Donna Yarri - Böcker

The ethical treatment of animals has become an issue of serious moral concern. Many people are challenging long-held assumptions about animals and raising questions about their status and their treatment. What is the relationship between humans and animals? Do animals have moral standing? Do we have direct or indirect duties to animals? Does human benefit always outweigh animal suffering? The use of animals for experimentation raises all of these questions in a particularly insistent way. Donna Yarri offers an overview of the current state of the discussion, and presents an argument for significantly restricted animal experimentation. She points to the important similarities between humans and animals, arguing that the actual differences are differences of degree rather than kind. For that reason, she says, we must rethink our use of animals in experimentation. Animal cognition and animal sentiency together are the basis for the argument that experimental animals do have rights, which Yarri here enumerates. Christian theology, she shows, supports the existence of animal rights and contains additional resources within which a more humane animal experimentation can be worked out. Animal experimentation is not completely ruled out, and Yarri provides a model for what benign experimentation would look like. She concludes with a concrete burden-benefit analysis that can serve as the foundation for informed decision-making.

A biologist and a Christian theologian examine the scientific and philosophical implications and potential impacts of genetic technologies.God, Science, and Designer Genes: An Exploration of Emerging Technologies provides a unique approach to the central ethical dilemma in contemporary science, offering both an up-to-date account of the current state of genetic technologies and insightful discussions of the moral/theological questions these technologies raise.Coauthored by professors of biology and theology, God, Science, and Designer Genes examines a range of from-the-headlines issues, including the relationship between science and religion, “designing” our children, stem-cell research, cloning, genetics and behavior, genetics and privacy, and using genetic technologies for social justice. Who should benefit—personally and financially—from DNA technology? Who might be harmed? How do we protect individual rights and guard against discrimination? How will embryo modification affect the identity of those so modified? God, Science, and Designer Genes gives readers an eloquent, thoughtful, and objective foundation for considering these and other questions about the potential conflict between scientific achievement, personal faith, and social responsibility.A series of chapters combining basic scientific discussions of DNA technologies with ethical discussions of the social issues they are raisingFive hypothetical case studies that provide realistic contexts for exploring specific issues related to genetic technologiesAn extensive bibliography of current and significant books, journals and websites with regard to genetic technologiesA comprehensive index

There are few literary authors in whose work animals and other creatures play as prominent a role as they do in Franz Kafka's. Exploring multiple dimensions of Kafka's incorporation of nonhuman creatures into his writing, this volume is the first collection in English of essays devoted to illuminating this important and ubiquitous dimension of his work. The chapters here are written by an array of international scholars from various fields, and represent a diversity of interpretive approaches. In the course of exploring the roles played by nonhuman animals and other creatures in Kafka's writing, they help make sense of the literary and philosophical significance of his preoccupation with animals, and make clear that careful investigation of those creatures illuminates his core concerns: the nature of power; the inescapability of history and guilt; the dangers, promise, and strangeness of the alienation endemic to modern life; the human propensity for cruelty and oppression; the limits and conditions of humanity and the risks of dehumanization; the nature of authenticity; family life; Jewishness; and the nature of language and art. Thus the essays in this volume enrich our understanding of Kafka's work as a whole. Especially striking is the extent to which the articles collected here bring into focus the ways in which Kafka anticipated many of the recent developments in contemporary thinking about nonhuman animals.