down with the lamb” and “love will replace hostility andcompetition both amongst humans and in the natural world”. While sevenNative Americans and eight white men sign the treaty in the background, thepainting’s main subjects are three children and twelve animals, peacefully enjoying themselves in an unspoiled environment...

The following is a draft excerpt from my forthcoming book, Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse. It concerns the the commodification of nonhuman animals, particularly endangered species.

Climate change makes of us all potentially endangered species, human and nonhuman. Some are “more immediately endangered” and some “less,” but no desirable future, at least as I’ve argued here, can be reconciled with homo Colossus’ quantifying and commodifying valuation of species and ecosystems.  It’s not just that climate instability makes a mockery of the concept “endangered species.” It’s that the way we assess the value of a species in terms of whether there are enough of them such that we’re “safe” in treating them as disposable eviscerates the world itself as a locus of experience worth wanting. In the pathology of conquest capital, an endangered species is simply a special kind of pricey commodity—like diamonds or honest politicians.

For the conquest capitalist, the meaning of “endangered” can only be calculated as price; the cost to salvage, the savings to let go to extinction. Endangered, moreover, signals “something important” only if it’s something in demand; hence the value of gorillas is a function of advertising, their beneficiaries the advertisers.

In this paper I defend the claim that many sentient nonhuman animals have a right to privacy. I begin by outlining the view that the human right to privacy protects our interest in shaping different relationships with one another by giving us control over how we present ourselves to others. I then draw on empirical research to show that nonhuman animals also have this interest, which grounds a right to privacy against us. I further argue that we can violate this right even when other animals are unaware that we are watching them.

Miranda Fricker (2007) explains that hermeneutical injustice occurs when an area of one's social experience is obscured from the collective understanding. However, Fricker focuses only on the injustice suffered by those who cannot render intelligible their own oppression. I argue that there is another side to hermeneutical injustice that is other-oriented; an injustice that occurs when one cannot understand, to a basic extent, the oppression of others. Specifically, I discuss the hermeneutical injustice suffered by non-human animals made possible by objectifying concepts available in the hermeneutical resource.