ETHICS IN PROGRESS 2020, VOLUME 11, ISSUE 2
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Call for Papers
Guest editors:
Prof. Dr. Hab. Maria Vita Romeo (University of Catania, Italy)
Sara Sgarlata B.A. (University of Catania, Italy)
Ethics in Progress invites submissions on the topic of speciesism and anthropocentrism in the context of animal ethics. The systematic and unjustified mistreatment we reserve to animals under our husbandry and into the wild is still a widespread reality, as if their value would be only of instrumental or relative importance with respect to human utility and other human-serving values, as Tom Regan pointed out in his 1983 essay, The Case for Animal Rights. Our relationship with nonhuman animals often turns into an explicit exploitation: animals are used for food, clothing, entertainment, work and experimentation. The fact that we treat animals in ways that would be unacceptable for human beings is directly related to another significant issue, namely, the fact that we apply the same discrimination to animals belonging to one or more species, in favour of those which are leisure companions or have a cultural, symbolic, religious or aesthetic significance to us. Much literature has been produced on the topic of the moral standing of animals and scholars made an effort to provide a conceptual understanding of our own behavioural and moral inconsistency toward (some of) them, which took the double name of anthropocentrism and speciesism. Far from being a critical appendix to speciesism and anthropocentrism, the resulting framework turned into a theoretical corpus, composed by multiple ethical theories, such as consequentialism, utilitarianism, rights theories, egalitarian biocentrism, ethics of virtue, ethics of care and responsibility. Deconstructing speciesism and anthropocentrism still means to reconstruct many of their underpinning topics as delivered from education and philosophical tradition, such us personhood, human distinctiveness, nature, dignity, equality, interest, consciousness and so on.With this issue Ethics in Progress proposes to investigate the multiple dimensions of speciesism and anthropocentrism, in particular: to deepen the conceptual connections between them; the way they affect the discussion on the moral standing of animals; speciesism and anthropocentrism as indicators of one’s ability to formulate moral judgments; speciesism not only as an individual prejudice, but also as a public, social attitude towards animals. Possible themes are, but not limited to:
a) Relationship between anthropocentrism and speciesism
b) Anti-anthropocentrist/anti-speciesist critique
c) Practical solutions to speciesism
d) Relation between speciesism and violence
e) Anthropocentrism and speciesism within culture and education
f) Social-psychological examination of human-animal relationship
The submission should be in English language. The cover page must include the author(s)’s first and last name, affiliation, e-mail address, ORCID number (if available), title, abstract and keywords. Please save the submission in OpenOffice or Microsoft Word document file format. Ethics in Progress follows the APA citation style. A further anonymized version of the paper should be submitted, for the review process.
Papers should be emailed to the Guest Editors email accounts.
Prof. Dr. Hab. Maria Vita Romeo: mariavitaromeo@unict.it
Sara Sgarlata B.A.: sara.sgarlata@amu.edu.pl
Deadline for submissions is 15 September 2020