Invertebrate animals are frequently lumped into a single category and denied welfare protections despite their considerable cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary diversity. Some ethical and policy ...inroads have been made for cephalopod molluscs and crustaceans, but the vast majority of arthropods, including the insects, remain excluded from moral consideration. We argue that this exclusion is unwarranted given the existing evidence and plausible concepts of moral standing. Yet anachronistic, value-laden readings of evolution still view invertebrates as lower in the scala naturae. There persists the a priori assumption that small brains are unlikely to support cognition or sentience, despite the growing evidence that they have converged on cognitive functions comparable to those of vertebrates. Cognitive-affective biases influence moral judgments and the attribution of mental states. Scientific uncertainty and moral risk are not appropriately balanced. These factors shape moral attitudes toward basal vertebrates too, but they are particularly acute in the arthropod context. Moral consistency dictates that the same standards of evidence and risk management that justify policy protections for vertebrates also support extending moral consideration to certain invertebrates. We also show how moving beyond a vertebrate-centered concept of welfare can help clarify foundational moral concepts in their own right.
The idea of moral progress played a central role in liberal political thought from the Enlightenment through the nineteenth century but is rarely encountered in moral and political philosophical ...discourse today. One reason for this is that traditional liberal theorists of moral progress, like their conservative detractors, tended to rely on underevidenced assumptions about human psychology and society. For the first time in history, we are developing robust scientific knowledge about human nature, especially through empirical psychological theories of morality and culture that are informed by evolutionary theory. In addition, the social sciences now provide better information about which social arrangements are feasible and sustainable and about how social norms arise, change, and come to shape moral thought and behavior. Accordingly, it is time to revisit the question of moral progress. On the surface, evolutionary accounts of morality paint a pessimistic picture, suggesting that certain types of moral progress are unrealistic or inappropriate for beings like us. In brief, humans are said to be “hard-wired” for rather limited moral capacities. However, such a view overlooks the great plasticity of human morality as evidenced by our history of social and political moral achievements. To account for these changes while giving evolved moral psychology its due, we develop a dynamic, biocultural theory of moral progress that highlights the interaction between adaptive components of moral psychology and the cultural construction of moral norms and beliefs; and we explore how this interaction can advance, impede, and reverse moral progress.
Alcohol abuse can lead to severe psychological and physiological damage. Little is known, however, about the relative impact of a small, daily dose of alcohol (daily-moderate schedule) versus a ...large, once per week dose (weekly-binge schedule). In this study, we examined the effect of each of these schedules on behavioural measures of anxiety in zebrafish (Danio rerio). Adult wild-type zebrafish were administered either 0.2% ethanol on a daily-moderate schedule or 1.4% ethanol on a weekly-binge schedule for a period of 21 days, and then tested for scototaxis (preference for darkness) during withdrawal. Compared to a control group with no alcohol exposure, the daily-moderate group spent significantly more time on the light side of the arena (indicative of decreased anxiety) on day two of withdrawal, but not day 9 of withdrawal. The weekly-binge group was not significantly different from the control group on either day of withdrawal and showed no preference for either the light or dark zones. Our results indicate that even a small dose of alcohol on a daily basis can cause significant, though reversible, changes in behaviour.
Rejecting Racism, Restoring Intuition Powell, Russell C
Journal for the study of religion, nature and culture,
01/2022, Volume:
16, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
John Muir continues to influence Americans to see the natural world as replete with sacred value. Yet Muir’s work is not without its shadow side: Muir’s racism against Indigenous peoples permeates ...his writing. I locate both the valuable and vile views inherent in Muir’s moral vision in his uncritical reliance on Romantic epistemology, and particularly the recourse Muir continually made to the power of his intuition. Applying insights from G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I offer an account of the various roles Muir’s intuitions played in his thinking so as to better contextualize the best and worst features of his moral thought.
Stephen Jay Gould argued that replaying the ‘tape of life’ would result in radically different evolutionary outcomes. Recently, biologists and philosophers of science have paid increasing attention ...to the theoretical importance of convergent evolution—the independent origination of similar biological forms and functions—which many interpret as evidence against Gould's thesis. In this paper, we examine the evidentiary relevance of convergent evolution for the radical contingency debate. We show that under the right conditions, episodes of convergent evolution can constitute valid natural experiments that support inferences regarding the deep counterfactual stability of macroevolutionary outcomes. However, we argue that proponents of convergence have problematically lumped causally heterogeneous phenomena into a single evidentiary basket, in effect treating all convergent events as if they are of equivalent theoretical import. As a result, the ‘critique from convergent evolution’ fails to engage with key claims of the radical contingency thesis. To remedy this, we develop ways to break down the heterogeneous set of convergent events based on the nature of the generalizations they support. Adopting this more nuanced approach to convergent evolution allows us to differentiate iterated evolutionary outcomes that are probably common among alternative evolutionary histories and subject to law-like generalizations, from those that do little to undermine and may even support, the Gouldian view of life.
Resource Management Powell, Russell C; Gould, Rebecca Kneale
Journal for the study of religion, nature and culture,
01/2023, Volume:
16, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Despite the relative consensus in the self-management literature that personal resolutions are not an effective stand-alone tactic for self-control, some individuals seem capable of using them to ...exert a remarkable level of control over their behavior. One such individual was Mahatma Gandhi, the famous Indian statesman. Gandhi often used personal resolutions-or "vows"-to commit himself to a range of challenging behaviors, such as extreme diets, sexual abstinence, and fasting. Similarly, Prince Pückler-Muskau, a celebrated 19th-Century adventurer, landscape designer and travel author, described using personal resolutions to unfailingly accomplish numerous tasks in his everyday life. In this article, we examine the historical writings of Gandhi and Pückler-Muskau concerning their use of resolutions. We describe three defining characteristics of their resolutions, which we will refer to as
, and outline Gandhi's advice for making and keeping such resolutions. Our analysis suggests that the effectiveness of unbreakable resolutions may be primarily due to the temporally extended contingencies of reinforcement associated with their use, and can be usefully interpreted from the perspective of delay-discounting and say-do correspondence models of self-control. The implications of this examination for understanding the concept of willpower and for enhancing modern research into self-control training are also discussed. Based on this analysis, we additionally offer a tentative set of guidelines on how to make and keep unbreakable resolutions.
Abstract
An emotion like shame is endowed with special motivational force. Drawing on Ralph Waldo Emerson's concept of shame, I develop an account of moral motivation that lends new perspective to ...the contemporary climate crisis. Whereas religious ethicists often engage the problem of climate change by re-imagining the metaphors, symbols, and values of problematic cosmologies, I focus on some specific moral tactics generated by religious communities who use their traditions to confront climate destruction. In particular, Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries, a Christian non-profit organization that seeks to infuse a renewed commitment in church parishes to bioregions and watersheds, effectively employs shame in the context of its Christian practice and leadership. My analysis of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries demonstrates both the efficacy of shame to motivate environmentally responsible behavior as well as the advantage to religious ethics of considering contextual practices over abstract cosmologies.
The relation of influence between Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Muir helps to illuminate Muir’s characteristic brand of nature religion, namely his mysticism. This relation is especially clear, I ...argue, in both Emerson and Muir’s writing on their mystical affinities for plant life. Applying Harold Bloom’s renowned theory of literary influence, I draw lessons from Emerson and Muir’s mystical writings to highlight the ways in which Muir acquired from Emerson the plant-related vocabularies and practices that came to mediate his nature-inspired mysticism and also how Muir can be said to have surpassed Emerson’s own mystical example, thus opening new vistas of consciousness in human–plant relations in the nineteenth-century American religious experience.
Episodic-like memory tests often aid in determining an animal’s ability to recall the
what
,
where
, and
which
(context) of an event. To date, this type of memory has been demonstrated in humans, ...wild chacma baboons, corvids (Scrub jays), humming birds, mice, rats, Yucatan minipigs, and cuttlefish. The potential for this type of memory in zebrafish remains unexplored even though they are quickly becoming an essential model organism for the study of a variety of human cognitive and mental disorders. Here we explore the episodic-like capabilities of zebrafish (
Danio rerio
) in a previously established mammalian memory paradigm. We demonstrate that when zebrafish were presented with a familiar object in a familiar context but a novel location within that context, they spend more time in the novel quadrant. Thus, zebrafish display episodic-like memory as they remember
what
object they saw,
where
they saw it (quadrant location), and on
which
occasion
(yellow or blue walls) it was presented.
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