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Title of Journal: Philos Stud

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Abbravation: Philosophical Studies

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Springer Netherlands

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1573-0883

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Meaning in the lives of humans and other animals

Authors: Duncan Purves Nicolas Delon
Publish Date: 2017/01/27
Volume: 175, Issue: 2, Pages: 317-338
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Abstract

This paper argues that contemporary philosophical literature on meaning in life has important implications for the debate about our obligations to nonhuman animals If animal lives can be meaningful then practices including factory farming and animal research might be morally worse than ethicists have thought We argue for two theses about meaning in life 1 that the best account of meaningful lives must take intentional action to be necessary for meaning—an individual’s life has meaning if and only if the individual acts intentionally in ways that contribute to finally valuable states of affairs and 2 that this first thesis does not entail that only human lives are meaningful Because nonhuman animals can be intentional agents of a certain sort our account yields the verdict that many animals’ lives can be meaningful We conclude by considering the moral implications of these theses for common practices involving animalsWe owe a significant debt to Dale Jamieson and Robert Elliot as well as Cheshire Calhoun Stephen Campbell Sari Kisilevsky Rob MacDougall Collin ONeil Regina Rini and an anonymous referee for this journal for their encouragement and incisive comments on earlier drafts of this paper

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Other Papers In This Journal:
  1. Acquaintance, singular thought and propositional constituency
  2. The paradox of the question
  3. Randomized controlled trials and the flow of information: comment on Cartwright
  4. Précis of Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading
  5. The non-transitivity of the contingent and occasional identity relations
  6. Two arguments against the punishment-forbearance account of forgiveness
  7. Value and the regulation of the sentiments
  8. God’s silence
  9. Norms of intentionality: norms that don’t guide
  10. How fallacious is the consequence fallacy?
  11. How fallacious is the consequence fallacy?
  12. Rationally self-ascribed anti-expertise
  13. Internalism about reasons: sad but true?
  14. Comments on Sydney Shoemaker’s Physical Realization
  15. Free will and the construction of options
  16. Absence of action
  17. The cognitivist account of meaning and the liar paradox
  18. A challenge for Frankfurt-style compatibilists
  19. Moral worth and rationality as acting on good reasons
  20. Asymmetric population axiology: deliberative neutrality delivered
  21. Pictures, perspective and possibility
  22. The real symmetry problem(s) for wide-scope accounts of rationality
  23. Knowledge and epistemic necessity
  24. Shaftesbury’s place in the history of moral realism
  25. Infinitism, finitude and normativity
  26. Memory and identity
  27. Complicitous liability in war
  28. Fictionalism versus deflationism: a new look
  29. Hume’s Solution of the Goodman Paradox and the Reliability Riddle (Mill’s problem)
  30. Universals
  31. Précis
  32. Making sense of unpleasantness: evaluationism and shooting the messenger
  33. Permissive consent: a robust reason-changing account
  34. Should the probabilities count?
  35. Extended simples
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