-
4The Takings Issue and the Human-Nature DichotomyHuman Ecology Review 3 (1): 12-15. 1996.Environmentalists are sometimes criticized for implausibly separating human beings from nature. However, in the debate between the "wise-use" and environmental movements, it is the proponents of "wise-use," and not the environmentalists, who implausibly divide human beings from nature. The "wise-use" movement calls for landowners to be compensated whenever environmental regulations reduce the economic value of their land. However, a well-established principle of constitutional law is that compen…Read more
-
Interests: Their Nature, Scope, and SignificanceDissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 1988.This thesis elaborates and defends the patiency conception of moral considerability, according to which moral agents have direct, prima facie duties of beneficence and non-maleficence toward any entity which has interests. ;Interests are divided into two kinds. An argument by analogy is used to show that preference interests, which are analyzed on the model of desires, probably are present in all animals with a functional prefrontal cortex and probably are not present in any non-mammalian creatu…Read more
-
Environmental Law and the Eclipse of Land as Private PropertyIn , University of Georgia Press. pp. 1442-160. 1994.
-
13No Holism without PluralismEnvironmental Ethics 13 (2): 175-179. 1991.In his recent essay on moral pluralism in environmental ethics, J. Baird Callicott exaggerates the advantages of monism, ignoring the environmentally unsound implications of Leopold’s holism. In addition, he fails to see that Leopold’s view requires the same kind of intellectual schitzophrenia for which he criticizes the version of moral pluralism advocated by Christopher D. Stone in Earth and Other Ethics. If itis plausible to say that holistic entities like ecosystems are directly morally cons…Read more
-
5A Wolf in the Garden: The Land Rights Movement and the New Environmental Debate (review)Environmental Ethics 20 (4): 441-443. 1998.
-
17SentientismIn Dale Jamieson (ed.), A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, Blackwell. 2001.This chapter contains sections titled: Contemporary sentientist ethics Is sentientism an “adequate” environmental ethic?
-
100Biological functions and biological interestsSouthern Journal of Philosophy 28 (2): 251-270. 1990.
-
162What's wrong with animal by-products?Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 7 (1): 7-17. 1994.Without looking beyond the conditions under which laying hens typically live in the contemporary U.S. egg industry, we can understand why the production and consumption of factory farmed eggs could be judged immoral. However, the question, What (if anything) is wrong with animal by-products? cannot always be adequately answered by looking at the conditions under which animals live out their productive lives. For the dairy industry looks benign in those terms, but if we look beyond the conditions…Read more
-
31The Prospects for Consensus and Convergence in the Animal Rights DebateHastings Center Report 24 (1): 24-28. 1994.Those who conduct research on animals and those who advocate on behalf of animals have more in common than is generally supposed. A more nuanced understanding of the arguments defending animals' interests can help replace the current politics of confrontation with a genuine conversation.
-
87The Schopenhauerian challenge in environmental ethicsEnvironmental Ethics 7 (3): 209-229. 1985.Environmental holism and environmental individualism are based on incompatible notions of moral considerability, and yield incompatible results. For Schopenhauer, every intelligible character--every irreducible instance of formative nature---defines a distinct moral patient, and for hirn both holistic entities and the individual members of higher species have distinguishable intelligible characters. Schopenhauer’s neglected metaethics thus can be used to generate an environmental ethics which is…Read more
-
39The Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics Debate (review)Environmental Ethics 15 (3): 279-282. 1993.
-
192Rejoinder to Kathryn paxton GeorgeJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 7 (1): 83-86. 1994.In Use and Abuse Revisited: Response to Pluhar and Varner, Kathryn Paxton George misunderstands the point of my essay, In Defense of the Vegan Ideal: Rhetoric and Bias in the Nutrition Literature. I did not claim that the nutrition literature unambiguously confirms that vegans are not at significantly greater risk of deficiencies than omnivores. Rather than settling any empirical controversy, my aim was to show how the literature can give the casual reader a skewed impression of what is known ab…Read more
-
15
-
57No holism without pluralismEnvironmental Ethics 13 (2): 175-179. 1991.In his recent essay on moral pluralism in environmental ethics, J. Baird Callicott exaggerates the advantages of monism, ignoring the environmentally unsound implications of Leopold’s holism. In addition, he fails to see that Leopold’s view requires the same kind of intellectual schitzophrenia for which he criticizes the version of moral pluralism advocated by Christopher D. Stone in Earth and Other Ethics. If itis plausible to say that holistic entities like ecosystems are directly morally cons…Read more
-
77In defense of the vegan ideal: Rhetoric and bias in the nutrition literature (review)Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 7 (1): 29-40. 1994.Much of the scientific literature on vegetarian nutrition leaves one with the impression that vegan diets are significantly more risky than omnivorous ones, especially for individuals with high metabolic demands (such as pregnant or lactating women and children). But nutrition researchers have tended to skew their study populations toward new vegetarians, members of religious sects with especially restrictive diets and tendencies to eschew fortified foods and medical care, and these are arguably…Read more
-
7Introduction to the Special Edition on Engineering and Animal EthicsJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31 (2): 137-142. 2018.
-
27The Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics Debate (review)Environmental Ethics 15 (3): 279-282. 1993.
-
29A Harean Perspective on Humane SustainabilityEthics and the Environment 15 (2): 31. 2010.Animal well-being must be a primary normative consideration in a conception of humane sustainability. The two-level utilitarianism of R.M. Hare embodies aspects of both animal welfare and animal rights views, and in this paper I illustrate its application to questions about what counts as humane sustainability. Hare’s theory is highly controversial, and a thorough defense of it is beyond the scope of this paper, but the insightful way it provides of assessing various visions of humane sustainabi…Read more
-
126Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (review)Philosophical Review 116 (2): 281-286. 2007.
-
27Precis of defending biodiversityBiology and Philosophy 35 (1): 1-4. 2020.Why should governments or individuals invest time and resources in conserving biodiversity? A popular answer is that biodiversity has both instrumental value for humans and intrinsic value in its own right. Defending Biodiversity critically evaluates familiar arguments for these claims and finds that, at best, they provide good reasons for conserving particular species or regions. However, they fail to provide a strong justification for conserving biodiversity per se. Hence, either environmental…Read more
-
30An Overview of Engineering Approaches to Improving Agricultural Animal WelfareJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31 (2): 143-159. 2018.In this essay, we provide an overview of how production systems can be re-engineered to improve the welfare of the animals involved. At least three potential options exist: engineering their environments to better fit the animals, engineering the animals themselves to better fit their environments, and eliminating the animals from the system by growing meat in vitro rather than on farms. The morality of consuming animal products and the conditions under which agricultural animals are maintained …Read more
-
32A wolf in the garden: The land rights movement and the new environmental debateEnvironmental Ethics 20 (4): 441-443. 1998.
-
4John O'Neill, Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-Being and the Natural World Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 15 (4): 271-273. 1995.
College Station, Texas, United States of America