Paul B. Thompson

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 focused on similarities and differencesbetween the US and the EU regarding publicdiscourse/debate on food biotechnology. A briefoverview of the Congress and the follow-up workshopsuggests what lessons AFHVS and ASFS might learn fromEuropean experience of agricultural and food ethics

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 agricultural mechanization and biotechnology correspond to documented defects in utilitarian theory. Research administrators can expect that application of a utilitarian standard ignoring these deficiencies will become the occasion for predictable attacks by critics. Administrators who are sensitive to the strengths and weaknesses of utilitarian ethics are equipped to make a better allocation of research effort.

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 being developed to determine the feasibility of various biofuels proposals. The second begins with a broader set of questions about the philosophical goals of agriculture, then queries the place that a turn to biofuels might have within the philosophy of agriculture. Both are portrayed as viable and important. The paper itself is a preliminary stage-setting reflection on the need for these two types of philosophical inquiry.