Concerned about climate change? Worried about environmental degradation? Want to protect local wildlife? Then you should think twice before purchasing a pet.
Image by wayhomestudio on Freepik
Category: Duties Page 1 of 8
I have been thinking about the ethics of keeping sentient animals as pets. As someone who has lived with dogs, cats, rats, mice, gerbils, rabbits, lizards, guinea pigs, and chickens, I have experienced first-hand the joy and companionship that such creatures can bring to our lives and the love that we can have for them. Yet, as a philosopher interested in animal ethics, I am aware of the many moral problems associated with our practice of keeping animals as pets. These problems have led me to reconsider human-animal companionship, and I have come to think that no matter how much we might love the animals we bring into our homes, we cannot justify doing so.
In this post, Max Lewis (University of Helsinki) discusses their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy about the kinds of gratitude appropriate for our relationship with nature.
If someone provides you with a gift or does you a favor, you should be grateful to them for what they did. This seems undeniable. In fact, failing to be grateful to them would make you morally criticizable. But here’s a puzzle. Nature provides you with an abundance of benefits you did not earn and are not owed. This too seems undeniable. But, if you are like most people, you are not grateful to nature. You are like the boy in the classic children’s book The Giving Tree: always taking from nature, but never giving back. After all, if you were grateful, you would try to pay nature back.
Image by shameersrk from Pixabay
So, are you morally criticizable for your lack of gratitude? Fortunately, I think not. In On Gratitude to Nature, I argue that we do not owe nature any gratitude. Nonetheless, it can be appropriate to be grateful for nature in numerous ways.
The latest report by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that hundreds of billions of dollars will be required for climate mitigation and adaptation investments per year to avoid catastrophic global warming. Yet, some of our financial practices are not only slow to adapt to this requirement, but actually represent an obstacle in achieving the goal.
In this post, Areti Theofilopoulou (Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences) discusses her recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on the range of wrongs that can occur in problematic parent-child relationships.
We know that our upbringing massively affects the way that our lives go. This is partly because, in our unequal societies, the socioeconomic status of our family determines the education and connections we have access to. But our upbringing would still affect the rest of our lives even in fairer societies, because the ways our parents treat us determine our future mental health and the kinds of people we become. Often, the upbringing people receive leads to the development of mental illness or personality traits that disadvantage them in all spheres of life (such as their career and relationships), and that is undeniably unfair. In my recent paper, I argue that states should intervene heavily in the family via mandatory parenting lessons and therapy to prevent these harms and disadvantages.
ESG investing – Adobe Stock
Each year when fall comes, I teach finance ethics to bright new postgraduate students in finance. After introducing ethical investing – i.e. the practice of integrating ethical criteria such as environmental, social, and governance performance (ESG) in investment decisions – I ask them a question: “Who believes that ESG investing generates higher financial returns?”
Photo Credit of Sinking Boat to Pok Rie
The nineteenth century British philosopher, W. K. Clifford, is one of a small handful of individuals who titled an essay so effectively that it became the name of an entire philosophical literature: the ethics of belief.
It has been (correctly) observed that “Clifford’s essay is chiefly remembered for two things: a story and a principle.”
The story is that of the negligent shipowner who, by wishful thinking, convinces himself that an unsafe ship is seaworthy, and who thereby sends his passengers to their death when the ship sinks.
The principle is that “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”
As a result, Clifford is often viewed one-dimensionally as an (unreasonable) evidentialist, most interested in defending a stringent epistemic position. I think this is unfortunate.
It is unfortunate because such a view of Clifford overlooks what are probably the most relevant aspects of his essay for a “misinformation age” like ours.
This is another post about childrearing and, like my previous ones, it is complaining about the status quo. This time I’m thinking about what we actively do to expose children to various ways of living and views about what makes for a good life (too little) and about how much we let parents screen such sources of influence out of children’s lives (too much.)
More precisely: how to make sense of the wrong of attributing to someone, and treating them according to, a gender that’s different to the one they say they have?
In this post, Emma Curran & Stephen John discuss their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on duties to prioritise vaccinating the vulnerable.
In the December of 2020, the UK seemed to breathe an, albeit small, sigh of relief as the first COVID-19 vaccinations were administered. After almost nine months of lockdowns, the vaccine roll-out was the first concrete sign that life might return to – at least something like – normality. Indeed, throughout 2020, the promise of a vaccine seemed to be the end to which lockdown pointed. Lockdown was tough but necessary to protect the lives of those most vulnerable to COVID-19, until they could be helped by a vaccine. Unsurprisingly, then, the vaccine roll-out started with the most vulnerable, with a primary focus on age. In this post, however, we explore a seemingly small alteration to the Government’s vaccine strategy which concerned and confused many. Using this policy, we explore the reasons we have to protect the vulnerable, the complexity of ethical discourse around the distribution of vaccines, and the need for transparent, open debate.