Bibliographic record
Abstract
I argue that ethical veganism and animal rights activism is preferable to a moral relativist approach to vegetarianism and animal use, even in cases of activism labeled “extreme.” The moral relativist says that being a vegetarian or a meat eater is a matter of personal choice. I argue that the strong commitments of ethical vegans and animal rights activists are admirable from a virtue ethics perspective; they are not extreme. On the contrary, they accord with the ideal that Aristotle called the "Golden Mean." Aristotle himself was not vegan. He viewed the universe in a fundamentally hierarchical way and would have had no objections to the human use of animals. However, he believed in the idea of a Natural Law, and this can be used to support contemporary ethical veganism and animal rights activism. If animals possess rights, then it is the moral duty (rather than personal choice) of every human to stop his or her consumption of animal products. From this perspective, the harms that may be caused by veganism (particularly economic harms) are of lesser significance than the value of veganism and animal rights activism. The moral relativist argument against the alleged extremism of ethical vegans is improper. The highly controversial tactics employed by some vegan and animal rights activists including the use of violence, harassment and property damage can be understood as reasonable and morally necessary from a virtue ethics perspective if we extend our concept of moral community to include all sentient beings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".