Weiye Loh's Library tagged Ethics →  View Popular, Search in Google

the edible vegetable begins with the sprouts and does not end until the leaves, vines, tubers, shoots and seeds have given their all.

If home cooks reconsidered what should go into the pot, and what into the trash, what would they find? What new flavors might emerge, what old techniques? Pre-industrial cooks, for whom thrift was a necessity as well as a virtue, once knew many ways to put the entire garden to work. Fried green tomatoes and pickled watermelon rind are examples of dishes that preserved a bumper crop before rot set in.

“Some people these days are so unfamiliar with vegetables in their natural state, they don’t even know that a broccoli stalk is just as edible as the florets,” said Julia Wylie, an organic farmer in Watsonville, Calif. The produce she grows at Mariquita Farm is served at Bay Area restaurants like Delfina, Zuni Cafe and Chez Panisse.

Food Ethics Waste

Opponents of gun control in the United States have a famous slogan that says, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." It states the obvious, that unless you inhabit the world of Terminator or the Transformers, humans shouldn't be blaming machines for their problems.

As obvious, though, is the fact that people can kill people is by failing to control the harm they can inflict with their machines. We already have speed limits, and the government has promised to step up enforcement. But, in this and all other cases of speed-related deaths, we seem to accept without question the right of manufacturers and merchants to sell fast cars that maybe just don't belong in a crowded city.

The comparison with guns is instructive. The standard defence of gun rights in the US is that guns aren't used only to commit violent crimes: they can also be used for hunting and self-defence. But then you don't need a military assault rifle like an AK-47 for such purposes, so these are more tightly regulated.

Capitalism Dream Merchants Technology Ethics Gun Car

Technology Ethics Philosophy Singularitarianism

You wouldn’t want to eat something capable of basic learning and memory, would you? But that’s the real problem: plants aren’t really capable of any of those things. Only a crackpot (or an editor of the International Journal of Parapsychology, it seems) would suggest that peas actually talk or learn or remember in the sense that a human, or even a puppy, talks and learns and remembers (and, to be fair, Marder seems to admit as much). Chemical signaling in plants may resemble those activities in some important ways, and so we can use the terms “talk” and “remember” and “learn” to draw analogies with familiar concepts. The danger in drawing such analogies, and the fallacy in Marder’s moral argument, lies in overextending those analogies.

Every analogy has a breaking point. Life is like a box of chocolates in that it’s far more expensive for some people when Valentine’s Day rolls around; however, life is unlikely to have originated in Kansas City, Missouri. Similarly, animal communication and plant chemical signaling have in common the basic properties of signaling systems; however, those similarities only extend so far, and necessarily end where the animal nervous system comes into play.

Vegan Plants Food Ethics

Cochineal has been used by humans for hundreds of years, and provides an important source of cash for a lot of rural Central and South American people.  There is some evidence the culture and sale of cochineal leads to more independence and higher female literacy in Mexico.  It's entirely consistent with Starbucks' policy to sustainably source their products to use a natural product like cochineal.

There is a change.org petition condemming Starbucks for using insect dyes; I'm tempted to start one to praise them for it!  The market for cochineal has been declining steadily, as more Western people discover what it is and freak the fuck out about insects in their food. That means less income traveling to our southern neighbors in the Americas.

I am a bit puzzled that people who willingly eat something called a Soy Strawberry Frappuccino, or [*shudder*] a Starbucks "Red Velvet Whoopie Moon Pie", are concerned about a tiny amount of insect extract. The reality is that anytime you eat processed food–including coffee and chocolate–you ARE eating insects. They may not be on the label, but parts of them are in there. 

Food Insect Vegan Ethics Starbucks

a pea plant subjected to drought conditions communicated its stress to other such plants, with which it shared its soil. In other words, through the roots, it relayed to its neighbors the biochemical message about the onset of drought, prompting them to react as though they, too, were in a similar predicament.

Curiously, having received the signal, plants not directly affected by this particular environmental stress factor were better able to withstand adverse conditions when they actually occurred. This means that the recipients of biochemical communication could draw on their “memories” — information stored at the cellular level — to activate appropriate defenses and adaptive responses when the need arose.

Plants Ethics Food Communications Diet

John Stuart Mill's Harm Principle seems to be tacitly in place in Western societies, when we allow others to harm themselves through personally chosen activities: from smoking to rock-climbing. As Mill noted: “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” When it comes to Mr Nicklinson’s case, we have a strange inconsistency: our principle that allows smokers to destroy their lungs disappears when it comes to the idea of ending the life we’ve otherwise allowed to be harmed. We allow a person to slowly or quickly destroy his life, but we don’t allow him to end it – even when the choice is determined by that same person.

Non-Maleficence Ethics Harm Euthanasia

Technology tends to make people optimistic. But are the scientists being realistic about people without the mathematical, scientific and engineering skills, that are highly valued and compensated in today’s economy? What happens to people without those skills?

If I were a worker in Amazon’s warehouses and could eventually be given a pink slip and replaced by an orange robot, I don’t think I would be so cheerful about this new work force.

Robots Amazon Technology Manufacturing Work Productivity Economy Luddite Ethics

This paper focuses on Information Warfare—the warfare characterised by the use of information and communication technologies. This is a fast growing phenomenon, which poses a number of issues ranging from the military use of such technologies to its political and ethical implications. The paper presents a conceptual analysis of this phenomenon with the goal of investigating its nature. Such an analysis is deemed to be necessary in order to lay the groundwork for future investigations into this topic, addressing the ethical problems engendered by this kind of warfare. The conceptual analysis is developed in three parts. First, it delineates the relation between Information Warfare and the Information revolution. It then focuses attention on the effects that the diffusion of this phenomenon has on the concepts of war. On the basis of this analysis, a definition of Information Warfare is provided as a phenomenon not necessarily sanguinary and violent, and rather transversal concerning the environment in which it is waged, the way it is waged and the ontological and social status of its agents. The paper concludes by taking into consideration the Just War Theory and the problems arising from its application to the case of Information Warfare.

War Technology Ethics Information New Media Traditional Media

From state-sponsored cyber attacks to autonomous robotic weapons, twenty-first century war is increasingly disembodied. Our wars are being fought in the ether and by machines. And yet our ethics of war are stuck in the pre-digital age. 

We're used to thinking of war as a physical phenomenon, as an outbreak of destructive violence that takes place in the physical world. Bullets fly, bombs explode, tanks roll, people collapse. Despite the tremendous changes in the technology of warfare, it remained a contest of human bodies. But as the drone wars have shown, that's no longer true, at least for one side of the battle.

War Technology Ethics Information New Media Traditional Media

Being religious doesn’t mean that you stop thinking. In fact if you are serious about it, like everything else in life, it demands a high level of self awareness and an open mind. You can not check your brain at the door if you are going to be effective at living out your faith, not if you intend your life to be a visible and compelling argument for the value of your religion.

Religion Knowledge Ethics Technology

Is a person’s weight his or her own business? Should we simply become more accepting of diverse body shapes? I don’t think so. Obesity is an ethical issue, because an increase in weight by some imposes costs on others.

I am writing this at an airport. A slight Asian woman has checked in with, I would guess, about 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of suitcases and boxes. She pays extra for exceeding the weight allowance. A man who must weigh at least 40 kilos more than she does, but whose baggage is under the limit, pays nothing. Yet, in terms of the airplane’s fuel consumption, it is all the same whether the extra weight is baggage or body fat.

Fat Politics Obesity Ethics

In this three-part interview, the illustrious Irish philosopher Richard Kearney explores the human experiences of evil. Part I of the interview considers theodicy and human responsibility for evil by contrasting Gnostic understandings of cosmological evil to St. Augustine’s understanding of evil as the privation of the good. During the course of this conversation, Kearney characterizes the human imagination as a creative capacity that can be turned to both good and evil purposes, and he urges us to develop “an ethical imagination responsive to the demands of the other.”

Ethics Evil Imagination

distinction between treatment and exploitation, I suspect, is also at the root of some differences among vegetarians themselves: vegans, for instance, make the argument that eating eggs and dairy products is unethical on the grounds that they are derived by exploiting animals. Presumably, ovo-lacto-vegetarians do not find this argument entirely convincing. Indeed, the latter seem to be drawing the line at treatment, not use: they will eat cheese, milk and eggs as long as the animals are not subjected to artificial hormonal treatments and are given a reasonably healthy diet and life style (e.g., free ranging chicken and cows).

The treatment-exploitation divide, then, also helps us make sense of why some vegetarians think it is okay to use, say, horses for races, or a range of animals for transportation of people or goods. They may see these activities as relatively benign as long as the animals are well treated, as each party (again, asymmetrically) gets something out of the symbiosis. For instance, horse racing may be acceptable on the condition that the horses are well taken care of, while a rodeo is could well be unacceptable because the animals are usually abused before and during the performance. (I do admit that there are plenty of grey areas here, but I think the general picture holds.)

Exploitation Treatment Animal Animal Rights Autonomy Ethics Diet Food

Secrecy is a kind of dead weight on sound and accountable government, in much the same way that excessive and irresponsibly incurred public debt is a dead weight on the effective functioning of our market economies. Secrecy should be cut back to a minimum.

Government Secrecy Censorship Open Government Open Information Information Divide Wikileaks Ethics

Scientists in the Netherlands hoping to create a more efficient alternative to rearing animals have grown small pieces of beef muscle in a laboratory.

These strips will be mixed with blood and artificially grown fat to produce a hamburger by the autumn.

The stem cells in this particular experiment were harvested from by-products of slaughtered animals but in the future, scientists say, they could be taken from a live animal through biopsy.

One usually assumes the main motivation for vegetarianism - aside from those who practise for religious reasons - is about the welfare of animals. The typical vegetarian forswears meat because animals are killed to get it.

So if the meat does not come from dead animals would there be an ethical problem in eating it if it one day lands on supermarket shelves?

Vegetarianism Food Stem Cells Ethics Morality

three challenges faced by environmental philosophy which have emerged from recent debates. The first is the struggle to overcome an anthropocentric view of nature – the view which sees all of nature as serving human interests, and overlooks what has been called the ‘intrinsic value’ of nature. The second challenge is the question of how to define the place of humans in nature; are we to be regarded as equal to other natural beings, with no special privileges or rights, or do we have a higher role in shaping and managing nature? The final challenge is saying on what basis we should assign moral status, or what is sometimes called moral considerability, to animals and natural objects.

Environment Philosophy Sustainability Ethics

Ethics is a human invention. It sprung not from the will of a divine commander, nor coalesced from pure reason, but was a cultural technology concocted by our distant ancestors to solve the problems inherent in social living.

But somewhere between its invention and today, ethics has become warped. We allowed the original function of ethics to be forgotten. Instead we took the presumed commands of a divine will or the abstract strictures of pure reason to be the roots of ethics, and constructed distorted moral systems in their spirit, forgetting the core purpose of ethics.

Today, we ought to return to the fundamental questions of how to solve the problems of social living, including problems both familiar and remote to our ancestors. We ought to propose new solutions that directly address these problems, that are unburdened by fallacious justificatory frameworks or the maladapted moralities of our distant past.

Ethics Will God

The outing of the researcher who exposed the Heartland Institute's efforts to discredit climate change has thrown the scientific community into tumult, with fierce debates raging on Tuesday over whether to brand his actions heroic, or misguided.

Peter Gleick, a water scientist and president of the Pacific Institute, admitted in a blogpost on Monday night to using a false name to dupe the thinktank into sending him confidential board materials, which he then forwarded to campaigners and journalists.

He apologised for the deception – which he described as "a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics" – but added in the blog post published at the Huffington Post: "My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts – often anonymous, well-funded and co-ordinated – to attack climate science."

Gleick's admission – nearly a week after Heartland's financial plans and donors list was put online – set off a fierce online debate about whether his actions made him a hero or a villain, and whether he had helped or set back the cause of climate change.

Heartland Institute Climate Science Politics Hacking Climate Change Ethics

if practical ethics should take empirical uncertainty into account, surely it should take moral uncertainty into account as well.  In many situations, we don’t know all the moral facts.  I think it is fair to say, for example, that we don’t currently know exactly how to weigh the interests of future generations against the interests of current generations.  But this issue is just as relevant to the question of how one ought to act in response to climate change as is the issue of expected temperature rise.  If the ethics of climate change offers advice about how best to act given empirical uncertainty concerning global temperature rise, it should also offer advice about how best to act, given uncertainty concerning the value of future generations.

Ethics Facts Science Uncertainty