KILLING ON THE FRONTIER: MEAT EATING AS AN EXTREME CASE FOR CHRISTIAN ETHICS

This article argues that killing animals for food represents an extreme case within Christian moral thinking comparable to Karl Barth's Grenzfall argument against such violent acts as suicide, abortion, killing in self‐defense, capital punishment, and war. This position is in contrast to the view of many environmental philosophers who hold human hunting to be comparable to animal predation. It also disputes the language of substitutionary sacrifice prevalent in some Christian discussions of meat eating.     

Systematic Need Assessment: A Primer

The purpose of this article is to provide information on conducting program-related needs assessment. A step-by-step approach to designing need assessments is given. Attention is directed to the importance of prioritizing needs; a scaling procedure for ensuring prioritization is reviewed; and an example of a need assessment using the scaling technique is presented.     

Moral Tragedies, Supreme Emergencies and National-Defence

abstract Assume that some group, A, is under a serious threat from some other group, B. The only way group A can defend itself is by using lethal force against group B, but the standard conditions for using force in self‐defence are not met. Ought group A to avoid the use of force even if this means yielding to an aggressive, evil power? Most people would resist this conclusion, yet given the violation of essential conditions for self‐defence, this resistance is hard to justify. The aim of this paper is to point to an interesting yet unnoticed move made by some philosophers to find a way out of this problem, a move which relies on construing the situation at hand as a tragic dilemma. I show the attractiveness of this solution and argue that in the end it fails.