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Touchstone: Animal Ethics and Desire’s Role in Ethics

President Trump’s expressed attitudes and actions towards immigrants revolt me, and viscerally offend my deepest convictions abut American values. (As do many other of his attitudes and actions.) Yet when I encounter someone else who shares my feelings about Trump, I am brought back to my senses. For chances are very high that that someone else who is so disgusted with Trump is a meat-eater, given that so few people in this country are not, and furthermore feels little if any compunction about it, or, even if she does, has no intention whatever of ceasing to eat animals, not to mention diary, eggs, and honey. So I ask myself: How can moral feelings be taken seriously, or at least at face value? For if someone outraged by Trump’s behavior toward immigrants, or women, et al., can be relatively indifferent to the (in)human treatment of other animals – which is vastly more horrific to boot -- what does this say about the true basis of that outrage? Veganism has become my moral touchstone. ...
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Intrinsic Desire and Morality: Entomological Revelations

 Darwinism is all the rage among contemporary ethicists, and with good reason. Since no informed thinker can deny the centrality of natural selection to our development as the human beings we are, our values, like any of our other traits, must conform to the constraint of survival. In other words, however much we are by nature wedded to notions like justice and beauty and reason and curiosity and charity, the root cause must have to do with their furtherance of, or at least compatibility with, our survival under the conditions of our evolution on this planet. Yet on the face of it, our values often appear indifferent to and even in conflict with our survival. How could this be? What, after all, has rapture by a sunset, or the fervor to understand what happened before the Big Bang, or abhorrence at cruelty to other animals, etc. ad inf., to do with our individual or even collective advantage in the struggle for existence?           ...
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Veterinarian, Heal Thy Profession!

by Joel Marks Published in Philosophy Now no. 85 ( page 47 ), July/August 2011. A running theme in philosophy is the distinction between appearance and reality. Traditionally this has been given a metaphysical interpretation: The world as we know it is merely phenomenal or illusory. This serves as a justification for philosophy itself, which helps us to discern What Lies Beneath (or Behind or Wherever). While I do not spurn that endeavor, I have also found a more everyday or one might say ethical application of the idea that what we take for granted is not the way things actually are. A particularly telling example came to light for me just recently when a veterinarian colleague showed me the Veterinarian’s Oath he took upon entering the profession in the United States. I think if you were to ask a layperson what they think that Oath says, the spontaneous response would be, first, “Do no harm.” This was indeed my thought, so imagine my surprise to discover that neither these wor...
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Review of Larry Carbone's "What Animals Want"

by Joel Marks Published in Philosophy Now no. 85 ( pages 40-42 ), July/August 2011 What do animals want? Larry Carbone, a research laboratory animal veterinarian, makes no bones about it: They don’t want to be there! He writes, “If voluntary consent were our standard for animal research, the whole business would end – not because we cannot understand what the animals are telling us, but because we can” (p.179). How, then, does Carbone justify vivisection, and his own career? In a sense he doesn’t even try. The clue to his motivations, then, is to be found on the very first page of text, in the Acknowledgments: “Two people’s illness and death brought pain and sadness to my years of writing. My father, John Carbone, died of Alzheimer’s disease at the start of this project, while my friend Joe DelPonte passed away midway through. They gave me love through the years, while their illnesses taught me that, no, I cannot call for an abolition to animal research, no matter my oath as a ...
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