scholarly journals Breaking the Silence about the Animals We Eat

Barnboken ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianna Koljonen
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Capabilities Approach ◽  
The Other ◽  
Martha Nussbaum ◽  
Human Consumption ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Inherent Value ◽  
Traditional Mode ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Intended Use

Some 77 billion terrestrial animals are reared for human consumption globally every year. The moral implications of killing animals for food and the material conditions of these animals in intensive animal agriculture have seldom been discussed in children’s literature. The purpose of this article is to examine how these socially and culturally maintained silences are broken in two Nordic children’s picturebooks, Swedish Älskade lilla gris (Dear Little Pig, 1982) by Ulf Nilsson and Eva Eriksson and Finnish Kinkkulin jouluyllätys (Little Ham’s Christmas Surprise, 2010) by Teija Rekola and Timo Kästämä. The books’ pig protagonists are determined not to die, embodying the dualistic status inherent in the animality of farmed animals; they are subjects and objects, living beings and food-to-become. Further, this article explores the representation of the inherent value of so-called farmed animals and how it can be narrated-to-exist by concepts gleaned from Western animal rights philosophy, especially the capabilities approach by Martha Nussbaum. In the two books, inherent value is expressed in significantly different modes. Älskade lilla gris discusses multispecies families, autonomous animality, and emancipation, whereas Kinkkulin jouluyllätys uses a more traditional mode involving an anthropomorphic animal story, idyllic setting, and humanized subjectivity. Analysis focuses on the representation of nonhuman individuality, agency, sentience, animality, and interaction with humans. Both books present active and sentient individuals with varying degrees of animality. One celebrates its protagonist’s pighood but also contrasts it with the confined conditions of an animal industrial complex. The other employs a human-like pig protagonist on the run from his slaughterer and whose pighood is limited to his appearance and intended use. 

Suffering Happiness

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur P. Bochner
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Core ◽  
Basic Issue ◽  
Material Conditions

The author develops a dialectical conception of happiness—a suffering happiness—that can clarify autoethnography's existential convictions and ethical commitments. Autoethnography should produce an ethical connection to the other's suffering, a desire to transform the material conditions of the other's heartbreaking circumstances, increasing the possibility of happiness and a good life. The question of how we can make life better is the basic issue at the core of autoethnography. Rather than accepting a decontextualized and affective conception of happiness, we need to understand happiness as inextricably tied to narrative and moral judgments about the goodness of a whole life. The narratives we make in autoethnography ought to invite and encourage a responsiveness to the other and a responsibility for the other.

scholarly journals When good art is bad: Educating the critical viewer

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-150
Author(s):  
Laura D’Olimpio
Keyword(s):  
Moral Education ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
The Other ◽  
Martha Nussbaum ◽  
Ethical Criticism ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Educational Implications ◽  
Wayne Booth

There is a debate within philosophy of literature as to whether narrative artworks should be judged morally, for their ethical value, meaning and impact. On one side you have the aesthetes, defenders of aestheticism, who deny the ethical value of an artwork can be taken into consideration when judging the work’s overall aesthetic value. Richard Posner backs artists such as Oscar Wilde who famously wrote, ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all’. On the other side of the debate are proponents of ethical criticism such as Martha Nussbaum, Wayne Booth, Noël Carroll and Mary Devereaux. This article examines the educational implications of each position and ultimately defends the importance of moral education alongside aesthetic education. Given artworks are powerful vehicles for moral sentiments and meaning, it is important that viewers are taught to engage critically with art’s ethical features as well as aesthetic features. In this way, educational concerns pose a challenge to the position of aestheticism.

scholarly journals Nonhuman Animal Rights, Alternative Food Systems, and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

PhaenEx ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Lee Wrenn
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Alternative Food ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Alternative Food Systems ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Alternative Systems ◽  
Nonhuman Animals

Alternative food systems (namely the humane product movement) have arisen to address societal concerns with the treatment of Nonhuman Animals in food production. This paper presents an abolitionist Nonhuman Animal rights approach (Francione, 1996) and critiques these alternative systems as problematic in regards to goals of considering the rights or welfare of Nonhuman Animals. It is proposed that the trend in social movement professionalization within the structure of a non-profit industrial complex will ultimately favor compromises like “humane” products over more radical abolitionist solutions to the detriment of Nonhuman Animals. This paper also discusses potential compromises for alternative food systems that acknowledge equal consideration for Nonhuman Animals, focusing on grassroots veganism as a necessary component for consistency and effectiveness.

scholarly journals CULTURAL IDENTITY, TRADITION, AND THE RITUAL KILLING OF BULLS – A NOTE ON A RECENT DECISION OF THE FRENCH CONSTITUTIONAL COUNCIL ON THE LEGALITY OF BULLFIGHTING

Obiter ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Peté ◽  
Angela Crocker
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Public Controversy ◽  
Legal Challenge ◽  
Kwazulu Natal ◽  
The Republic

In a recent two-part article in this journal, the authors of this note analysed the controversy surrounding the ritual bull-killing which takes place during the Ukweshwama “first fruits” ceremony held each year in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. While much of the Ukweshwama ceremony is uncontroversial, the ritual killing of a bull by young Zulu warriors with their bare hands attracted strong opposition from certain animal-rights groups, which resulted in legal action and public controversy. The authors attempted to disentangle the different legal, historical, political and philosophical strands which combined to make up a complex story about the place of ancient rituals in the modern world, particularly those involving animal sacrifice. They also attempted to situate the controversy around the Ukweshwama bull-killing ritual within a contemporary global context, by comparing and contrasting the Zulu bull-killing ceremony on the one hand, and Spanish bullfighting on the other. The purpose of the present note is to report on recent developments in what is a global debate on the place of ancient rituals which involve the ritual killing of animals, within modern constitutional democracies. In particular, this note will examine and discuss the outcome of a recent legal challenge brought before the Constitutional Council of the Republic of France by certain animal-welfare groups in that country. The challenge was directed at bringing an end to a legal exception which operates in certain parts of the country – that is, those with an uninterrupted local tradition of bullfighting – excluding bullfighting from the provisions of animal-welfare legislation. The legal, political and cultural issues which arise as a result of this legal challenge are of relevance to those in South Africa who are concerned, one way or the other, about the future of the annual Ukweshwama bull-killing ritual in KwaZulu-Natal. Like it or not, although the bull-killing rituals which take place in the South of France and in KwaZulu-Natal South Africa are very different, the similarities between the rituals and their impact on broader society (legally, politically and culturally), are such that they cannot be ignored. The authors make a similar point in relation to the links between Spanish bullfighting and the Ukweshwama bull-killing ritual.

Animal rights – Jewish perspectives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronen Pinkas
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Golden Rule ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Strict Adherence ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Paradigmatic Change

This article raises the question why is it that, despite Jewish tradition devoting much thought to the status and treatment of animals and showing strict adherence to the notion of preventing their pain and suffering, ethical attitudes to animals are not dealt with systematically in the writings of Jewish philosophers and have not received sufficient attention in the context of moral monotheism. What has prevented the expansion of the golden rule: »Love your fellow as yourself: I am the LORD« (Lev 19,18) and »That which is hateful to you do not do to another« (BT Shabbat 31a:6; JT Nedarim 30b:1) to animals? Why is it that the moral responsibility for the fellow-man, the neighbor, or the other, has been understood as referring only to a human companion? Does the demand for absolute moral responsibility spoken from the face of the other, which Emmanuel Levinas emphasized in his ethics, not radiate from the face of the non-human other as well? Levinas’s ethics explicitly negates the principle of reciprocity and moral symmetry: The ›I‹ is committed to the other, regardless of the other’s attitude towards him. Does the affinity to the eternal Thou which Martin Buber also discovers in plants and animals not require a paradigmatic change in the attitude towards animals?

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Howells
Keyword(s):  
Collective Choice ◽  
Personal History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Dialectical Reason ◽  
History Of ◽  
Phenomenological Account ◽  
Material Conditions

Sartre was a philosopher of paradox: an existentialist who attempted a reconciliation with Marxism, a theorist of freedom who explored the notion of predestination. From the mid-1930s to the late-1940s, Sartre was in his ‘classical’ period. He explored the history of theories of imagination leading up to that of Husserl, and developed his own phenomenological account of imagination as the key to the freedom of consciousness. He analysed human emotions, arguing that emotion is a freely chosen mode of relationship to the outside world. In his major philosophical work, L’Être et le Néant(Being and Nothingness) (1943a), Sartre distinguished between consciousness and all other beings: consciousness is always at least tacitly conscious of itself, hence it is essentially ‘for itself’ (pour-soi) – free, mobile and spontaneous. Everything else, lacking this self-consciousness, is just what it is ‘in-itself’ (en-soi); it is ‘solid’ and lacks freedom. Consciousness is always engaged in the world of which it is conscious, and in relationships with other consciousnesses. These relationships are conflictual: they involve a battle to maintain the position of subject and to make the other into an object. This battle is inescapable. Although Sartre was indeed a philosopher of freedom, his conception of freedom is often misunderstood. Already in Being and Nothingness human freedom operates against a background of facticity and situation. My facticity is all the facts about myself which cannot be changed – my age, sex, class of origin, race and so on; my situation may be modified, but it still constitutes the starting point for change and roots consciousness firmly in the world. Freedom is not idealized by Sartre; it is always within a given set of circumstances, after a particular past, and against the expectations of both myself and others that I make my free choices. My personal history conditions the range of my options. From the 1950s onwards Sartre became increasingly politicized and was drawn to attempt a reconciliation between existentialism and Marxism. This was the aim of the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) (1960) which recognized more fully than before the effect of historical and material conditions on individual and collective choice. An attempt to explore this interplay in action underlies both his biography of Flaubert and his own autobiography.

Some Observations on the Phenomena of Life and Mind

1868 ◽  
Vol 13 (64) ◽  
pp. 437-449
Author(s):  
Robert Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Nervous System ◽  
Present State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
Physical Forces ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
The One

Life and mind, in their abstract nature or essence alike inscrutable to us, are problems which belong to the same category; for, in this world, we know nothing of life apart from an organism, and we have no manifestations of mind independently of a brain and nervous system. Here living organisms are required for the display of the vital phenomena, and a brain and nervous system for the manifestations of mind. Life has accordingly been defined as “the collective expression for a series of phenomena which take place exclusively in bodies that are organized,” and “mind as the functional manifestations of the living brain.” But then, and at the outset, it is to be remembered that in affirming sensation, emotion, thought, and volition to be functions of the nervous system, what is really maintained is this, that the vesicular matter of the encephalic ganglia furnishes the material conditions—the medium through which these mental phenomena are made manifest in this life. It may indeed be asked, Are not the physical forces of external nature, which underlie all vital phenomena, and the changing states of consciousness which constitute our mental life, as inscrutable to us in their nature or essence as are life and mind ? and it must be conceded that they are. Matter and force are coexistent, and are correlative. Nor can we conceive of the one but in association with, by, and through the other, any more than we can conceive of life, in our present state of existence, apart from an organism, or of thought independently of a living brain.

‘Growth’, Economic and Human: Reconstructing Economics through Pragmatism and the Capabilities Approach

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 286-306
Author(s):  
Kenneth W. Stikkers
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Capabilities Approach ◽  
The Other ◽  
Thorstein Veblen ◽  
The One ◽  
Growth Economic

Economist Amartya Sen’s and philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to economic development enjoys global attention, and there has been considerable interest in connections between it and pragmatism. 1 This paper argues, first, that there are indeed strong, productive affinities between Sen’s and Nussbaum’s understanding of ‘capabilities’ in rethinking how economies are to be developed and measured, on the one hand, and John Dewey’s notion of ‘growth’ and applications of pragmatism to economics, by economists such as Thorstein Veblen, John Commons, and, more recently, Daniel Bromley, to rethink and to reconstruct their discipline, on the other. Second, the paper suggests that Dewey’s notion of ‘growth’ can do much to strengthen and to deepen Sen’s and Nussbaum’s “capabilities approaches” to economics. Third, it suggests that Dewey enriches notions of ‘science’ and ‘democracy’, which are largely underdeveloped in capabilities approaches.

scholarly journals New Perspectives on Aspirin and the Endogenous Control of Acute Inflammatory Resolution

2006 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 1048-1065 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thea Morris ◽  
Melanie Stables ◽  
Derek W. Gilroy
Keyword(s):  
Mode Of Action ◽  
Acute Inflammation ◽  
Lipid Mediators ◽  
The Other ◽  
Endogenous Control ◽  
Protective Properties ◽  
Traditional Mode ◽  
Inflammatory Drugs ◽  
Cox 2 ◽  
Anti Inflammatory

Aspirin is unique among the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in that it has both anti-inflammatory as well as cardio-protective properties. The cardio-protective properties arise form its judicious inhibition of platelet-derived thromboxane A2over prostacyclin, while its anti-inflammatory effects of aspirin stem from its well-established inhibition of prostaglandin (PG) synthesis within inflamed tissues. Thus aspirin and the other NSAIDs have popularised the notion of inhibiting PG biosynthesis as a common anti-inflammatory strategy based on the erroneous premise that all eicosanoids are generally detrimental to inflammation. However, our fascination with aspirin has shown a more affable side to lipid mediators based on our increasing interest in the endogenous control of acute inflammation and in factors that mediate its resolution. Epi-lipoxins (epi-LXs), for instance, are produced from aspirin’s acetylation of inducible cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2) and together with Resolvins represent an increasingly important family of immuno-regulatory and potentially cardio-protective lipid mediators. Aspirin is beginning to teach us what nature knew all along – that not all lipid mediators are bad. It seems that while some eicosanoids are pathogenic in a variety of diseases, others are unarguable protective. In this review we will re-count aspirin’s colorful history, discuss its traditional mode of action and the controversies associated therewith, as well as highlight some of the new pathways in inflammation and the cardiovascular systems that aspirin has recently revealed.

Us and Them : Scientists' and Animal Rights Campaigners' Views of the Animal Experimentation Debate

1995 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Animal Experiments ◽  
Animal Experimentation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Opposing Group ◽  
Relative Capacity ◽  
Extreme View

AbstractAnimal rights campaigners and scientists working with animals completed anonymous questionnaires in which they were asked to report, not only on their own beliefs and ideas about the animal experimentation debate, but also on those they perceived the opposing group to hold. Both groups of participants tended to have a negative and somewhat extreme view of the other. But they did have an accurate grasp of the arguments and defenses commonly offered on both sides of the debate, and showed some agreement concerning the relative capacity of different animals to suffer. Differences appeared in the level of the phylogenetic hierarchy at which participants thought animals might be capable of suffering, and in their decision-making processes regarding the admissibility of animal experiments.

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