Muslims and Meat‐Eating

Religious thinking, including among Muslims, connects food and sex, as well as women and animals; both food practices and gender norms are significant for communal identity and boundary construction. Female bodies (properly covered) and animal bodies (properly slaughtered) serve as potent signifiers of Muslim identity, as patriarchal thought sustains the hierarchical cosmologies that affirm male dominance in family and society and allow humans to view animals as legitimately subject to human violence. I argue that Muslims in the industrialized West—especially those concerned with gender justice—ought to be vegetarians and that feminist ethics provides underutilized resources for Muslim thinking about ethics generally and food ethics in particular. Much contemporary Muslim thought about meat is at least as concerned with demonstrating the primacy of “Islamic” identity as with general questions about the formation of virtuous subjects and the development of good societies. This defensive concern with religious authenticity poses a stumbling block to richer thinking. Engagement with non‐Islamic (though not “un‐Islamic”) ethics provides a model for productive dialogue and engagement among parties who disagree about basic presumptions but agree on desirable outcomes, including the development of individuals' ethical sensibilities and the construction of societies conducive to human flourishing.     

Measurement of Cruelty in Children: The Cruelty to Animals Inventory

Cruelty to animals may be a particularly pernicious aspect of problematic child development. Progress in understanding the development of the problem is limited due to the complex nature of cruelty as a construct, and limitations with current assessment measures. The Children and Animals Inventory (CAI) was developed as a brief self- and parent-report measure of F. R. Ascione's (1993) 9 parameters of cruelty. The CAI emerged as a reliable, stable, and readily utilized measure of cruelty using parent and child reports. Children (especially the older children) reported higher rates of cruelty than their parents and boys reported more cruelty than girls. Self- and parent-reports showed good convergence with independent observations of cruelty versus nurturance during free interactions with domestic animals. The results indicate that cruelty to animals can be reliably measured using brief child and parent report measures.     

EXPLORING OLD AND NEW PATHS IN THEODICY

Christopher Southgate's work raises questions about God, evolution, and suffering. In this article, I begin by contributing an alternative to Southgate's “only way” argument and by offering a third option in speculations about the nature of nonhuman animals in heaven. The second half of the article starts with Southgate's approach of evolutionary theodicy as “an adventure in theology” and proposes a new path branching off his work. “Compassionate theodicy” is a reworking of the method and audience of traditional theodicy in the hope that it might become something that could offer theological resources to those who suffer.     

Human and Animal Subjects of Research: The Moral Significance of Respect versus Welfare

Human beings with diminished decision-making capacities are usually thought to require greater protections from the potential harms of research than fully autonomous persons. Animal subjects of research receive lesser protections than any human beings regardless of decision-making capacity. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely animals’ lack of some characteristic human capacities that is commonly invoked to justify using them for human purposes. In other words, for humans lesser capacities correspond to greater protections but for animals the opposite is true. Without explicit justification, it is not clear why or whether this should be the case. Ethics regulations guiding human subject research include principles such as respect for persons—and related duties—that are required as a matter of justice while regulations guiding animal subject research attend only to highly circumscribed considerations of welfare. Further, the regulations guiding research on animals discount any consideration of animal welfare relative to comparable human welfare. This paper explores two of the most promising justifications for these differences␣between the two sets of regulations. The first potential justification points to lesser moral status for animals on the basis of their lesser capacities. The second potential justification relies on a claim about the permissibility of moral partiality as␣found in common morality. While neither potential justification is sufficient to justify the regulatory difference as it stands, there is possible common ground between supporters of some regulatory difference and those rejecting the current difference.     

Circles of Solicitude and Concern

Abstract

Heidegger distinguishes between concern for things and solicitude for other Dasein. As Dasein is already being‐in‐the‐world and being‐with from the start, there is no need to define what another Dasein is to recognize it. In this paper it is argued that Dasein is thrown into circles of care, where the distinction between solicitude and concern is given. Although this undermines any attempts to regard a comatose patient as non‐Dasein, it raises questions about Dasein’s relations with animals. It is suggested that Dasein’s relations with animals could be captured by inserting another circle, for which the German word versorgen might be suitable.     

论先秦儒家道德教育的特点

先秦儒家教育虽然包括道德教育、文化知识的传授和技能的培养等三方面的内容,但重视道德教育是其重点。先秦儒家重视道德教育具有三大特点：一是以人禽之辨为基础,二是以道德教育为根本,三是能够达到提高道德修养和改变人的气质的良好效果。它虽距今2000多年,但仍对当代教育有一定的启发意义。     

Animal-Assisted Therapy with Farm Animals for Persons with Psychiatric Disorders: Effects on Anxiety and Depression,a Randomized Controlled Trial

This study examined the effects of Animal-Assisted Therapy with farm animals during a 12 weeks' intervention on anxiety and depression among psychiatric patients by using a randomized controlled trial with a follow-up investigation at 6 months. Ninety adult patients were included, with 41 completers in the treatment group and 28 in the control group. Anxiety measured using Spielberger State Anxiety Inventory did not decrease significantly during the intervention for the treatment group but was significantly lower at follow-up compared with baseline (p = 0.002) and with the end of the intervention (p = 0.004). There was no significant change for the control group. Depression measured using Beck Depression Inventory was significantly lower at follow-up compared with baseline for both groups, but there were no significant differences between the groups.     

Symbolic Representation by Pigeons

The capacity for symbolic representation is a prerequisite for the development of human language because words, the basic units of language, are symbols that represent things. But symbolic representation may also serve a nonlinguistic role of organizing events into categories having the same meaning, and such a capacity could have considerable survival value for many species. In a number of experiments, my co-workers and I have found that pigeons that are trained to treat two different stimuli similarly also learn that those stimuli are commonly represented and, thus, that they have the same meaning. We have demonstrated evidence for such common representations in a number of ways, but perhaps the most convincing is when pigeons learn a new association involving one of the presumed commonly represented stimuli, and without further training demonstrate that they have learned a similar association involving the other stimulus. Furthermore, we have found that when pigeons are trained to treat two stimuli similarly, one of those stimuli is represented in terms of the other. These results have implications not only for the generality of cognitive processes across species, but also for the generality of symbolic representation beyond language use.     

NAMING THE HUMAN ANIMAL: GENESIS 1–3 AND OTHER ANIMALS IN HUMAN BECOMING

Recently the paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman has proposed what she calls the animal connection as the human trait that connects all other traits. Theologians and biblical scholars have proposed many relational, functional, and ontological interpretations of the image of God in humans and human nature, but have generally not included a connection with animals. Genesis 1–3, however, weaves human and animal creation in a variety of ways, and Adam's naming of other species implies they are understood as family or kin. Thus Genesis 1–3 understands a relationship with other animals as integral to human becoming and uses family or kinship as a root metaphor for human–animal relations.