Paul Thompson

Gene editing enables insertion of DNA sequences (e.g. coding and regulatory genetic constructs) at precise locations in the genome of modified organisms. In the case of livestock species, especially, the additional precision may or may not provide a basis for reevaluating the ethical significance of specific genetic modifications. This paper applies a risk-based ethics to determine when gene editing has ethical significance beyond that of modification using earlier methods utilizing recombinant DNA (e.g. GMOs). Ethical concerns about any form of genetic modification, from conventional breeding to gene editing, can be classified into the categories of environmental hazards, socio-economic consequences, food safety and animal welfare. The chapter describes risk-based ethics and discusses the significance of gene editing for each of these categories. Gene editing of agricultural species is ethically significant to the extent that greater precision reduces the probability for realization of specific hazards in one or more of these categories is either increased or lessened. This effect is primarily meaningful in the context of food safety and animal welfare because the potential for unintended and unnoticed disruptions of genetic functionality has bearing on these hazards, and the precision afforded by gene editing is expected to have meaningful impact on the opportunity for such disruption. Gene editing may also have social consequences for the traceability of certain types of genetic modification. In other areas where the ethics of genetically engineered livestock has been debated, gene editing has little material effect when compared to earlier applications of gene technology in agriculture.

This chapter sets out some key features of an agriculturally based environmental utopia. In such a world, the production of food and fiber would be wholly consonant with resilient ecosystems, but the idea of a utopia implies more. Specifying the requirements for utopia is an inherently philosophical task, so criteria that emphasize resilient ecosystems may suggest a different utopia than criteria of food security, let alone food sovereignty. Furthermore, a full appreciation of the tensions implied by these different value orientations requires more than simply spelling out the alternative ways to specify the desirable traits of a utopian society. I will illustrate these tensions by drawing upon the contrast between industrial and agrarian philosophies of agriculture, as outlined in my book, The Agrarian Vision. I will then explore how agrarian philosophical commitments would dictate criteria for a green utopia.

In this _Second Edition_ of _The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics_, Paul B. Thompson reviews four worldviews that shape competing visions for agriculture. Productionists have sought increasing yields--to make two seeds grow where only one grew before--while traditional visions of good farming have stressed stewardship. These traditional visions have been challenged by two more worldviews: a call for a total cost-accounting for farming, and an advocacy for a holistic perspective. Thompson argues that an environmentally defensible systems approach must draw upon all four worldviews, recognizing their flaws and synthesizing their strengths in a new vision of sustainable agriculture. This classic 1995 study has been thoroughly revised and significantly expanded in its _Second Edition_ with up-to-date examples of agriculture’s impact on the environment. These include extensive discussions of new pesticides and the effects of animal agriculture on climate and other areas of the environment. In addition, a new final chapter discusses sustainability, which has become a dominant idea within environmental studies, and agrarian political philosophy.

Bryan Norton takes the debate over weak and strong sustainability to characterize the key conceptual disagreement among attempts to elaborate a theoretical approach to sustainability. In contrast, I argue that this debate is mired within assumptions of economic development theory that fail to recognize how elements of fragility, stability, resilience and adaptive capability within system design or organization have been material to the way that sustainability has been conceptualized in many domains. Two paradigmatic conceptualizations of sustainability compete within the scholarly literature, one stressing the availability of key resource stocks, the other stressing the robustness and resilience of system organization. A better approach would move beyond weak and strong sustainability to acknowledge a deeper and more philosophically potent set of paradigmatic features within sustainability scholarship.

Biomedical research on advanced cryopreservation has spillover effects on innovation in the food and agricultural sector. Advanced biopreservation technology has three key domains of impact in the food system: (1) improving efficiencies in storage and utilization of gametes and organoids for plant and animal breeding; (2) isochoric methods for preservation of fresh food products; and (3) in biorepositories for storage of genetic resources for agriculturally significant plants and livestock species.

There are now dozens of proposals for integrating ethics into the early planning and assessment of technological innovation. This paper tracks some of Larry Hickman’s contributions to these trends. While Hickman’s suggestions could be incorporated into virtually many of the new proposals for integrating ethics into technological research, development and dissemination, barriers remain. In this paper, I will explores some reasons why the field remains fragmented, emphasizing weaknesses in the pragmatist approach. First, I acknowledge the significance of obvious explanations: the technical community’s unfamiliarity with ethical inquiry and the lack of both administrative and financial commitment to ethics-oriented research. There is, in short, an epistemic gap between the message that innovators are prepared to hear and the sophisticated response that Hickman’s pragmatism offers. This gap may be a practical limitation to philosophical pragmatism in many of its manifestations.

Richard P. Haynes, founding editor of _Agriculture and Human Values_, was an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Florida. His personal interests in the environmental dimensions of agriculture led him to found the journal in the 1980s with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Later in life, he published on ethical treatment of lab and farm animals. Haynes understood _Agriculture and Human Values_ as a broadly multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary platform for critical studies of agriculture and food systems. As he took over the editorship of _The Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics_ in the 1990s, he fashioned it as a complementary outlet for more traditionally philosophical studies of environmental and agricultural topics.

Although I took one class with John McDermott at SUNY Stony Brook, I write as a colleague who came through the ranks under his mentorship at Texas A&M from 1980 to 1997, when I left College Station to assume the Joyce and Edward E. Brewer Chair in Applied Ethics at Purdue University. I came to Texas A&M during the transition from McDermott's term as the Head of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities to the leadership of Professor Hugh McCann. It was a heady time in Central Texas, and especially in philosophy. Texas A&M was itself undergoing rapid growth in both the size of its student population and in the research output of its faculty. The 1980s, in particular, were a time when a faculty member in any...

Environmental philosophers in Europe and North America have gravitated toward an approach that emphasizes the scarcity of resources and the encroachment of civilization on spectacular natural landscapes. As a result, they have neglected philosophical sources within the European tradition that would start with agriculture as a locus for building conceptualizations of humanity’s proper relationship to the natural world. Some of these sources are reviewed briefly, and they are put forward as a possible bridge for creating new conversations among philosophers representing Western and East Asian philosophical traditions.

the coss dialogues were initiated in 1995 to foster cross talk between philosophers working in the classical American tradition modeled by C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, and others, on the one hand, and contemporary representatives from other traditions, especially disciplines other than philosophy, on the other. The format for the Coss Dialogues was originally conceived as a plenary presentation at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy by an invited speaker representing the alternative intellectual tradition, followed by a response from philosophers more traditionally associated with the SAAP. The Society for the Advancement of American..

This open access collection of new interdisciplinary essays discusses philosophical and social implications of new biotechnologies, methods, and tools used in agriculture from a multispecies perspective. Contributors employ philosophy, sociology, and history of agriculture; agricultural ethics; philosophy of science; and science and technology studies to investigate agricultural research, farming practice, and agricultural policy. Chapters explore and critically discuss how mechanical, chemical, and genetic interventions reshape ecological relationships and agricultural knowledge by relying on case studies of interspecies interactions across different agriculturalized landscapes. These include careful examinations of the nature of dynamic causal relationships across microbial, macrobial, megaflora and faunal organismal communities; exploration of specific coevolved species of pollinators and field crops; and analyses of the epistemic and normative commitments that guide crop management decisions and shape methodological choices leading to the reengineering of land use. These analyses and case studies are intended to provide readers with a variety of conceptual tools through which the use of agricultural technologies might possibly be understood and debated.

Scientific research increasingly involves large, multidisciplinary teams networked across multiple institutions to develop new technologies. Despite the rise of complex research networks and big team science, there has been too little analysis to date of the ethical challenges facing these networks. The extensive literature on the ethical issues confronting individual researchers and small teams (the microlevel) and on the larger societal challenges flowing from research and new technology (the macrolevel) leaves a troubling gap in between, at the mesolevel of the research network involved in big team science. Yet the ability of complex networks to conduct research ethically—which is essential if the results are to be deemed reliable and trustworthy—depends on recognizing the ethical issues that emerge at this intermediate network level, identifying the values that should guide networks in addressing those issues, and equipping research leaders to build a culture supporting the ethical conduct of research across the laboratories and institutions that comprise the network. This paper calls out the problem, analyzing the gap and recommending next steps.

How do human interventions into the environment motivated by different aims transform agriculture in ways that create new causal relationships between organisms above and below ground? We provide a conceptual framework for a philosophical and sociological approach to agricultural biotechnology and its multiple impacts on agricultural systems. We begin with a brief account of the history of the philosophy of the agricultural sciences and the early reluctance of philosophers of science to engage in the philosophy of the applied sciences. Applied sciences in general and the agricultural sciences in particular rely on contingencies in social practice. Here, one would expect diversity among different disciplines and goals. Instead of the basic sciences’ aim of discovering a univocal reality, applied sciences were reconciled to the possibility of incompatible prescriptions. Following this, we introduce some concepts and approaches central to discussions of agricultural biotechnologies including social epistemology and social ontology. Our coinage, engineered agricultural ecologies is meant to echo debate over novel ecosystems in conservation biology, where attempts to intervene in ecosystems damaged by species loss and climate change are advocated by some, opposed by others. By insisting that farms are engineered ecologies we hope to stimulate some crosstalk with environmental philosophers and conservation ecology.

Through socio-cultural analysis of the discourse of bullying, the present article aims to show that moral learning is less about teaching children the difference between right and wrong and more about making available to them what Tappan and Wertsch describe as the mediational means to engage in their own moral learning. Bullying is explained in Bakhtinian terms as a form of ‘authoritative discourse’. Both moral education and manipulative adolescent bullying are presented as, in a broad sense, forms of political practice. The same 13-year-old girl was recorded as she talked with peer ‘counsellors’ about her own bullying and then a fortnight later in the course of directing and featuring in a tutor-group video which aimed to introduce younger pupils to their new school. Through the inter-animation of social voices, new moral ideas are appropriated by the participants. In a succession of ‘zones of proximal development’, students support and ‘scaffold’ each other’s thinking in their progression towards changed levels of moral awareness.

This article explores how time-related metaphors frame advanced cryopreservation technologies in environmental conservation. Cryopreservation “stops” or “freezes” biological time and “buys time” desperately needed to preserve species and ecosystems. We advance a framing of these technologies as logistical, highlighting how they create opportunities to shift materials, knowledge, and decision-making power through space and time. As logistical technologies, advanced cryopreservation techniques require active planning in the present rather than deferring responsibility and accountability to the future.

The term ‘posthumanism’ has not been promoted by many environmental philosophers, and it is not clear how the figures I discuss would react to be being characterized as posthumanist. It is more typical for advocates of the perspectives I discuss to characterize them with labels such as ‘non-anthropocentric,’ ‘ecocentric’, or ‘deep ecology.’ Yet, as I will argue, the ideas that have emerged in these lines of thought reflect philosophical commitments that could aptly be characterized as posthumanist

Histone post‐translational modifications (PTMs) alter the chromatin architecture, generating “open” and “closed” states, and these structural changes can modulate gene expression under specific cellular conditions. While methylation and acetylation are the best‐characterized histone PTMs, citrullination by the protein arginine deiminases (PADs) represents another important player in this process. In addition to “fine tuning” chromatin structure at specific loci, histone citrullination can also promote rapid global chromatin decondensation during the formation of extracellular traps (ETs) in immune cells. Recent studies now show that PAD4‐mediated citrullination of histone H1 at promoter elements can also promote localized chromatin decondensation in stem cells, thus regulating the pluripotent state. These observations suggest that PAD‐mediated histone deimination profoundly affects chromatin structure, possibly above and beyond that of other PTMs. Additionally, these recent findings further enhance our understanding of PAD biology and the important contributions that these enzymes play in development, health, and disease.