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16Reality, Attention, and SocialityTechné Research in Philosophy and Technology 27 (2): 149-152. 2023.
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7The Promise in Disasters: Reducing Epistemic Deficits of Food Systems for SustainabilityIn Samantha Noll & Zachary Piso (eds.), Paul B. Thompson's Philosophy of Agriculture: Fields, Farmers, Forks, and Food, Springer Verlag. pp. 103-113. 2023.As Paul Thompson has argued, agriculture, and food systems more generally, can be usefully analyzed with tools from the philosophy of technology. Don Ihde’s framework of multistability of possible relationships with technology suggests Thompson is right when he argues for the possibility of societies reforming their food systems to be more sustainable, participatory, and just through a focus on agrarian ideals. Ihde’s framework also suggests that for those of us who interact with food systems as…Read more
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17From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo: Three Sub-movements Within Local FoodJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27 (2): 201-210. 2014.The local food movement has been touted by some as a profoundly effective way to make our food system become more healthy, just, and sustainable. Others have criticized the movement as being less a challenge to the status quo and more an easily co-opted support offering just another set of choices for affluent consumers. In this paper, we analyze three distinct sub-movements within the local food movement, the individual-focused sub-movement, the systems-focused sub-movement, and the community-f…Read more
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401Local Food Movements: Differing Conceptions of Food, People, and ChangeIn Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2017.The “local food” movement has been growing since at least the mid- twentieth century with the founding of the Rodale Institute. Since then, local food has increasingly become a goal of food systems. Today, books and articles on local food have become commonplace, with popular authors such as Barbara Kingsolver1 and Michael Pollan2 espousing the virtues of eating locally. Additionally, local food initiatives, such as the “farm- tofork,” “Buying Local,” and “Slow Food” have gained a strong interna…Read more
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1Individual and community identity in food sovereignty: the possibilities and pitfalls of translating a rural social movementIn Mary C. Rawlinson & Caleb Ward (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, Routledge. pp. 377--387. 2017.
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23A Right to Understand Injustice: Epistemology and the “Right to the Truth” in International Human Rights DiscourseSouthern Journal of Philosophy 58 (1): 186-199. 2020.People's “right to truth” or their “right to know” about their government's human rights abuses is a growing consensus in human rights discourses and a fertile area of work in international and humanitarian law. In most discussions of this right to know the truth, it is commonly seen as requiring the state or international institutions to provide access to evidence of the violations. In this paper, I argue that such a right naturally has many epistemic aspects, and the tools of social epistemolo…Read more
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30Food Justice in Us and Global Contexts: Bringing Theory and Practice Together (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2017.This book offers fresh perspectives on issues of food justice. The chapters emerged from a series of annual workshops on food justice held at Michigan State University between 2013 and 2015, which brought together a wide variety of interested people to learn from and work with each other. Food justice can be studied from such diverse perspectives as philosophy, anthropology, economics, gender and sexuality studies, geography, history, literary criticism, philosophy and sociology as well as the h…Read more
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29Domination and Consumption: An Examination of Veganism, Anarchism, and EcofeminismPhaenEx 8 (2): 161. 2013.Anarchism provides a useful set of theoretical tools for understanding and resisting our culture’s treatment of non-human animals. However, some points of disagreement exist in anarchist discourse, such as the question of veganism. In this paper I will use the debate around veganism as a way of exploring the anarchist discourse on non-human animals, how that discourse can benefit more mainstream work on non-human animals, and how work coming out of mainstream environmental discourse, in particul…Read more
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36Precision Livestock Farming and Farmers’ Duties to LivestockJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31 (2): 181-195. 2018.Precision livestock farming promises to allow modern, large-scale farms to replicate, at scale, caring farmers who know their animals. PLF refers to a suite of technologies, some only speculative. The goal is to use networked devices to continuously monitor individual animals on large farms, to compare this information to expected norms, and to use algorithms to manage individual animals automatically. Supporters say this could not only create an artificial version of the partially mythologized …Read more
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657Loss of Epistemic Self-Determination in the AnthropoceneEthics, Policy and Environment 20 (2): 156-167. 2017.One serious harm facing communities in the Anthropocene is epistemic loss. This is increasingly recognized as a harm in international policy discourses around adaptation to climate change. Epistemic loss is typically conceived of as the loss of a corpus of knowledge, or less commonly, as the further loss of epistemic methodologies. In what follows, I argue that epistemic loss also can involve the loss of epistemic self-determination, and that this framework can help to usefully examine adaptatio…Read more
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558Asking for Reasons as a Weapon: Epistemic Justification and the Loss of KnowledgeJournal of Cognition and Neuroethics 2 (1): 173-190. 2014.In this paper, I will look at what role being able to provide justification plays in several prominent conceptions of epistemology, and argue that taking the ability to provide reasons as necessary for knowledge leads to a biasing toward false negatives. However, I will also argue that asking for reasons is a common practice among the general public, and one that is endorsed by “folk epistemology.” I will then discuss the fact that this asking for reasons is done neither constantly nor arbitrari…Read more
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191Domination and Consumption: an Examination of Veganism, Anarchism, and EcofeminismJournal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 8 (2): 135-160. 2013.Anarchism provides a useful set of theoretical tools for understanding and resisting our culture’s treatment of non-human animals. However, some points of disagreement exist in anarchist discourse, such as the question of veganism. In this paper I will use the debate around veganism as a way of exploring the anarchist discourse on non-human animals, how that discourse can benefit more mainstream work on non-human animals, and how work coming out of mainstream environmental discourse, in particul…Read more
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66Community Epistemic CapacitySocial Epistemology 30 (1): 25-44. 2016.Despite US policy documents which recommend that in areas of environmental risk, interaction between scientific experts and the public move beyond the so-called “Decide, Announce, and Defend model,” many current public involvement policies still do not guarantee meaningful public participation. In response to this problem, various attempts have been made to define what counts as sufficient or meaningful participation and free informed consent from those affected. Though defining “meaningfulness”…Read more
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1158Food Sovereignty, Health Sovereignty, and Self-Organized Community ViabilityInterdisciplinary Environmental Review 15 (2/3): 134-146. 2014.Food Sovereignty is a vibrant discourse in academic and activist circles, yet despite the many shared characteristics between issues surrounding food and public health, the two are often analysed in separate frameworks and the insights from Food Sovereignty are not sufficiently brought to bear on the problems in the public health discourse. In this paper, I will introduce the concept of 'self-organised community viability' as a way to link food and health, and to argue that what I call the 'Heal…Read more
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858Food Policies Empowering Democratic and Epistemic Self‐DeterminationJournal of Social Philosophy 47 (1): 25-40. 2016.
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426Individual and Community Identity in Food Sovereignty: The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Translating a Rural Social MovementIn Mary Rawlinson & Caleb Ward (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, Routledge. pp. 377-387. 2016.
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826People Work to Sustain Systems: A Framework for Understanding SustainabilityJournal of Water Resources Planning and Management 141 (12). 2015.Sustainability is commonly recognized as an important goal, but there is little agreement on what sustainability is, or what it requires. This paper looks at some common approaches to sustainability, and while acknowledging the ways in which they are useful, points out an important lacuna: that for something to be sustainable, people must be willing to work to sustain it. The paper presents a framework for thinking about and assessing sustainability which highlights people working to sustain. It…Read more
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578Sustainability of What? Recognizing the Diverse Values that Sustainable Agriculture Works to SustainEnvironmental Values 25 (2): 195-214. 2016.The contours of sustainable systems are defined according to communities’ goals and values. As researchers shift from sustainability-in-the-abstract to sustainability-as-a-concrete-research-challenge, democratic deliberation is essential for ensuring that communities determine what systems ought to be sustained. Discourse analysis of dialogue with Michigan direct marketing farmers suggests eight sustainability values – economic efficiency, community connectedness, stewardship, justice, ecologism…Read more
Ian Werkheiser
University Of Texas Rio Grande VAlley
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
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University Of Texas Rio Grande VAlleyDepartment Of Philosophy, University Of Texas Rio Grande ValleyAssistant Professor
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Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Applied Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |