Animal Welfare Competing Conceptions and Their Ethical Implications
Members of the “animal welfare science community”, which includes both scientists and philosophers, have illegitimately appropriated the concept of animal welfare by claiming to have given a scientific account of it that is more objectively valid than the
- PDF / 1,219,622 Bytes
- 172 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 42 Downloads / 340 Views
Richard P. Haynes
Animal Welfare Competing Conceptions and Their Ethical Implications
Richard P. Haynes Department of Philosophy University of Florida Gainesville, FL USA
ISBN 978-1-4020-8618-2 (hardcover) e-ISBN 978-1-4020-8619-9 ISBN 978-90-481-8787-4 (softcover) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4020-8619-9 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2010924815 © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008, First softcover printing 2010 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
My interest in animal welfare as an academic topic developed during the decade that I was a member of the University of Florida Institutional Care and Use Committee (IACUC). As the usually lone dissenter to most protocols that came before the committee, I felt that I needed to develop a philosophy of animal care and use that I could appeal to in justifying my dissent. This led me to the idea of constructed consent, a notion often appealed to when adults have to make decisions for those incapable of making them. It occurred to me that if I thought the proposed use of an animal turned out to be a good deal for the animal, in my judgment, then I was willing to approve of it. I develop this notion further in Chapter 5 of this book. When the Committee was charged with developing a plan to promote the psychological well-being of the non-human primates that the University housed, I became fascinated with the difficulties that many academics faced in conceptualizing this notion and I began to think that their conceptualization was influenced by the disciplinary matrix within which they worked. This idea of a disciplinary ideology I learned from Bernard Rollin’s book The Unheeded Cry, and I am deeply indebted to him for it. This interest prompted me to apply for a grant from the Ethics and Value Studies branch of the National Science Foundation in 1993 to study this phenomenon. The grant enabled me to visit many primate centers and conduct interviews with primatologists. After a number of delays, due largely to APHIS’s putting the responsibility on a select committee, who did not publish their findings until 1998, my publication of the results of my study was delayed. Meanwhile, I began to expand my concern about disagreements and difficulties in conceptualizing psychological well-being to the broader topic of animal welfare, thinking that if “welfare” meant the same thing as “happiness,” then there should be no real disagreement between so-called welfarists and so-called liberationists, unless one really believed that using animals in research and for
Data Loading...
