Part 3 - An ethicist weighs in on the future of meat       (17 minutes)

Is it immoral to kill animals for food? And under what conditions is it most ethical to eat meat? We ask this to environmental and animal ethicist Bernice Bovenkerk at Wageningen University.

Speaker
 

Bernice Bovenkerk is associate professor at the Social Sciences Group, sub-department of Communication, Philosophy and Technology of  Wageningen University. Previously she was post-doc and lecturer at the Ethics Institute at the Department of Philosophy of Utrecht University. She received her PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, on a dissertation titled The Biotechnology Debate. Democracy in the face of intractable disagreement (supervisors: Prof. Robyn Eckersley and Prof. Frans Brom).

Her research interests concern issues in animal and environmental ethics and political philosophy. Current topics are animal agency, animal domestication, animals and (bio) technology (in particular Precision Livestock Farming, gene drives, and de-extinction), the moral status of ‘boundary animals’ such as fish and insects, climate ethics, and deliberative democracy.

Section resources
 

Article: Taking animal perspectives into account in animal ethics (Bernice Bovenkerk and Eva Meijer, 2019)

The moral status of animals (Standford Encyclopedia, 2017)