Author: Carlo Alvaro Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1498590020 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 215
Book Description
Millions of animals are brought into existence and raised for food every year. This has generated three serious problems: first, intensive animal farming is one of the leading causes of environmental degradation. Farming livestock contributes to a large amount of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere each year; it contributes to land and water degradation, biodiversity loss, coral reef degeneration, and deforestation. Second, raising animals for food causes millions of animals to suffer and be killed. And third, consumption of meat and animal products is linked with heart disease, diabetes, and various cancers. Consequently, a global change in the way that animals are treated is imperative. Many moral philosophers have suggested a move toward vegetarianism. But vegetarianism, unfortunately, still relies on raising animals for food, and does not avoid the deleterious effects of animal products on human health. The right solution is ethical veganism, which is the avoidance of all animal products and by-products. Some moral philosophers have framed ethical veganism in terms of animals having the same fundamental rights as humans, a notion that is highly controversial. In any case, the view that animals have rights is not capable of generating the moral duty to embrace ethical veganism. The answer is to adopt a virtue-oriented approach to the treatment of animals because the acquisition of virtues, such as compassion, magnanimity, temperance, and fairness enable people to see that raising and using animals for food is unfair, callous, and self-indulgent.
Author: Carlo Alvaro Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000037940 Category : Health & Fitness Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
Human beings are getting fatter and sicker. As we question what we eat and why we eat it, this book argues that living well involves consuming a raw vegan diet. With eating healthfully and eating ethically being simpler said than done, this book argues that the best solution to health, environmental, and ethical problems concerning animals is raw veganism—the human diet. The human diet is what humans are naturally designed to eat, and that is, a raw vegan diet of fruit, tender leafy greens, and occasionally nuts and seeds. While veganism raises challenging questions over the ethics of consuming animal products, while also considering the environmental impact of the agriculture industry, raw veganism goes a step further and argues that consuming cooked food is also detrimental to our health and the environment. Cooking foods allows us to eat food that is not otherwise fit for human consumption and in an age that promotes eating foods in ‘moderation’ and having ‘balanced’ diets, this raises the question of why we are eating foods that should only be consumed in moderation at all, as moderation clearly implies they aren’t good for us. In addition, from an environmental perspective, the use of stoves, ovens and microwaves for cooking contributes significantly to energy consumption and cooking in general generates excessive waste of food and resources. Thus, this book maintains that living well and living a noble life, that is, good physical and moral health, requires consuming a raw vegan diet. Exploring the scientific and philosophical aspects of raw veganism, this novel book is essential reading for all interested in promoting ethical, healthful, and sustainable diets.
Author: Deirdre Nansen Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226556670 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 637
Book Description
For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations. High Noon, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. The Bourgeois Virtues is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner.
Author: Paul B. Thompson Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199391696 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
Covering diet and health issues, livestock welfare, world hunger, food justice, environmental ethics, green revolution technology and GMOs in this concise but comprehensive study, Paul B. Thompson shows how food can be a nexus for integrating larger social issues in social inequality, scientific reductionism and the eclipse of morality.
Author: Michael Huemer Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429638000 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 118
Book Description
After lives filled with deep suffering, 74 billion animals are slaughtered worldwide every year on factory farms. Is it wrong to buy the products of this industry? In this book, two college students – a meat-eater and an ethical vegetarian – discuss this question in a series of dialogues conducted over four days. The issues they cover include: how intelligence affects the badness of pain, whether consumers are responsible for the practices of an industry, how individual choices affect an industry, whether farm animals are better off living on factory farms than not existing at all, whether meat-eating is natural, whether morality protects those who cannot understand morality, whether morality protects those who are not members of society, whether humans alone possess souls, whether different creatures have different degrees of consciousness, why extreme animal welfare positions "sound crazy," and the role of empathy in moral judgment. The two students go on to discuss the vegan life, why people who accept the arguments in favor of veganism often fail to change their behavior, and how vegans should interact with non-vegans. A foreword, by Peter Singer, introduces and provides context for the dialogues, and a final annotated bibliography offers a list of sources related to the discussion. It offers abstracts of the most important books and articles related to the ethics of vegetarianism and veganism. Key Features: Thoroughly reviews the common arguments on both sides of the debate. Dialogue format provides the most engaging way of introducing the issues. Written in clear, conversational prose for a popular audience. Offers new insights into the psychology of our dietary choices and our responsibility for influencing others.
Author: Carlo Alvaro Publisher: ISBN: 9781680532456 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
It is often claimed that belief in God is based on faith, while non-belief is grounded in rationality. This claim is inaccurate. Moral philosopher Carlo Alvaro takes the reader through his philosophical journey-a journey taken with the absolute absence of faith. Through reasoning alone, and with an objective assessment of the classical theistic arguments, Deism takes the reader from disbelief to a particular version of deism. Deism discusses such arguments as the Kalam Cosmological, the asymmetry against the evil-god challenge, the anthropic principle, and the moral. Such arguments lead to the undeniable conclusion that there exists a timeless, space-less, wholly good, and infinitely powerful being endowed with freedom of the will, who brought the universe into existence a finite time ago. An objective appraisal of such arguments leads to the conclusions that atheism is an irrational philosophical position, that God does not interact with humans, at least not during our physical existence on earth, and that God is the best explanation of the objectivity of moral value and duty.
Author: Mark Rowlands Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190846046 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
Can animals be persons? To this question, scientific and philosophical consensus has taken the form of a resounding, 'No!' In this book, Mark Rowlands disagrees. Not only can animals be persons, many of them probably are. Taking, as his starting point, John Locke's classic definition of a person, as "a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself the same thinking thing, in different times and places," Rowlands argues that many animals can satisfy all of these conditions. A person is an individual in which four features coalesce: consciousness, rationality, self-awareness and other-awareness, and many animals are such individuals. Consciousness--something that is like to have an experience--is widely distributed through the animal kingdom. Many animals are capable of both causal and logical reasoning. Many animals are also self-aware, since a form of self-awareness is essentially built into the possession of conscious experience. And some animals are capable of a kind of awareness of the minds of others, quite independently of whether they possess a theory of mind. This is not just a book about animals, however. As well as being fascinating in their own right, animals, as Claude Levi-Strauss once put it, are "good to think." In this seamless interweaving of the empirical study of animal minds with philosophy and its history, this book makes a powerful case for the idea that reflection on animals allows us to better understand each of these four pillars of personhood, and so illuminates what means for any individual--animal or human--to be conscious, rational, self- and other-aware.
Author: Bob Torres Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com ISBN: 1458770877 Category : Self-Help Languages : en Pages : 330
Book Description
In this informative and practical guide, two seasoned vegans offer tips and advice for thriving without animal by-products. Sometimes funny and irreverent, yet always aware of its serious message, this resource for being vegan in a world that doesn’t always understand or have sympathy for the lifestyle illustrates how to: go vegan in three weeks or less by employing a "cold tofu method"; convince family, friends, and others that there is no such thing as a vegan cult; and survive restaurants, grocery stores, and meals with omnivores.
Author: Christopher Schlottmann Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317626133 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 401
Book Description
Food, Animals, and the Environment: An Ethical Approach examines some of the main impacts that agriculture has on humans, nonhumans, and the environment, as well as some of the main questions that these impacts raise for the ethics of food production, consumption, and activism. Agriculture is having a lasting effect on this planet. Some forms of agriculture are especially harmful. For example, industrial animal agriculture kills 100+ billion animals per year; consumes vast amounts of land, water, and energy; and produces vast amounts of waste, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. Other forms, such as local, organic, and plant-based food, have many benefits, but they also have many costs, especially at scale. These impacts raise difficult ethical questions. What do we owe animals, plants, species, and ecosystems? What do we owe people in other nations and future generations? What are the ethics of risk, uncertainty, and collective harm? What is the meaning and value of natural food in a world reshaped by human activity? What are the ethics of supporting harmful industries when less harmful alternatives are available? What are the ethics of resisting harmful industries through activism, advocacy, and philanthropy? The discussion ranges over cutting-edge topics such as effective altruism, abolition and regulation, revolution and reform, individual and structural change, single-issue and multi-issue activism, and legal and illegal activism. This unique and accessible text is ideal for teachers, students, and anyone else interested in serious examination of one of the most complex and important moral problems of our time.
Author: Carlo Alvaro
Author: Carlo Alvaro
Author: Deirdre Nansen
Author: Paul B. Thompson
Author: Michael Huemer
Author: Carlo Alvaro
Author: Mark Rowlands
Author: Bob Torres
Author: Carol J. Adams
Author: Christopher Schlottmann