动物伦理学研究

为了构建动物伦理学，笔者考察并概括了西方动物伦理研究的本质和关键问题，认为：动物伦理学是关于人与动物关系的伦理信念、道德态度和行为规范的理论体系，是一门尊重动物的价值和权利的新的伦理学说。它的产生具有坚实的科学基础、伦理基础和现实迫切性。     

动物权利之华山论剑——评《动物权利论争》

“我们为什么要保护动物？”对此，现代环境伦理学提供了四种伦理思考：其一，审慎理论。保护动物对人类有利；其二，仁慈理论。对动物麻木不仁和残酷成性是人性发育不完整和有欠缺的表现；其三，动物解放论。能够感受苦乐是拥有利益和获得关怀的充分条件，动物拥有感觉能力，人类需要从道德上关怀动物；其四，动物权利论。动物拥有权利，人类不能仅仅将它们当作工具。     

中国环境管理干部学院动物伦理教育概述

对中国环境管理干部学院的动物伦理教育进行了总结,提出动物伦理教育是大学生思想政治教育的一个重要方面的观点,指出动物伦理教育不仅事关动物,而且关系到大学生人格的培养。     

因素食而诞生的动物伦理学名著

彼得·辛格和汤姆·雷根都是素食者,他们从关注素食问题开始,走上了动物伦理学的研究道路,创立了关于动物解放和动物权利的学说。作为动物伦理学领域的权威学者,二者的研究进路有很大不同,辛格是效用主义者,雷根是权利论者,但他们都主张一种比较彻底的动物保护观,主张动物与人类平等,反对为了人类的贪欲和利益而伤害动物。他们的观点给了动物保护以强大的推动力。     

《哪吒闹海》与生态伦理

龙王深居龙宫,统辖水族虾兵蟹将,自是水域各类水体生物的最高利益代言人了。在动物权利论者看来,作为有感觉能力的鱼虾是不应被捕捞食用的,龙王自当保护好每一只鱼虾。     

自然的权利:从环境法视角的法理学思考

通过对传统法的“人类中心主义”理念的批判与对反对“自然的权利”确认的观点的分析,探讨了环境问题的突出使“生态利益中心主义”成为法律的现代理念,在此基础上自然的权利的确认也就顺理成章,并揭示了自然的权利的确认对环境保护的意义。     

当代中国环境治理的权利观

当代中国环境治理的权利观是指从权利的角度去考察、理解当代中国的环境治理,推进当代中国的生态文明建设事业。从这一角度来看,环境相关权利是当代中国环境治理的基本价值目标,也是重要的治理工具。所谓环境相关权利,是指环境治理有助于保障的环境权、生存权和发展权、生命权和健康权,以及在环境治理中可以运用到的知情、表达、参与、监督等权利。当代中国环境治理的权利观,在理论上符合生态文明建设的以人为本原则,符合国家治理体系和能力现代化的方针和取向,在实践上也能够揭示当代中国生态文明建设和环境治理的基本特征、精神实质和发展方向,既具有阐释性,也具有建构性。     

日本龙美环境诉讼评介

龙美环境行政诉讼为日本历史上意义重大的环境诉讼案件,在该案件中第一次将珍贵动物列为原告之一,案件的结果虽为法院驳回原告的诉讼,但历经8年的龙美诉讼使得自然的权利观念深深根植于民众之中,并促使人们对如何保护环境、如何建构环境法律制度、个人以及国家在环境保护方面应当扮演什么角色等问题进行深入的思考。     

海北高寒草甸生态系统中鼠类的天敌动物及其保护

文章对青藏高原海北高寒草甸生态系统中鼠类天敌动物的数量进行了调查，分析了天敌动物与鼠类的相互关系，提出保护天敌动物的必要性和措施。天敌动物的数量随鼠类的种群数量而变化，当鼠类数量降低时，天敌动物的产数减少，种群数量下降。同时，天敌 鼠类的种群数量及其行为有明显的调控作用。不同种类的天敌动物由于取食特点和栖息地的差异对不同鼠类的抑制作用不同，当鼠类数量较低时，多种天敌动物的总和捕食压力使其鼠类的抑制     

不断实践人类对生命的伟大承诺

古道尔在《希望:拯救濒危动植物的故事》中,不仅将视野放置在全球人类的共同行动上,而且竭尽全力突破人类对动物的认识,从而将动物的理念还原为动物的本质。古道尔将她亲临的很多种动物的保护过程进行了详细的描述。她告诉读者:尽管动物在不断受到人类和各种自然环境变化而导致的威胁,但是,人类一直没有停止对动物的保护和挽救。     

Animal Rights: Autonomy and Redundancy

Even if animal liberation were to be adopted, would rights for animals be redundant – or even deleterious? Such an objection, most prominently voiced by L. W. Sumner and Paul W. Taylor, is misguided, risks an anthropocentric and anthropomorphic conception of autonomy and freedom, overly agent-centered rights conceptions, and an overlooking of the likely harmful consequences of positing rights for humans but not for nonhuman animals. The objection in question also stems from an overly pessimistic construal of autonomy-infringements thought to result from extending rights to animals, and also, of confusions that supposedly may ensue from ascribing animal rights. Whether or not a case for animal liberation and/or animal rights can cogently be made, the redundancy-or-worse objection to animal rights need pose no barrier.     

Agricultural technology,wealth, and responsibility

Responsibility as a dual to human rights is presented as a moral alternative to extended, complex systems of animal and ecological rights. This simple idea of responsibility is then applied to four levels of agricultural technology: animal (nature) rights, conservation, organization of agriculture, and people versus planet relationships. The stewardship argument is freed from at least some of the complications of animal rights and ecology, but leaves responsibility with humans to do the right thing.The views expressed are the author's and do not necessarily represent policies or views of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.     

What's wrong with animalby-products?

Without looking beyond the conditions under which laying hens typically live in the contemporary U.S. egg industry, we can understand why the production and consumption of factory farmed eggs could be judged immoral. However, the question, What (if anything) is wrong with animal by-products? cannot always be adequately answered by looking at the conditions under which animals live out their productive lives. For the dairy industry looks benign in those terms, but if we look beyond the conditions under which milk cows live, we can better understand some animal rights activists' reasons for objecting to dairy products. The contemporary U.S. dairy industry requires a slaughter industry between one-seventh and one-third the size of the contemporary beef industry. Today, beef slaughter is vastly more humane than poultry slaughter, but if today's beef slaughter industry is judged emmoral, the contemporary dairy industry should be judged similarly immoral, because the two are wedded. This is the deep reason for moral suspicion of the dairy industry.     

Animal Care Ethics, ANZCCART, and Public Perceptions of Animal Use Ethics

The public attitude to animal use in Australia and New Zealandcan be inferred from survey results and political activity. The publicis concerned about the rights of animals as far as any uses causing painare concerned, but takes a more utilitarian view of the taking of lifewhere no suffering is involved. Many of the participants in two recentANZCCART conferences fall short in their knowledge of and attitudetoward these concerns. Animal welfare legislation and standards need tobe reformed so that painful animal use is eliminated, even if economicgrowth suffers as a result.     

A rights foundation for ecological democracy

ABSTRACT

What would it mean to conceptualize some environmental relationships as bundles of rights, rather than as a good as generally defined by liberalism? Environmental rights are a category of human rights necessarily central to both democracy and global environmental protection and governance (ecological democracy). The world of democratic politics and governance since mid-twentieth century has been transformed by a rights revolution in which recognized rights have come to constitute a ‘global normative order.’ There are several policy spaces in which persuasive environmental rights discourses have been emerging from existing or foreseeable congruences of elite and popular environmental norms, including (1) rights involving access to information and decision-making processes; (2) rights ensuring access to food and water; and (3) rights providing environmental security to all. We analyze these three rights discourses and assess their current and necessary future trajectories. We identify next steps in achieving better understanding and more meaningful establishment of environmental rights and their integration into our thinking about human rights, with attention to how they can be reconciled with the social and cultural diversity of democratic environmental governance in coming turbulent times.     

Discrimination and bias in the vegan ideal

The vegan ideal is entailed by arguments for ethical veganism based on traditional moral theory (rights and/or utilitarianism) extended to animals. The most ideal lifestyle would abjure the use of animals or their products for food since animals suffer and have rights not to be killed. The ideal is discriminatory because the arguments presuppose a male physiological norm that gives a privileged position to adult, middle-class males living in industrialized countries. Women, children, the aged, and others have substantially different nutritional requirements and would bear a greater burden on vegetarian and vegan diets with respect to health and economic risks, than do these males. The poor and many persons in Third World nations live in circumstances that make the obligatory adoption of such diets, where they are not already a matter of sheer necessity, even more risky.Traditional moral theorists (such as Evelyn Pluhar and Gary Varner whose essays appear in this issue) argue that those who are at risk would beexcused from a duty to attain the virtue associated with ethical vegan lifestyles. The routine excuse of nearly everyone in the world besides adult, middle-class males in industrialized countries suggests bias in the perspective from which traditional arguments for animal rights and (utilitarian) animal welfare are formulated.     

Obligations to animals are based on rights

Some feminist philosophers criticize the idea of human rights because, they allege, it encapsulates male bias; it is therefore misguided, in their view, to extend moral rights to non-human animals. I argue that the feminist criticism is misguided. Ideas are not biased in favour of men simply because they originate with men, nor are ideas themselves biased in favour of men because men have used them prejudicially. As for the position that women should abandon theories of rights and embrace an ethic that emphasizes care: women who made this choice would not so much liberate themselves from the patriarchy as they would conform to its representation of women as emotional, subjective and irrational. There is, then, no good reason to withhold ascribing rights to non-human animals, based on the criticisms of rights made by some feminists.Some of the material in the discussion of the feminist critique of rights originally appeared in my The Case for Animal Rights: A Decade's Passing inA Quarter Century of Value Inquiry: Presidential Addresses of the American Society of Value Inquiry, edited by Richard T. Hull, pp. 451–455. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994. These passages are reprinted with the permission of the editor and publisher, whose thoughtful co-operation is gratefully acknowledged.     

Deep Ethology, Animal Rights, and the Great Ape/Animal Project: Resisting Speciesism and Expanding the Community of Equals

In this essay I argue that the evolutionary and comparative study of nonhuman animal (hereafter animal) cognition in a wide range of taxa by cognitive ethologists can readily inform discussions about animal protection and animal rights. However, while it is clear that there is a link between animal cognitive abilities and animal pain and suffering, I agree with Jeremy Bentham who claimed long ago the real question does not deal with whether individuals can think or reason but rather with whether or not individuals can suffer. One of my major goals will be to make the case that the time has come to expand. The Great Ape Project (GAP) to The Great Ape/Animal Project (GA/AP) and to take seriously the moral status and rights of all animals by presupposing that all individuals should be admitted into the Community of Equals. I also argue that individuals count and that it is essential to avoid being speciesist cognitivists; it really doesn't matter whether ‘dogs ape’ or whether ‘apes dog’ when taking into account the worlds of different individual animals. Narrow-minded primatocentrism and speciesism must be resisted in our studies of animal cognition and animal protection and rights. Line-drawing into ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ species is a misleading speciesist practice that should be vigorously resisted because not only is line-drawing bad biology but also because it can have disastrous consequences for how animals are viewed and treated. Speciesist line-drawing also ignores within species individual differences. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Ethics and farm animal welfare

In this paper the authors argue that ethical considerations are relevant for evaluating animal production systems and that in consequence agrologists should seriously consider the arguments of animal welfare supporters. Furthermore, the authors point out the ethical basis for some (though not all) of the conclusions proposed by supporters of animal welfare. In consequence it is necessary to determine the nature of animal welfare and methods of evaluating the welfare of animals and to recognize when production systems fail to satisfy the needs of animals.