Global Bioethics may be seen as the ultimate quid pro quo for the Land Ethic called for by Aldo Leopold in 1949• The core of that idea is conveniently expressed in the dedication of my first book on bioethics to Leopold directly quoting him. In the second of four paragraphs h~ had said: There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it...

When do humans extend their ethical scope to include nature? Anthropocentrism and ecocentrism are two ways of understanding an extension of ethics to nature. In an anthropocentric ethic nature deserves moral consideration because how nature is treated a¡ects humans. In an ecocentric ethic nature deserves moral consideration because nature has intrinsic value. In two experiments participants (n=...

Arguably the fundamental problem faced by employers is how to elicit effort from employees. Most models suggest that employers meet this challenge by monitoring employees carefully to prevent shirking. But there is another option that relies on heterogeneity across employees, and that is to screen job candidates to find workers with a stronger work ethic who require less monitoring. This should...

Few studies in the social sciences have spurred more controversy than Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. At the core of Weber’s theory lies a connection between Protestantism and attitudes toward work. Using micro-data from contemporary Germany, this paper investigates the impact of Protestantism on economic outcomes and whether any such connection still exists. To b...

The compatibility of an "animal lib­ eration" ethic and an environmental eth ic depends prima ri lyon how one interprets the meaning and moral structu re of a theory of envi ronmental ethics. In part this is because the meaning and moral structure of an animal liberation ethic is fairly straightforward: it focuses on the absence of morally relevant differences between humans and animals, and on...

Zentall and Singer (2007a) hypothesized that our failure to replicate the work-ethic effect in pigeons (Vasconcelos, Urcuioli, & Lionello-DeNolf, 2007) was due to insufficient overtraining following acquisition of the high- and low-effort discriminations. We tested this hypothesis using the original work-ethic procedure (Experiment 1) and one similar to that used with starlings (Experiment 2) b...

In this article, I follow up on a suggestion made by Josephine Donovan that a Hume-inspired ethic of sympathy would be a better foundation for an animal ethic than more rationalistic approaches of both utilitarianism and deontology. I then expand on Donovan’s suggestion by further suggesting that Hume’s “sentiment of humanity” could easily be expanded to include other animals. Hume’s ethic of s...