100 books like Agricultural Ethics

One of the very important agricultural issues is treatment of animals especially those grown in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

Singer was among the very first who wrote about how animals are treated by the agricultural enterprise and by people. He was among the first to tell us that animals can suffer and therefore we must consider our moral obligation to any creature that can suffer.

Animal science has made more progress than most other agricultural disciplines in changing the way animals are treated. There is still a long way to go.

Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer, a prolific author, an environmental activist, cultural critic, and poet.

In this book, one of his many, he raises important questions about the practice of agriculture in the United States and some of the consequences including loss of small farms and communities, the ecological effects, energy use, and agriculture's externalities.

His work has been largely ignored by the agricultural community including most faculty in colleges of agriculture. He writes eloquently about his concern that man was not made to rule the world and his claim that to rule the world we must conquer it.

Humans and agriculture have conquered and ignored and externalized the cultural, environmental, and human costs, which Berry explores in detail. His work has not been ignored by the environmental community.

When I began my career as a professor at Colorado State University I knew my responsibility was to study the kinetics of herbicide degradation and soil and develop systems for weed control in agronomic crops.

During my academic career at Cornell University and Oregon State University no one ever suggested I should take class in philosophy or that agriculture had moral problems. I knew and my professors emphasized agriculture was a worthy and essential human endeavor.

When I first became acquainted with William Aiken and he introduced me to his book my view of agriculture began to change. I realized the value and essential role of moral philosophy to agriculture. I know I was viewed as a traitor to my discipline, but Aiken's book convinced me there was something wrong.

As a professor and educator I had a responsibility to begin to study and write about agricultural ethics.

Thomas Berry called himself a geologian, and wrote this book at the same time as Everybody’s Story, neither author aware of the other. An ordained Catholic priest, he later said that “the bible should be put on the shelf for 100 years” while we attend to planetary exigencies. Seminal quotes: “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” “The environmental crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis.”

This handbook, edited by three well-known Smith scholars, follows on from a conference organised for the 250th anniversary of the publication of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments although it is not a proceedings volume.

The book has seven parts, each part featuring four chapters. These 28 chapters cover all bases, from an introductory outline of life, times, and legacy, over the importance of Smith’s unpublished work, the importance to Smith of rhetoric, ethics, aesthetics, theatre, and fashion, to Smith’s view on commerce and morality, his view on religion, and Smith’s legacy and influence, among many other topics.

There are a lot of great books about metaethics and a lot of great books about reasons, but this book nabs my top recommendation because Smith makes the topics so deceptively easy to get into and start thinking about. This is the book that I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis on that got me into studying and writing about philosophy for a living, and it is also one of the key books that everyone in my generation in my field grew up thinking about and reacting to. It also has a great balance between an overarching project that spans all of the chapters and some pretty self-contained discussions, especially in the earlier chapters, that helps the reader to focus on one question at a time while also getting a glimpse of how philosophical questions can add up to something bigger.

This is another important contribution to our understanding of Spinoza as a moral philosopher. It is a denser read than the first three books, but fascinating nonetheless for those already with a little Spinoza under their belt. Rather than concentrating on just the latter parts of the Ethics, where most scholars interested in Spinoza’s moral philosophy focus and where we find the mature discussion of the “free person” who lives under the “guidance of reason”, Sangiacomo is especially concerned with the evolution of Spinoza’s moral thought from his earliest writings to his final, uncompleted work. He considers tensions within, and pressures upon, Spinoza’s understanding of the “Supreme Good” and how to achieve it, and the changes that that account consequently undergoes. Sangiacomo’s thesis is thus both historical and philosophical.

I’m so sick of the culture wars in America. That’s why Makoto Fujimura’s call towards Culture Care was so refreshing and encouraging.

He acknowledges how artists may end up as border walkers, gaining inspiration by living on the edges of society. But mere rebellion isn’t enough. I was so inspired by his encouragement to see cultural care as comparable to environmental work. How do we create estuaries where new growth and ideas can emerge? As a painter, Mako brings his visions to life on canvas. Yet, this book challenged me to usher more beauty into my community through any medium.

Buddhist philosophers had much to say about how we should live our lives and how we should treat others. Modern scholars of Buddhist moral thinking have presented these ideas in a number of different ways. Gowans’ book is a fair and balanced discussion of what Indian Buddhist moral philosophers had to say about ethics and the different ways in which recent scholars have interpreted their claims.

I love how Hearne—a poet, student of philosophy, essayist, and master trainer of dogs and horses—weaves together her hands-on experience working with animals and reflections on the (often uninformed) philosophical commonplaces about them: insights that could only come from someone with her unique skill set.

As the title implies, Hearne is keenly interested in the relationship between language, the mental and emotional worlds of humans and animals, and the challenges of doing justice to how those worlds do (and do not) overlap. (One essay is called “How To Say `Fetch!’”)

No one writes more insightfully—and sometimes iconoclastically—about complex concepts such as animal dignity, honor, and humor, and no one captures more beautifully how animals are unique individuals, each with its own personality.