•  13
    Happiness, Competition, and Not Necessarily Arrogance in Kant
    Kant Studien 112 (3): 400-425. 2021.
    Kant held that human beings are competitive and not very good at living together in harmony. He also held that the principle of one’s own happiness is the central opponent of the principle of morality. According to Allen Wood, these claims are related: the competitive tendencies Kant attributes to human nature reveal, according to Wood, that the very shape of our human idea of happiness is derived from a deep-seated arrogance, incompatible with morality. I argue, by contrast, that although Kant’…Read more
  •  13
    Non-human Animals as Research Participants: Ethical Practice in Animal Assisted Interventions and Research in Aotearoa/New Zealand
    with Emma Tumilty, Peter Walker, and Gareth J. Treharne
    In Catriona Ida Macleod, Jacqueline Marx, Phindezwa Mnyaka & Gareth J. Treharne (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Ethics in Critical Research, Springer Verlag. pp. 99-115. 2018.
    In this chapter we outline the need to develop ethical frameworks to guide research on the role of animal-orientated health, therapeutic, and service interventions. We discuss findings from our research on uses of animals in therapeutic settings and benefits of human–canine interactions for human health. These stories from the field reveal that current ethics review processes do not recognise the animal as an equal partner in the potential reciprocal benefits and risks of therapeutic human–anima…Read more
  •  9
    I argue that we have good textual reason to read Kant’s notion of “self-conceit,” and his theory of immorality more generally as being founded on the claim that we have the tendency to think that our ability to achieve happiness is our most valuable feature. I explain how this is not the same as the claim that we are arrogant or think we are better than others. Self-conceit (and the standard of assessment it implies) can lead to the opinion that one is worth more than others, when life is going …Read more