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35Need and safety: The nuclear power debateEnvironmental Ethics 6 (1): 57-69. 1984.Many arguments for and against nuclear power can be analyzed according to a matrix of logically competing claims on the need and safety of nuclear power. Logical analysis of the arguments reveals their philosophical basis and contributes to an understanding of their explanatory appeal. The evidential value of claims made in the arguments of both supporters and opponents depends upon familiar issues in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of science
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35The reshaping of conventional farming: A north american perspective (review)Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 14 (2): 217-229. 2001.Debates over the future of agriculture in North Americaestablish a dialectical opposition between conventional,industrial agriculture and alternative, sustainable agriculture.This opposition has roots that extend back to the 18th century inthe United States, but the debate has taken a number ofsurprising turns in the 20th century. Originally articulated as aphilosophy of the left, industrial agriculture has utilitarianmoral foundations. In the US and Canada, the articulation of analternative to …Read more
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43The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental EthicsUniversity Press of Kentucky. 2010.Agrarian political philosophies since ancient Greece stress the role of agriculture in forming political solidarity and civic virtue. More recent transformations suggest a way to conjoin these elements of what makes a polity politically sustainable with environmental sensitivity and literacy.
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199F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk: Compassion by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare: Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, xiv + 409 pp, ISBN 978-0-19-955116-3 (review)Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 26 (2): 517-521. 2013.F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk: Compassion by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s10806-012-9377-z Authors Paul B. Thompson, WK Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 South Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824-1032, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863
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The Ethics of Aid and Trade: U.S. Food Policy, Foreign Competition, and the Social ContractCambridge University Press. 1992.The traditional military-territorial model of the nation state defines international duties in terms of protecting citizens' property from foreign threats. In this 1992 book about the principles of the US agricultural policy and foreign aid, Professor Thompson replaces this model with the notion of the trading state that sees its role in terms of the establishment of international institutions that stabilize and facilitate cultural and intellectual, as well as commercial, exchanges between natio…Read more
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86Ethics and the genetic engineering of food animalsJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 10 (1): 1-23. 1997.Biotechnology applied to traditional foodanimals raises ethical issues in three distinctcategories. First are a series of issues that arise inthe transformation of pigs, sheep, cattle and otherdomesticated farm animals for purposes that deviatesubstantially from food production, including forxenotransplantation or production of pharmaceuticals.Ethical analysis of these issues must draw upon theresources of medical ethics; categorizing them asagricultural biotechnologies is misleading. The second…Read more
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30Science policy and moral purity: The case of animal biotechnologyAgriculture and Human Values 14 (1): 11-27. 1997.Public controversy over animalbiotechnology is analyzed as a case that illustratestwo broad theoretical approaches for linking science,political or ethical theory, and public policy. Moralpurification proceeds by isolating the social,environmental, animal, and human health impacts ofbiotechnology from each other in terms of discretecategories of moral significance. Each of thesecategories can also be isolated from the sense inwhich biotechnology raises religious or metaphysicalissues. Moral puri…Read more
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96Agrarian philosophy and ecological ethicsScience and Engineering Ethics 14 (4): 527-544. 2008.Mainstream environmental ethics grew out of an approach to value that was rooted in a particular conception of rationality and rational choice. As weaknesses in this approach have become more evident, environmental philosophers have experimented with both virtue ethics and with pragmatism as alternative starting points for developing a more truly ecological orientation to environmental philosophy. However, it is possible to see both virtue ethics and pragmatism as emerging from older philosophic…Read more
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37Pragmatism and policy: The case of waterIn Andrew Light & Eric Katz (eds.), Environmental Pragmatism, Routledge. pp. 187--208. 1996.
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31Uncertainty Arguments in Environmental IssuesEnvironmental Ethics 8 (1): 59-75. 1986.A large part of environmental policy is based upon scientific studies ofthe likely health, safety, and ecological consequences of human actions and practices. These studies, however, are frequently vulnerable to epistemological and methodological criticisms which challenge their validity. Epistemological criticisms can be used in ethical and political philosophy arguments to challenge the applicability of scientific knowledge to environmental policy, and, in turn, to challenge the democratic bas…Read more
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79Mark Sagoff 's price, principle, and the environment: Two commentsEthics, Place and Environment 9 (3). 2006.I will discuss two themes that can be found in Mark Sagoff's most recent book, Price, Principle, and the Environment. Built from pieces fashioned in his entertaining and incisive critical es...
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Hugh Lehman, Rationality and Ethics in Agriculture Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 16 (3): 185-187. 1996.
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Technological mediation and nuclear weaponsIn Larry A. Hickman (ed.), Philosophy, Technology, and Human Affairs, Ibis Press of College Station, Texas. pp. 117. 1985.
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163Food aid and the famine relief argument (brief return)Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 23 (3): 209-227. 2010.Recent publications by Pogge ( Global ethics: seminal essays. St. Paul: Paragon House 2008 ) and by Singer ( The life you can save: acting now to end world poverty. New York: Random House 2009 ) have resuscitated a debate over the justifiability of famine relief between Singer and ecologist Garrett Hardin in the 1970s. Yet that debate concluded with a general recognition that (a) general considerations of development ethics presented more compelling ethical problems than famine relief; and (b) s…Read more
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83Collective responsibility and professional rolesJournal of Business Ethics 5 (2). 1986.Flores and Johnson (Ethics 93 No. 3 (1983) pp. 537, 545.) offer a solution to the problem of individual and collective responsibility which obscures the fundamental requirement for responsibility ascriptions, namely, moral agency. Close attention to matters of individual and collective agency provides a simple yet defensible criterion for establishing when an individual is and isn't responsible for the untoward consequences of a collective act.
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28Thinking About Thinking About TechnologyTechné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 5 (1): 29-34. 2000.
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31Borgmann on commodification: A comment on real american ethicsJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 21 (1): 75-84. 2008.
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14Report of the nabc ad-hoc committee on ethicsJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 10 (2): 105-125. 1997.1. Each NABC member institutions should ensure that subject matter on ethical issues associated with food and agricultural biotechnology is systematically integrated into the curriculum of their institution. The pattern of implementation will vary a teach institution, but we expect that some combination of the following three strategies will be employed at most institutions. a) Modules Included in Basic and Applied Science Courses b) Modules Included in General Courses on Applied Ethics c) Speci…Read more
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177Review of Gary L. Comstock, Vexing Nature? On the Ethical Case Against Agricultural Biotechnology (review)Agriculture and Human Values 18 (3): 341-345. 2001.
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19Sharing the Earth: The Rhetoric of Sustainable Development by Tarla Rae Peterson (review)Agriculture and Human Values 17 (4): 407-408. 2000.
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26The first European congress on agricultural and food ethics and follow-up workshop on ethics and food biotechnology: A US perspective (review)Agriculture and Human Values 17 (4): 327-332. 2000.The first European Congress on Agriculturaland Food Ethics was held at Wageningen University andResearch Center (WUR), Wageningen, The Netherlands, March 4–6, 1999. This was the inaugural conference forthe newly forming European Society for Agricultural andFood Ethics – EUR-SAFE – and around two hundredpeople from across Europe (and a handful of NorthAmericans) participated. Following theCongress/conference, a small (16 people), two-dayworkshop funded in part by the US National ScienceFoundation…Read more
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15From Synthetic Bioethics to One Bioethics: A Reply to CriticsEthics, Policy and Environment 18 (2): 215-224. 2015.Replies to commentaries on my 2012 article ‘Synthetic Biology Needs a Synthetic Bioethics,’ note that I do not, in fact, call for some ‘new’ kind of ethics. The focus then and now is on integrating questions that relate to distributive justice and environmental quality more faithfully into the topics that have come to preoccupy mainstream bioethics as institutionalized in medical schools and medical research institutions
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91Ethics in agricultural researchJournal of Agricultural Ethics 1 (1): 11-20. 1988.Utilitarian ethics provides a model for evaluating moral responsibility in agricultural research decisions according to the balance of costs and benefits accruing to the public at large. Given the traditions and special requirements of agricultural research planning, utilitarian theory is well adapted to serve as a starting point for evaluating these decisions, but utilitarianism has defects that are well documented in the philosophical literature. Criticisms of research decisions in agricultura…Read more
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Convergence in an agrarian keyIn Ben Minteer (ed.), Nature in Common?: Environmental Ethics and the Contested Foundations of Environmental Policy, Temple University Press. 2009.
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113The agricultural ethics of biofuels: A first look (review)Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 21 (2): 183-198. 2008.A noticeable push toward using agricultural crops for ethanol production and for undertaking research to expand the range of possible biofuels began to dominate discussions of agricultural science and policy in the United States around 2005. This paper proposes two complementary philosophical approaches to examining the philosophical questions that should be posed in connection with this turn of events. One stresses a critique of underlying epistemological commitments in the scientific models be…Read more
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East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
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