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Speciesism is a term used in philosophy regarding the treatment of individuals of different species. The term has several different definitions within the relevant literature. Some sources specifically define speciesism as discrimination or unjustified treatment based on an individual's species membership, while other sources define it as differential treatment without regard to whether the treatment is justified or not. Richard Ryder, who coined the term, defined it as "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species." Speciesism results in the belief that humans have the right to use non-human animals, which scholars say is pervasive in the modern society. Studies from 2015 and 2019 suggest that people who support animal exploitation also tend to endorse racist, sexist, and other prejudicial views, which furthers the beliefs in human supremacy and group dominance to justify systems of inequality and oppression.
Wildlife refers to undomesticated animal species, but has come to include all organisms that grow or live wild in an area without being introduced by humans. Wildlife was also synonymous to game: those birds and mammals that were hunted for sport. Wildlife can be found in all ecosystems. Deserts, plains, grasslands, woodlands, forests, and other areas including the most developed urban areas, all have distinct forms of wildlife. While the term in popular culture usually refers to animals that are untouched by human factors, most scientists agree that much wildlife is affected by human activities. Some wildlife threaten human safety, health, property and quality of life. However, many wild animals, even the dangerous ones, have value to human beings. This value might be economic, educational, or emotional in nature.
In environmental philosophy, environmental ethics is an established field of practical philosophy "which reconstructs the essential types of argumentation that can be made for protecting natural entities and the sustainable use of natural resources." The main competing paradigms are anthropocentrism, physiocentrism, and theocentrism. Environmental ethics exerts influence on a large range of disciplines including environmental law, environmental sociology, ecotheology, ecological economics, ecology and environmental geography.
Anthropocentrism is the belief that human beings are the central or most important entity on the planet. The term can be used interchangeably with humanocentrism, and some refer to the concept as human supremacy or human exceptionalism. From an anthropocentric perspective, humankind is seen as separate from nature and superior to it, and other entities are viewed as resources for humans to use.
Jefferson Allen McMahan is an American moral philosopher. He has been Sekyra and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford since 2014.
Disease is described as a decrease in performance of normal functions of an individual caused by many factors, which is not limited to infectious agents. Furthermore, wildlife disease is a disease when one of the hosts includes a wildlife species. In many cases, wildlife hosts can act as a reservoir of diseases that spillover into domestic animals, people and other species. Wildlife diseases spread through both direct contact between two individual animals or indirectly through the environment. Additionally, human industry has created the possibility for cross-species transmission through the wildlife trade.Furthermore, there are many relationships that must be considered when discussing wildlife disease, which are represented through the Epidemiological Triad Model. This model describes the relationship between a pathogen, host and the environment. There are many routes to infection of a susceptible host by a pathogen, but when the host becomes infected that host now has the potential to infect other hosts. Whereas, environmental factors affect pathogen persistence and spread through host movement and interactions with other species. An example to apply to the ecological triad is Lyme disease, where changes in environment have changed the distribution of Lyme disease and its vector, the Ixodes tick. The recent increase in wildlife disease occurrences is cause for concern among conservationists, as many vulnerable species do not have the population to recover from devastating disease outbreaks.
Animal ethics is a branch of ethics which examines human-animal relationships, the moral consideration of animals and how nonhuman animals ought to be treated. The subject matter includes animal rights, animal welfare, animal law, speciesism, animal cognition, wildlife conservation, wild animal suffering, the moral status of nonhuman animals, the concept of nonhuman personhood, human exceptionalism, the history of animal use, and theories of justice. Several different theoretical approaches have been proposed to examine this field, in accordance with the different theories currently defended in moral and political philosophy. There is no theory which is completely accepted due to the differing understandings of what is meant by the term ethics; however, there are theories that are more widely accepted by society such as animal rights and utilitarianism.
Wild animal suffering is the suffering experienced by non-human animals living outside of direct human control, due to harms such as disease, injury, parasitism, starvation and malnutrition, dehydration, weather conditions, natural disasters, and killings by other animals, as well as psychological stress. Some estimates indicate that these individual animals make up the vast majority of animals in existence. An extensive amount of natural suffering has been described as an unavoidable consequence of Darwinian evolution and the pervasiveness of reproductive strategies which favor producing large numbers of offspring, with a low amount of parental care and of which only a small number survive to adulthood, the rest dying in painful ways, has led some to argue that suffering dominates happiness in nature.
Welfare biology is a proposed cross-disciplinary field of research to study the positive and negative well-being of sentient individuals in relation to their environment. Yew-Kwang Ng first advanced the field in 1995. Since then, its establishment has been advocated for by a number of writers, including philosophers, who have argued for the importance of creating the research field, particularly in relation to wild animal suffering. Some researchers have put forward examples of existing research that welfare biology could draw upon and suggested specific applications for the research's findings.
Clare Palmer is a British philosopher, theologian and scholar of environmental and religious studies. She is known for her work on environmental and animal ethics. She was appointed as a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University in 2010. She had previously held academic appointments at the Universities of Greenwich, Stirling, and Lancaster in the United Kingdom, and Washington University in St. Louis in the United States, among others.
Núria Almiron Roig is a Catalan researcher who specializes in communication and power relations. Since 2008, she has been a professor in the Department of Communication at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and was previously a professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).
Óscar Horta Álvarez is a Spanish animal activist and moral philosopher who is currently a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) and one of the co-founders of the organization Animal Ethics. He is known for his work in animal ethics, especially around the problem of wild animal suffering. He has also worked on the concept of speciesism and on the clarification of the arguments for the moral consideration of nonhuman animals. In 2022, Horta published his first book in English, Making a Stand for Animals.
Animal Ethics is a nonprofit organization formed to promote discussion and debate around issues in animal ethics and to provide information and resources for animal advocates. They also do outreach work in several countries on the issue of speciesism. Their aim is to create a world where moral consideration is extended to all sentient beings. The organization's website covers topics such as speciesism, sentience, veganism and wild animal suffering and has content translated into several languages.
The eradication or abolition of suffering is the concept of using biotechnology to create a permanent absence of involuntary pain and suffering in all sentient beings.
The predation problem or predation argument refers to the consideration of the harms experienced by animals due to predation as a moral problem, that humans may or may not have an obligation to work towards preventing. Discourse on this topic has, by and large, been held within the disciplines of animal and environmental ethics. The issue has particularly been discussed in relation to animal rights and wild animal suffering. Some critics have considered an obligation to prevent predation as untenable or absurd and have used the position as a reductio ad absurdum to reject the concept of animal rights altogether. Others have criticized any obligation implied by the animal rights position as environmentally harmful.
Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism is an open access peer-reviewed journal focusing on ethics and related topics from a non-anthropocentric perspective. The journal aims to create an interdisciplinary forum within Europe to promote discussion of scientific and moral problems that relate to the need to transcend the anthropocentric nature of existing structures of knowledge. The journal's language is English, but it is published in Italy. The content includes commentary, debates, interviews and reports on conferences, activities, workshops, events and other projects. Submissions are intended to be understood by both an academic and lay audience. Relations. was published biannually from 2013 to 2018, then annually in 2019 and 2020. It is edited by Francesco Allegri, Matteo Andreozzi, Sofia Bonicalzi and Eleonora Adorni. Topics of past issues include animal emotions, animal personhood, antispeciesism, wild animal suffering, posthumanism, animal products and energy ethics.
The relationship between animal ethics and environmental ethics concerns the differing ethical consideration of individual nonhuman animals—particularly those living in spaces outside of direct human control—and conceptual entities such as species, populations and ecosystems. The intersection of these two fields is a prominent component of vegan discourse.
Thomas Lepeltier is a French independent scholar, essayist and science writer specializing in the history and philosophy of science and applied ethics, known in particular for his contributions to the field of animal law. He is the author of several philosophical works on animal ethics such as L'imposture intellectuelle des carnivores and of science history books including Darwin hérétique and Univers parallèles. Known initially as a science historian, he now mainly advocates in defense of animals in the French media.
"The Meat Eaters" is a 2010 essay by the American philosopher Jeff McMahan, published as an op-ed in The New York Times. In the essay, McMahan asserts that humans have a moral obligation to stop eating meat and, in a conclusion considered to be controversial, that humans also have a duty to prevent predation by individuals who belong to carnivorous species, if we can do so without inflicting greater harm overall.
Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature is a 2022 book by the philosopher Catia Faria published by Cambridge University Press. It examines wild animal suffering as a moral problem. Faria contends that if we have a moral obligation to aid those in need, we should intervene in nature to prevent or alleviate the suffering of wild animals, as long as it is practical and leads to a net positive outcome.
References
- 1 2 "Catia Faria i Eze Páez: "l'espècie no determina si un individu pot ser danyat o beneficiat"" [Catia Faria and Eze Páez: "the species does not determine whether an individual can be harmed or benefited"]. Ara Balears (in Catalan). Retrieved 2021-02-13.
- 1 2 "Catia Faria". Academia.edu .
- 1 2 "Catia Faria". Center for Animal Ethics (UPF). Retrieved 2021-02-13.
- 1 2 "Animal Ethics in the Wild". Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 2022-06-13.
- 1 2 Faria, Catia. "Short CV" (PDF). EPS (Ethics, Politics & Society). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2021-03-08. Retrieved 2021-02-04.
- ↑ "First dissertation on helping animals in the wild". Center for Animal Ethics (UPF). 2016-03-19. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
- ↑ "Past Students". The Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
- ↑ "Academic work on wild animal suffering edited by Animal Ethics activists". Animal Ethics. 2015-12-23. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
- ↑ Faria, Catia (2014-12-21). "Should we intervene in nature to help animals?". Practical Ethics blog. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
- ↑ "Catia Faria". elDiario.es. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
- ↑ "Catia Faria, autora en pikara magazine" [Catia Faria, author at pikara magazine]. Pikara Magazine (in European Spanish). Retrieved 2021-02-13.
- ↑ "Catia Faria and Oscar Horta contribute to The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics: With the chapter "Welfare Biology"". Center for Animal Ethics (UPF). 2020-12-20. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
- 1 2 Faria, Catia; Paez, Eze (2015-05-11). "Animals in Need: the Problem of Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature". Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism. 3 (1): 7–13. ISSN 2280-9643.
- ↑ Faria, Catia; Paez, Eze (2019-02-17). "It's Splitsville: Why Animal Ethics and Environmental Ethics Are Incompatible". American Behavioral Scientist. 63 (8): 1047–1060. doi:10.1177/0002764219830467. S2CID 150854523.
- ↑ Faria, Catia (2021-01-03). "Xenozoopolis: Unnatural Solidarity". Medium. Retrieved 2021-02-24.
- ↑ "Feminism and antispeciesism, a talk by philosopher Catia Faria". Universitat Pompeu Fabra. 2020-02-21. Retrieved 2021-02-24.
- 1 2 Ruiz Carreras, María (2016-11-04). ""La lucha por la igualdad y la justicia es necesariamente feminista y antiespecista"" [The fight for equality and justice is necessarily feminist and antispeciesist]. Diagonal (in Spanish). Retrieved 2021-02-13.
