Confining 'disenhanced' animals

In "Making Sense of Animal Disenhancement" Adam Henschke provides a framework for fully understanding and evaluating animal disenhancement. His conclusion is that animal disenhancement is neither morally nor pragmatically justified. In this paper I argue that Henschke misapplies his own framework for understanding disenhancement, resulting in a stronger conclusion than is justified. In diagnosing his misstep, I argue that the resources he has provided us, combined with my refinements, result in two new avenues for inquiry: an application of concepts from political theory to disenhancement, and an inquiry in to the mode of valuation that underlies industrial animal agriculture and disenhancement proposals.

The international library of environmental, agricultural and food ethics, 2021

I criticize the current usage of the terms "enhancement" and "disenhancement" in the debate over the genetic modification of animals and propose an alternative definition of these terms based on how modifications affect animals' welfare in particular contexts. The critique largely follows a similar criticism of the use of the term "enhancements" in the human bioethics literature. I first describe how the term "disenhancement" has been used in debates thus far, and argue that the present lack of a shared definition is problematic. I then consider some potential definitions of "disenhancement" that can be adapted from the human bioethics literature and argue that most of these uses are flawed for the purposes of using the term in current ethical debates. Finally, I elaborate on the welfarist conception of disenhancement and consider some potential objections, using examples from the literature to illustrate key points. 29.1 Introduction Consider the following scenarios from the ethics literature about genetically modifying animals: Football Birds: Using gene-editing, chicken DNA is altered so radically that it results in headless (football-shaped) "birds" that are merely fed nutrients through tubes and produce edible eggs. The organisms completely lack anything resembling a brain and are completely insentient (Comstock 2000, 152). Live Fast, Die Young: In order to avoid the act of killing livestock, certain animals' genes are altered such that they die painlessly shortly after reaching adulthood (McMahan 2008).

In his paper “The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken problem” ( Nanoethics 2: 305-36, 2008) Thompson argued that technological attempts to reduce or eliminate selected non-human animals’ capabilities (animal disenhancements) in order to solve or mitigate animal welfare problems in animals’ use pose a philosophical conundrum, because there is a contradiction between rational arguments in favor of these technological interventions and intuitions against them. In her response “Animal Disenhancement and the Non-Identity Problem: A Response to Thompson” ( Nanoethics 5:43–48, 2011), Palmer maintained that the philosophical conundrum is even deeper if we introduce the non-identity problem into the discussion. In my brief response, I claim that in order to avoid the pitfalls of speculative ethics, empirical facts related to the technologies involved as well as costs for the non-human animals have to be taken into account. Depending on which changes we are referring to, ethical problems can be seen very differently. Widening the consideration to the socio-economic context in which non-human animals are currently used by humans, I challenge the idea of genuine philosophical conundrums from an antispeciesist and abolitionist perspective. Only in a context of exploitation, in which non-human animals are deprived of basic rights and their existence is totally dependent on human exploitation, the contradictions between improvement of welfare and disenhancement of capabilities make sense. Content Type Journal Article Category Critical Discussion Notes Pages 1-12 DOI 10.1007/s11569-012-0139-1 Authors Arianna Ferrari, KIT/ITAS (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology/Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis), Karlsruhe, Germany Journal NanoEthics Online ISSN 1871-4765 Print ISSN 1871-4757.

Extending ethical considerability to animals consistently takes the form of imperialism: progressing outward from the core of human morality, it incorporates only those animals deemed relevantly similar to humans while rejecting or reforming those lifeforms which are not. I develop an ethic of animal treatment premised on the species difference of undomesticated animals, which has the potential to reunite not only animal and environmental ethics, but environmental and interhuman ethics: each species has evolutionarily specified patterns of behaviour for the proper treatment of members of its own species and members of other species, and vice versa.

Broadview Press, 2009

Can animals be regarded as part of the moral community? To what extent, if at all, do they have moral rights? Are we wrong to eat them, hunt them, or use them for scientific research? Can animal liberation be squared with the environmental movement? Taylor traces the background of these debates from Aristotle to Darwin and sets out the views of numerous contemporary philosophers – including Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Mary Anne Warren, J. Baird Callicott, and Martha Nussbaum – with ethical theories ranging from utilitarianism to eco-feminism. The new edition also includes provocative quotations from some of the major writers in the field. As the final chapter insists, animal ethics is more than just an “academic” question: it is intimately connected both to our understanding of what it means to be human and to pressing current issues such as food shortages, environmental degradation, and climate change.

This article considers whether a morally relevant distinction can be drawn between wild and domesticated animals. The term "wildness" can be used in several different ways, only one of which (constitutive wildness, meaning an animal that has not been domesticated by being bred in particular ways) is generally paired and contrasted with "domesticated." Domesticated animals are normally deliberately bred and confined. One of the article's arguments concerns human initiatives that establish relations with animals and thereby change what is owed to these animals. The main relations of interest in ethics are the vulnerability and dependence in animals that are created when humans establish certain relations with them on farms, in zoos, in laboratories, and the like. Domestication is a pervasive way in which humans make animals vulnerable, and thereby duties of animal care and protection arise in a persistent way.

Research in Phenomenology, 2010

The concepts of animal, human, and rights are all part of a philosophical tradition that trades on foreclosing the animal, animality, and animals. Rather than looking to qualities or capacities that make animals the same as or different from humans, I investigate the relationship between the human and the animal. To insist, as animal rights and welfare advocates do, that our ethical obligations to animals are based on their similarities to us reinforces the type of humanism that leads to treating animals-and other people-as subordinates. But, if recent philosophies of difference are any indication, we can acknowledge difference without acknowledging our dependence on animals, or without including animals in ethical considerations. Animal ethics requires rethinking both identity and difference by focusing on relationships and responsivity. My aim is not only to suggest an animal ethics but also to show how ethics itself is transformed by considering animals.

Ethics & Behavior, 1993

It seems impossible for a human being not to have some point of view concerning nonhuman animal (hereafter animal) welfare. Many people make decisions about how humans are permitted to treat animals using speciesist criteria, basing their decisions on an individual's species membership rather than on that animal's individual characteristics. Although speciesism provides a convenient way for making difficult decisions about who should be used in different types of research, we argue that such decisions should rely on an analysis of individual characteristics and should not be based merely on species membership. We do not argue that the concept of species is never useful or important. To make our points, we present a conversation among a skeptic, an agnostic, and a proponent of the view that our moral obligations to an animal must be based on an analysis of that individual's characteristics. In the course of the discussion, concepts such as personhood, consciousness, cognitive ability, harm, and pain are presented, because one's understanding of these concepts informs his or her ethical decisions about the use of animals by humans.

1998

A couple of decades after becoming a major area of both public and philosophical concern, animal ethics continues its inroads into mainstream consciousness. Increasingly, philosophers, ethicists, professionals who use animals, and the broader public confront specific ethical issues regarding human use of animals as well as more fundamental questions about animals' moral status. A parallel, related development is the explosion of interest in animals' mental lives, as seen in exciting new work in cognitive ethology 1 and in the plethora of movies, television commercials, and popular books featuring apparently intelligent animals. As we approach the turn of the twenty-first century, philosophical animal ethics is an area of both increasing diversity and unrealized potential-a thesis supported by this essay as a whole. Following up on an earlier philosophical review of animal ethics (but without that review's focus on animal research), 2 the present article provides an updated narrativeone that offers some perspective on where we have been, a more detailed account of where we are, and a projection of where we might go. Each of the three major sections offers material that one is unlikely to find in other reviews of animal ethics: the first by viewing familiar territory in a different light (advancing the thesis that the utility-versus-rights debate in animal ethics is much less important than is generally thought); the second by reviewing major recent works that are not very well-known (at least My thanks to Tom Beauchamp, Maggie Little, and Barbara Orlans for their comments on a draft of this paper.

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2010