Suchergebnisse

Animal protection as an emerging field of legislation needs to be constitutionalized as well as comprehensively expounded by legal scholars. As it is a growing body of regulation and accompanying legal theories, it needs to develop a solid conceptual and axiological framework, in particular a set of basic values and principles on which detailed rules are to be founded. Lacking these, the domain of animal law is still in the pre-paradigm stage and remains an assemblage of dispersed ideas, concepts and regulatory measures. It yet has to develop into a coherent whole that may grow to be a mature regulatory and doctrinal domain of the law. In order to reach this stage, it should be founded on clear theoretical and constitutional grounds. Lacking those, its further development, and effective operation may be seriously impeded. There seem to be two basic approaches that may serve as the possible foundations for a viable model of animal protection law. The first may be referred to as the "dignity" approach and the other, as the "sentientist" approach. According to the first of those two approaches, animal protection law should rely on the concept of animal dignity as its philosophical foundation. The second approach rejects the idea that the concept of animal dignity as the basis for the relevant legislation as philosophically dubious and entailing objectionable normative consequences for the scope and content of legal protections of animals. Thus, it aims rather at legal norms and policies being based directly on scientifically informed theories of sentience, evolutionarily developed nervous structures underlying cognitive and emotional capabilities or species-typical biological and psychological needs that condition the subjective well-being of a given creature. The aim of this paper is to analyse and discuss both these approaches and to argue that the former is philosophically, conceptually and practically flawed. The second approach, even despite some serious disadvantages, is therefore deemed to be preferable and more promising.

The paper discusses and criticizes views on various aspects of the situations of animals within human societies offered by authors presenting at the seminar held at the Research Centre for Public Policy and Regulatory Governance. They include legal, ethical as well as socio-psychological problems about animal welfare and the attempts to improve the conditions in which animals are treated. The author hints at the theoretical background as well as implications of some of the ideas that are advocated in the ongoing legal and ethical debates over animal welfare. The discussion aims to shed some light on how the cross-disciplinary studies and exchanges that include biologists, psychologists, sociologists as well as legal researchers may contribute to numerous controversies in the contemporary animal law scholarship.

This book explores the legal conception of personhood in the context of contemporary challenges, such as the status of non-human animals, human-animal biological mixtures, cyborgisation of the human body, or developing technologies based on artificial autonomic agents. It reveals the humanistic assumptions underlying the legal approach to personhood and examines the extent to which they are undermined by current and imminent scientific and technological advances. Further, the book outlines an original conception of non-personal subjecthood so as to provide adequate normative solutions for the problematic status of sentient animals and other kinds of entities. Arguably, non-personal subjects of law should be regarded as holding one right, and only one right - the right to be taken into account

The age of intellectual debates in France between the Revolution in 1789 and the Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the centuries is one of the key sources that enable the understanding of the modern political culture. It concerns, in particular, the modern concept of liberty that became one of the defining values shaping the European political discourse. Thus, the post-revolutionary France remains an extremely valuable source of inspiration when re-visiting the essence of many contemporary debates in political philosophy and public dis-course. Most of the ideas and arguments in circulation today echo the debates over the liberty, reason, and society that dominated the intellectual climate of that period in the French political history or, at least, heavily depend on the foundational ideas formulated then and there. Thus, they are worth reconsidering.

The safeguarding of animal welfare includes the reduction of pain inflicted on farm animals when slaughtered. According to the Polish Animal Protection Act of 1997, the killing of animals may be carried out only by means of humanitarian methods which decrease pain to the lowest possible level, including mandatory stunning of animals before their slaughter. This article examines the events that took place after the Polish Parliament abolished in 2002 an exception to this stunning requirement which had been reserved for killing animals according to religious rites (used by small Jewish and Muslim communities to obtain kosher and halal meat).

The concept of personhood becomes increasingly controversial in modern legal debates. The advancements in the contemporary science and technology entail the need for reconsideration of who should count as a person in law and why. Animals, cyborgs, artificial agents and the like may pose the most important challenge for the legal orders in the 21st century. The volume collects essays addressing various aspects of this challenge and provide an overview of what may become the most interesting and far-reaching dilemma for the law in the years to come