2012/07/30 by Gordon M. Burghardt · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Political and Economic history of UK and US
paper · pdf · doi:10.15368/bts.2013v16n1.6
openalex publication_date 2012/07/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/20
This commentary acknowledges the fine contribution Palmer makes to distinguishing between the contextualist and consequentialist approaches to understanding human obligations to suffering in animals in 'natural' settings, and uses her examples to reflect on larger issues in evaluating how our species treats and responds to nature. Overall, this genre of philosophical reflection seems to have made little breakthrough conceptual progress in recent decades. Is this due to an increasingly 'scholastic' approach to the problems of animal sentience, rights, ethics, and obligations? I argue that a major problem may be the distinction, going back to Pascal if not earlier, between evaluation and decision making using logic and reason and the much more common and accessible ancient process of making immediate and intuitive evaluations and decisions based, in part, on emotional and affective processes entrenched in human nature. If this is true, and if we are concerned about the survival of wildlife on a rapidly changing planet, then the problem for philosophers (and legal systems) may be to move beyond purely 'rational' philosophical analysis and to incorporate the kind of moral and ethical evaluation processes that most human beings actually use, while also avoiding uncritical anthropocentric biases to which both philosophical and legal scholars are not immune.