Posted in Animals, Top Ten Tuesday on February 6, 2008 | 3 Comments »
The Top Ten Tuesday is another weekly feature that I’m trying out. Since it’s already Wednesday it’s obvious that such things are limited by my laziness. That also means that it will probably be quite rare to have a list with as many as ten things on it. Today is an exception. Here are ten [...]
Posted in Animals, Ethics, Philosophy on November 11, 2007 | No Comments »
The Principle of the Equal Consideration of Interests is the foundation of Singer’s moral theory and he makes it clear that to have interests requires consciousness. This poses the rather tricky question ‘How do we detect consciousness in animals?’. His arguments in favour of the irreplaceability of persons also poses a question: ‘What makes self-conscious [...]
Posted in Animals, Ethics, Philosophy on October 27, 2007 | No Comments »
From this foundation, much of Singer’s moral reasoning follows standard utilitarianism. However, he departs from this with his notion of replaceability. Utilitarianism holds that it is right to maximise pleasure, or the satisfaction of desires, regardless of the content of these pleasures. Thus it does not matter to the utilitarian whether I derive my pleasure [...]
Posted in Animals, Ethics, Philosophy on October 24, 2007 | No Comments »
Like many ethicists, Singer takes it as axiomatic that ethics requires one to justify one’s actions, not merely in terms of self-interest, but from a universal standpoint. He points to examples such as the Golden Rule and the Categorical Imperative to substantiate this claim. From here, he goes on to claim that:
Posted in Animals, Ethics, Philosophy on October 21, 2007 | No Comments »
If you were to take a sample of the books written on ethics in the last century and sort them into two piles, one containing books published prior to 1970, the other containing those published after, almost all of the books dealing with animals would be in the second pile. One ethicist who helped bring [...]
Posted in Animals, Ethics on September 27, 2007 | No Comments »
Here is another one of my essays. It’s a lot shorter than the utilitarianism one and I wrote it last year in a psychology class. My ideas have changed a bit since then but here it is in its original form.
Posted in Animals, Evolution, Personal Minutiae on August 5, 2007 | No Comments »
The good thing about having a zoo membership is that I can go there between lectures and not have to worry about the expense. It’s not a bad zoo, certainly the only one I know of that has both a bear-cat and cat-bears. I went twice this week, to renew my membership and to meet [...]
Posted in Animals, Evolution, Minds and Brains, Science News on July 20, 2007 | No Comments »
I often trawl science blogs and news sites when I’m on the web so here’s some of the science news I’ve collected. Since I’m going to study animal behaviour, I’ve started with three stories from the animal world involving psychotic rats, interspecies ape-love and duck genitalia.
