Sentience as moral consideration and disvalue in nature

Is There a Place for Animals in the Moral Consideration of Nature?

The compatibility of an "animal lib­ eration" ethic and an environmental eth ic depends prima ri lyon how one interprets the meaning and moral structu re of a theory of envi ronmental ethics. In part this is because the meaning and moral structure of an animal liberation ethic is fairly straightforward: it focuses on the absence of morally relevant differences between humans and animals, and on...

The Problem of Evil in Nature: Evolutionary Bases of the Prevalence of Disvalue

This paper examines the problem of evil in nature, that is, the issue of the disvalue present in nature, and the question of whether or not it prevails over happiness. The paper claims that disvalue actually outweighs happiness in nature. This is an unavoidable consequence of the existence of an evolutionary process in a context where resources are scarce. Because of this, suffering and early d...

The Nature of Moral Vitalism

Moral vitalism refers to a tendency to view good and evil as actual forces that can influence people and events. We introduce a scale designed to assess the belief in moral vitalism. High scorers on the scale endorse items such as “There are underlying forces of good and evil in this world.” After establishing the reliability and criterion validity of the scale (Studies 1, 2a, and 2b), we exami...

Sentience and Pain in Invertebrates

Hatred as a Moral and Ethical Conception in Russian Society

The present paper deals with the national specifics of the assessment aspect in the meaning of the words. A modern scientific paradigm considers the language as a cognitive tool of understanding the world and keeping and representing people’s experience and values which reflect the people’s vision of the world (“the world picture). Usually linguistics understands the language ...