The violets are out in the banks and in the woods, in hedges and verges and in my garden. They seem to be new arrivals in my garden. I don't think I'd noticed them before.
I ventured into the wilderness behind the house today. All I did was sweep the path. Which meant shoveling up a few kilos of bird food. The seeds and suet had become a rather interesting mulch.
Back inside, I've been reading about, yep, animals. One paper by Onora O'Neill was interesting. In fact, she is interesting: she is a member of the House of Lords as well as a philosopher. A philosopher queen, perhaps. What she said was that an ethical theory can be anthropocentric but also take animals seriously. For example, she considers humans not as the only rights holders but as the only ones with moral obligations. Her view is that rights are meaningless without a sense of who should be attending to them. Obligations, though, are agent-centred. The agent has obligations 'not to injure', for example.
This kind of idea gets a richer formulation with Martha Nussbaum who believes that there is intrinsic value in living beings. Agents have to respect that by not limiting the prospects of a living being flourishing in the way that it flourishes.
This it seems for her means that while chimps can't flourish in a lab, maybe mice can - given the best welfare - and so they do not suffer in that situation. That part, I'm not so sure about.
I've also been reading papers about researchers suffering PTSD caused by their work. And about the very careful and, to be honest, caring advice on how to minimise suffering in laboratory animals. Pick up mice with cupped hands rather than by their tails. Be careful if they have swollen paws due to the arthritis they are suffering as part of the research protocol - swollen paws are very painful. Kill them if they are in severe pain. You can tell by their faces.
Mice and men. Which is more noble?
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