Rainer Ebert

Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
  •  2521
    The Wrongness of Killing
    Dissertation, Rice University. 2016.
    There are few moral convictions that enjoy the same intuitive plausibility and level of acceptance both within and across nations, cultures, and traditions as the conviction that, normally, it is morally wrong to kill people. Attempts to provide a philosophical explanation of why that is so broadly fall into three groups: Consequentialists argue that killing is morally wrong, when it is wrong, because of the harm it inflicts on society in general, or the victim in particular, whereas personhood …Read more
  •  956
    The Concept of Human Dignity in German and Kenyan Constitutional Law
    Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya 4 (1): 43-73. 2012.
    This paper is a historical, legal and philosophical analysis of the concept of human dignity in German and Kenyan constitutional law. We base our analysis on decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, in particular its take on life imprisonment and its 2006 decision concerning the shooting of hijacked airplanes, and on a close reading of the Constitution of Kenya. We also present a dialogue between us in which we offer some critical remarks on the concept of human dignity in the t…Read more
  •  390
    Ethics after Darwin: Completing the Revolution
    Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics 11 (3): 43-48. 2020.
    This is a big-picture discussion of an important implication of Darwinism for ethics. I argue that there is a misfit between our scientific view of the natural world and the view, still dominant in academic philosophy and wider society alike, that there is a discrete hierarchy of moral status among conscious beings. I will suggest that the clear line of traditional morality – between human beings and other animals – is a remnant of an obsolete moral outlook, not least because it has no counterpa…Read more
  •  301
    Question-Begging Arguments as Ones That Do Not Extend Knowledge
    Philosophy and Progress 65 (1): 125-144. 2019.
    In this article, I propose a formal criterion that distinguishes between deductively valid arguments that do and do not beg the question. I define the concept of a Never-failing Minimally Competent Knower (NMCK) and suggest that an argument begs the question just in case it cannot possibly assist an NMCK in extending his or her knowledge.
  •  257
    On What a Good Argument Is, in Science and Elsewhere
    Dhaka University Journal on Journalism, Media and Communication Studies 1 17-26. 2011.
    This article investigates what constitutes good reason, in particular in scientific communication. I will start out with a general description of what scientists do and will identify the good argument as an integral part of all science. Employing some simple examples, I will then move on to derive some necessary conditions for the goodness of an argument. Along the way, I will introduce various basic concepts in logic and briefly talk about the nature of human knowledge. I will conclude by relat…Read more
  •  230
    Good to die
    Diacritica 27 139-156. 2013.
    Among those who reject the Epicurean claim that death is not bad for the one who dies, it is popularly held that death is bad for the one who dies, when it is bad for the one who dies, because it deprives the one who dies of the good things that otherwise would have fallen into her life. This view is known as the deprivation account of the value of death, and Fred Feldman is one of its most prominent defenders. In this paper, I explain why I believe that Feldman’s argument for the occasional bad…Read more
  •  179
    Review of Fritz Mauthner’s Die Sprache (review)
    Copula: Jahangirnagar University Studies in Philosophy 30 65-67. 2013.
  •  123
    Review of Alasdair Cochrane’s Animal Rights Without Liberation (review)
    Journal of Animal Ethics 5 (1): 114-116. 2015.
  •  113
    Daniel Bell and Wang Pei’s recent monograph, Just Hierarchy, seeks to defend hierarchical relationships against more egalitarian alternatives. This paper addresses their argument, offered in one chapter of the book, in favour of a hierarchical relationship between human and nonhuman animals. This relationship, Bell and Pei argue, should conform to what they call “subordination without cruelty:” it is permissible to subordinate and exploit animals for human ends, provided that we do not treat the…Read more
  •  103
    Secular arguments for equal and exclusively human worth generally tend to follow one of two strategies. One, which has recently gained renewed attention because of a novel argument by S. Matthew Liao, aims to directly ground worth in an intrinsic property that all humans have in common, whereas the other concedes that there is no morally relevant intrinsic difference between all humans and all other animals, and instead appeals to the membership of all humans in a special kind. In this article, …Read more
  •  79
    Mental-Threshold Egalitarianism: How Not to Ground Full Moral Status
    Social Theory and Practice 44 (1): 75-93. 2018.
    Mental-threshold egalitarianism, well-known examples of which include Jeff McMahan’s two-tiered account of the wrongness of killing and Tom Regan’s theory of animal rights, divides morally considerable beings into equals and unequals on the basis of their individual mental capacities. In this paper, I argue that the line that separates equals from unequals is unavoidably arbitrary and implausibly associates an insignificant difference in empirical reality with a momentous difference in moral sta…Read more
  •  36
    According to a diverse and widely popular family of moral theories, there is a class of individuals – typically humans or persons – who have the very same, full moral status. Individuals not falling into that class count for less, or not at all, morally speaking. In this article, I identify two problems for such theories, the mapping problem and the problem of misgrounded value, and argue that they are serious enough to be decisive. I will then propose an alternative account of full and equal mo…Read more
  •  30
    Africa and Her Animals: Philosophical and Practical Perspectives (edited book)
    with Anteneh Roba
    University of South Africa Press. 2018.
    Africa and Her Animals challenges the common view that animals are essentially inferior to human beings: it is both the start of a long overdue conversation and a call to action. Non‐human animals, essential to the everyday lives and well-being of Africans, impact and are affected by African societies in diverse ways. Africa and Her Animals investigates and analyses the moral, social, cultural, religious, and legal status of non‐human animals in Africa. The contributors, drawn from a wide range …Read more
  •  22
    Der Band vereinigt die Vorträge der internationalen Vorlesungsreihe “Tierrechte” an der Universität Heidelberg im Sommersemester 2006. Herausgegeben von der Interdisziplinären Arbeitsgemeinschaft Tierethik (IAT) mit ihren gegenwärtigen und früheren Mitgliedern Katharina Blesch, Alexandra Breunig, Stefan Buss, Guillaume Dondainas, Rainer Ebert, Florian Fruth, Nils Kessler, Matthias Müller, Uta Panten, Anette Reimelt, Bernd Schälling, Jürgen Schneele, Adriana Sixt-Sailer, Manja Unger und Alexander…Read more
  •  7
    In Bangladesh, Dies a Vestige of Colonialism
    with Md Mahmudul Hoque
    Gay and Lesbian Review 3 (18): 45. 2011.
    GREAT EMPIRES may come and go, but, like the tides, they leave behind a tangled assortment of treasures and trash. In the case of the British Empire, this included much that one might admire, but also a British Protestant morality that was codified in laws that persist to this day. Section 377 of the colonial Penal Code is a striking example. It classed consensual oral and anal sex as “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” and made it a crime punishable with imprisonment for life. When…Read more
  •  5
    Editorial Vol.7
    Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics 7 (3). 2017.
  •  3
    Editorial Vol.8
    Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics 8 (1). 2017.