Care ethics and the moving animal

Andersson-Cederholm, E., Björk, A., Jennbert, K. & Lönngren, A-S. (red.): Exploring the Animal Turn. Human-Animal Relations in Science, Society and Culture, , 2014

Anthropomorphism is a ubiquitous and persistent cultural phenomenon that has been with us since the onset of minded interaction with our surroundings. Seen as a theological sin in the middle ages it has today developed into a mostly silent but looming social, cultural, and scientific anxiety. Within the scientific community, research into animals" mental states is fraught with the fear of an embarrassing subjective bias that might undermine the scientific validity. By way of attributing human traits to animals, the critique of anthropomorphism usually states that it misinterprets animals' true needs and fails to recognize what animals "really are." Notwithstanding that anthropomorphism routinely is seen as an intellectual failure, it has historically proven very useful in providing functional explanations and meaning in the relationships between humans and the world, including making sense of animal behavior. Such claims for functionality creates problems in science, since functionality and its corollary, predictability, are valued goals in science, along with scientific certainty. Methods that serve functionality ideally also serve queries about truth. However, historically this has not always been the case, with functionality and truth sometimes tugging in different directions. This prompts questions about the role of functionality in science and its relationship to certaintyquestions that will be discussed in this paper. It will focus on the controversy over anthropomorphism in the cognitive sciences and direct our attention to the scientific goals of functionality and certainty. Though not always recognized as a problem in the contemporary discourse, an initial recourse to the historical debate on the relationship between subjective (bias) and objective (reality) will be used to frame the inherent tension between the divergent goals.

The Journal of Ethics, 2007

Although 20 th -century empiricists were agnostic about animal mind and consciousness, this was not the case for their historical ancestorsthe dominance of the Darwinian paradigm of evolutionary continuity, one would not expect belief in animal mind to disappear. That it did demonstrates that standard accounts of how scientific hypotheses are overturned -i.e., by empirical disconfirmation or by exposure of logical flaws -is inadequate. In fact, it can be demonstrated that belief in animal mind disappeared as a result of a change of values, a mechanism also apparent in the Scientific Revolution. The ''valuational revolution'' responsible for denying animal mind is examined in terms of the rise of Behaviorism and its flawed account of the historical inevitability of denying animal mentation. The effects of the denial of animal consciousness included profound moral implications for the major uses of animals in agriculture and scientific research. The latter is particularly notable for the denial of felt pain in animals. The rise of societal moral concern for animals, however, has driven the ''reappropriation of common sense'' about animal thought and feeling.

Environmental Values, 1997

Contemporary ethical discourse on animals is influenced partly by a scientific and partly by an anthropomorphic understanding of them. Apparently, we have deprived ourselves of the possibility of a more profound acquaintance with them. In this contribution it is claimed that all ethical theories or statements regarding the moral significance of animals are grounded in an ontological assessment of the animal’s way of being. In the course of history, several answers have been put forward to the question of what animals really and basically are. Three of them (namely the animal as a machine, an organism and a being that dwells in an – apparently – restricted world) are discussed. It is argued that the latter (Heideggerian) answer contains a valuable starting point for an ethical reflection on recent changes in the moral relationship between humans and animals.

Journal of the Kafka Society of America , 2006

This thesis is a discussion of the nature of perception with the debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell as a springboard into an investigation of the perceptual similarities, and differences, between human and animal perception. I criticize Dreyfus’ lack of commitment to the idea that humans and animals share a “space of motivations” through what I call the theory of “cultural penetration.” It is my claim that when it comes to the nature of human perception, Dreyfus is committed to a Heideggerian holism that deepens the perceptual divide between us and other animals. I then bring in J.J. Gibson, who through his ecological approach comes closer to conceiving of the similarities of human and animal perception through his concept of “affordances” – a concept that both Dreyfus and McDowell uses, albeit with a different focus than Gibson. However, it turns out that Gibson’s theory has drawbacks of its own, as the generality of “affordances” in Gibson’s conceptual scheme renders them ambiguous. as “affordances” are ambiguous in Gibson’s conceptual scheme through their generality. The fact that “affordances” are shared between species can, on Gibson’s’ view render the similarities between us and other animals trivial. A philosopher I claim helps open up a discussion of the fundamental similarities, while retaining inherent differences between humans and animals by bringing in much needed animal examples is Alasdair McIntyre, whose views I will discuss at the end of the thesis.

Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal: At the Limits of Experience, 2007

As Max Horkheimer wrote sixty years ago, Modern insensitivity to nature is indeed only a variation of the pragmatic attitude that is typical of Western Civilization as a whole. Only the forms are different.

Relations

American Journal of Bioethics, 2012

Maintaining the attention to bodily difference human and animal ontology has long been constructed on rigid physical characterizations seemingly untouched by culture. In "Reframing the Ethical Issues in Part-Human Animal Research," Haber and Benham (2012) call into question most of the formal elements of essentialism that an earlier mode of thought took for granted. Two views on the nature of human and interspecies animal bodies are in contention here. The first offers an argument grounded in the essential developmental properties of human and animal material and biological systems such that giving life to "animals with human derived material," exemplified by animal-human hybrids and chimeras, effaces physical distinctions between animal and human. Dualism is invoked as an interpretive aid, structuring thought and shaping understanding. Against nonhuman animals, human life, in all its stages and forms, uniquely requires some fundamental form of moral consideration. Because of this presumptive obligation, an "inexorable moral confusion" is an inevitable byproduct of scientific change, since fixed constructions of animal and human bodies as unified and separate wholes are lost in any clear-cut sense (Robert and Baylis 2003).