The Normative Animal?

The Normative Animal? PDF Author: Neil Roughley
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190846461
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
An interdisciplinary group of scholars investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals. They do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms--social, moral, and linguistic--and asking whether they might be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind.

The Normative Animal?

The Normative Animal? PDF Author: Neil Roughley
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190846461
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book Here

Book Description
An interdisciplinary group of scholars investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals. They do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms--social, moral, and linguistic--and asking whether they might be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind.

The Normative Animal?

The Normative Animal? PDF Author: Neil Roughley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019084647X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
It is often claimed that humans are rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral creatures. What these characterizations may all have in common is the more fundamental claim that humans are normative animals, in the sense that they are creatures whose lives are structured at a fundamental level by their relationships to norms. The various capacities singled out by discussion of rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral animals might then all essentially involve an orientation to obligations, permissions and prohibitions. And, if this is so, then perhaps it is a basic susceptibility, or proclivity to normative or deontic regulation of thought and behavior that enables humans to develop the various specific features of their life form. This volume of new essays investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals in this sense. The contributors do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms-social, moral, and linguistic-and asking whether they might all be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind. These questions are posed by philosophers, primatologists, behavioral biologists, psychologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists, who have collaborated on this topic for many years. The contributors are committed to the idea that understanding normativity is a two-way process, involving a close interaction between conceptual clarification and empirical research.

The Single-Minded Animal

The Single-Minded Animal PDF Author: Preston Stovall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000434001
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
This book provides an account of discursive or reason-governed cognition, by synthesizing research in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and evolutionary anthropology. Using the grasp of a natural language as a model for the autonomous or self-governed rationality of discursive cognition, the author uses a semantics for individual intentions, shared intentions, and normative attitudes as a framework for understanding what it is to be a rational animal. This semantics interprets claims about shared intentions and claims about what people ought and may do as the expression of plans of action that involve taking the points of view of other people within a community. This has important consequences for our understanding of both the natural basis and the social relevance of intentional and normative mental states. In order to distinguish the strong and weak modal force, which characterizes normativity but not shared intentionality, the author argues that a notion of single-minded practical cognition is necessary. This account of single-mindedness is then used to shed light on the autonomy or self-government characteristic of discursive cognition, as manifest in a linguistic community whose members are able to adopt the standpoints of others. Drawing together research in philosophy and the related sciences, the formal account of the semantic content of the claims we use to give expression to shared intentional and normative mental states integrates well with research in cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, and social psychology concerning the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of shared intentionality and norm psychology in human beings and other primates. The Single-Minded Animal will appeal to researchers and advanced students working on shared intentionality, normativity, rationality, cognitive science, social and developmental psychology, and evolutionary anthropology.

Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition

Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition PDF Author: Gary E. Varner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199758786
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The book also draws heavily on empirical research on consciousness and cognition in non-human animals as a way of approaching the question of which animals, if any, are "persons," or at least "near-persons".

How to Count Animals, more or less

How to Count Animals, more or less PDF Author: Shelly Kagan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192565176
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Most people agree that animals count morally, but how exactly should we take animals into account? A prominent stance in contemporary ethical discussions is that animals have the same moral status that people do, and so in moral deliberation the similar interests of animals and people should be given the very same consideration. In How to Count Animals, more or less, Shelly Kagan sets out and defends a hierarchical approach in which people count more than animals do and some animals count more than others. For the most part, moral theories have not been developed in such a way as to take account of differences in status. By arguing for a hierarchical account of morality - and exploring what status sensitive principles might look like - Kagan reveals just how much work needs to be done to arrive at an adequate view of our duties toward animals, and of morality more generally.

The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics

The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics PDF Author: Tom L. Beauchamp
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195371968
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 997

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Book Description
This text is designed to capture the nature of the questions as they stand today and to propose solutions to many of the major problems in the ethics of how we use animals.

Normative Externalism

Normative Externalism PDF Author: Brian Weatherson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192576887
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Normative Externalism argues that it is not important that people live up to their own principles. What matters, in both ethics and epistemology, is that they live up to the correct principles: that they do the right thing, and that they believe rationally. This stance, that what matters are the correct principles, not one's own principles, has implications across ethics and epistemology. In ethics, it undermines the ideas that moral uncertainty should be treated just like factual uncertainty, that moral ignorance frequently excuses moral wrongdoing, and that hypocrisy is a vice. In epistemology, it suggests we need new treatments of higher-order evidence, and of peer disagreement, and of circular reasoning, and the book suggests new approaches to each of these problems. Although the debates in ethics and in epistemology are often conducted separately, putting them in one place helps bring out their common themes. One common theme is that the view that one should live up to one's own principles looks less attractive when people have terrible principles, or when following their own principles would lead to riskier or more aggressive action than the correct principles. Another common theme is that asking people to live up to their principles leads to regresses. It can be hard to know what action or belief complies with one's principles. And now we can ask, in such a case should a person do what they think their principles require, or what their principles actually require? Both answers lead to problems, and the best way to avoid these problems is to simply say people should follow the correct principles.

Subhuman

Subhuman PDF Author: T. J. Kasperbauer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190695811
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
How do we think about animals? How do we decide what they deserve and how we ought to treat them? Subhuman takes an interdisciplinary approach to these questions, drawing from research in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, law, history, sociology, economics, and anthropology. Subhuman argues that our attitudes to nonhuman animals, both positive and negative, largely arise from our need to compare ourselves to them.

Cognitive Kin, Moral Strangers? Linking Animal Cognition, Animal Ethics & Animal Welfare

Cognitive Kin, Moral Strangers? Linking Animal Cognition, Animal Ethics & Animal Welfare PDF Author: Judith Benz-Schwarzburg
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004415076
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
In Cognitive Kin, Moral Strangers?, Judith Benz-Schwarzburg reveals the scope and relevance of cognitive kinship between humans and non-human animals. She presents a wide range of empirical studies on culture, language and theory of mind in animals and then leads us to ask why such complex socio-cognitive abilities in animals matter. Her focus is on ethical theory as well as on the practical ways in which we use animals. Are great apes maybe better described as non-human persons? Should we really use dolphins as entertainers or therapists? Benz-Schwarzburg demonstrates how much we know already about animals’ capabilities and needs and how this knowledge should inform the ways in which we treat animals in captivity and in the wild.

The Animal Inside

The Animal Inside PDF Author: Geoffrey Dierckxsens
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783488220
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Much has been written about animals in applied ethics, environmental ethics, and animal rights. This book takes a new turn, offering an examination of the 'animal question' from a more fundamental, philosophical-anthropological perspective. The contributors in this important volume focus on how the animal has appeared and can be used in philosophical argumentation as a metaphor or reference point that helps us understand what is distinctively human and what is not. A recurring theme in the essays is the existence of a zone of ambiguity between animals and humans, which puts into question comfortable assumptions about the uniqueness and superiority of human nature. While the chapters straddle the boundaries of historical-philosophical and systematic, continental and analytic approaches, their thematic unity knits them together, presenting a rich, broad, and yet cohesive perspective. The first part of the book offers general explorations of the relation between animal and human nature, and of the concomitant existential and ethical dimensions of this relationship. The chapters in the second part address the same theme, but, in so doing, focus on specific aspects of animal and human nature: imagination, politics, history, sense, finitude, and science