Animal Ethics in the Age of Humans: Blurring boundaries in human-animal relationships

Bernice Bovenkerk · Jozef Keulartz

Sep 2016 · The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics Book 23 · Springer

About this ebook

This book provides reflection on the increasingly blurry boundaries that characterize the human-animal relationship. In the Anthropocene humans and animals have come closer together and this asks for rethinking old divisions. Firstly, new scientific insights and technological advances lead to a blurring of the boundaries between animals and humans. Secondly, our increasing influence on nature leads to a rethinking of the old distinction between individual animal ethics and collectivist environmental ethics. Thirdly, ongoing urbanization and destruction of animal habitats leads to a blurring between the categories of wild and domesticated animals. Finally, globalization and global climate change have led to the fragmentation of natural habitats, blurring the old distinction between in situ and ex situ conservation. In this book, researchers at the cutting edge of their fields systematically examine the broad field of human-animal relations, dealing with wild, liminal, and domestic animals, with conservation, and zoos, and with technologies such as biomimicry. This book is timely in that it explores the new directions in which our thinking about the human-animal relationship are developing. While the target audience primarily consists of animal studies scholars, coming from a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, sociology, psychology, ethology, literature, and film studies, many of the topics that are discussed have relevance beyond a purely theoretical one; as such the book also aims to inspire for example biologists, conservationists, and zoo keepers to reflect on their relationship with animals.

About the author

Dr. Bernice Bovenkerk is assistant professor at the Philosophy Group at Wageningen University. Previously she was post-doc and lecturer at the Ethics Institute at Utrecht University. She received her PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, on a dissertation titled The Biotechnology Debate. Democracy in the face of intractable disagreement (which she published with Springer). She received her Master’s title at the University of Amsterdam on a thesis titled Pluralism in Environmental Ethics. Bernice Bovenkerk is currently working on an Innovative Research Grant about the ethics of animal domestication. She has recently carried out research about the moral status and welfare of fish. Her research interests concern issues in animal and environmental ethics and political philosophy. Current topics are the moral status of animals and other natural entities, climate ethics, and deliberative democracy.

Jozef Keulartz is emeritus Professor of Environmental Philosophy at the Radboud University Nijmegen, and senior researcher Applied Philosophy at Wageningen University and Research Centre. He has published extensively in different areas of science and technology studies, social and political philosophy, bioethics, environmental ethics and nature policy. His books include Die verkehrte Welt des Jürgen Habermas [The Topsy-Turvy World of Jürgen Habermas, 1995], Van bestraffing naar behandeling [From Punishment to Treatment, 1996, 4rd ed], Struggle for Nature – A Critique of Radical Ecology (1998), and Werken aan de grens – een pragmatische visie op natuur en milieu [Boundary-Work: A Pragmatist View on Nature and Environment, 2005]. He is editor of Wilhelm Dilthey: Kritiek van de historische rede [Wilhelm Dilthey: Critique of Historical Reason, 1994] and co-editor of Foucault herdenken [In Memory of Foucault, 1995], Museum Aarde [Museum Earth, 1997], Pragmatist Ethics for a Technological Culture (Kluwer, 2002), Legitimacy in European Nature Conservation Policy (Springer, 2008), New Visions of Nature (Springer, 2009), Environmental Aesthetics. Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground (Fordham University Press, 2013), and Old World and New World Perspectives in Environmental Philosophy (Springer, 2014).