Judith Benz-Schwarzburg

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna

African (Bantu) philosophy conceptualizes morality through ubuntu, which emphasizes the role of community in producing moral agents. This community is characterized by practices that respond to and value interdependence, such as care, cooperation, and respect for elders and ancestral knowledge. While there have been attributions of morality to nonh...

Many nonhuman animals have the emotional capacities to form caring relationships that matter to them, and for their immediate welfare. Drawing from care ethics, we argue that these relationships also matter as objectively valuable states of affairs. They are part of what is good in this world. However, the value of care is precarious in human-anima...

Wildlife populations are plummeting worldwide and captivity, of at least some, species is increasingly being challenged from an ethical perspective. When captivity serves human entertainment, poor treatment as well as unequal power-relationships are problematic. Particularly for wildlife ecotourism then, we ask: is the future virtual? Taking a post...

Humans interact with animals in numerous ways and on numerous levels. We are indeed living in an “animal”s world,’ in the sense that our lives are very much intertwined with the lives of animals. This also means that animals, like those dogs we commonly refer to as our pets, are living in a “human’s world” in the sense that it is us, not them, who,...

Farm animal welfare is a major concern for society and food production. To more accurately evaluate animal farming in general and to avoid exposing farm animals to poor welfare situations, it is necessary to understand not only their behavioral but also their cognitive needs and capacities. Thus, general knowledge of how farm animals perceive and i...

It has been argued that some animals are moral subjects, that is, beings who are capable of behaving on the basis of moral motivations (Rowlands 2011, 2012, 2017). In this paper, we do not challenge this claim. Instead, we presuppose its plausibility in order to explore what ethical consequences follow from it. Using the capabilities approach (Nuss...

The portrayal of animals in the media is often criticised for instrumentalising, objectifying and anthropomorphising animals (e.g. Hirschman and Sanders in Semiotica 115(1/2):53–79, 1997; Lerner and Kalof in Sociol Q 40(4):565–586, 1999; Stewart and Cole in Int J Multidiscip Res 12(4):457–476, 2009). Although we agree with this criticism, we also i...

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/06/the_ethical_problems_with_super_muscly_pigs.html

Ethologists and philosophers increasingly understand (some) animals as individuals with complex socio-cognitive abilities. However, strong animal rights claims linked to such abilities have been pushed for great apes and dolphins, but not yet for any farm animal species. We hypothesize that the reason for this is not because farm animals lack moral...

Purpose – This study addresses the great apes' fatal situation in the wild by integrating perspectives from conservation biology, conflict research, and bioethics. Design/methodology/approach – We introduce the great apes' red list status and describe habitat destruction and bushmeat commerce as main threats to their survival. We analyze the comple...

More and more species are being recognized as our 'cognitive relatives', sharing complex socio-cognitive abilities with us. What has been neglected so far, however, are the ethical implications arising from our growing knowledge on such dimensions of relatedness. Some philosophers claim that we should at least reconsider the moral status of those s...

This article provides an empirically based, interdisciplinary approach to the following two questions: Do animals possess behavioral and cognitive characteristics such as culture, language, and a theory of mind? And if so, what are the implications, when long-standing criteria used to justify differences in moral consideration between humans and an...

In this article, we ask how far armed conflicts in the Virunga Region directly and indirectly contribute to the extinction of the Great Apes and the critically endangered Mountain Gorilla in specific. We introduce the conflict situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the concept of ‘New Wars’ in order to identify mechanisms linking arm...

Albert Schweitzer developed an egalitarian biocentrism which follows the maxim "I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live". Following Schweitzer's idea of the Reverence for Life obviously leads to ethical dilemmas - as for example in the case of animal experimentation. In many situations we cannot but kill or harm, even...

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