Ep90 Jes Harfeld on ethics, breaking down disciplinary boundaries, & the importance of finding out why we are thinking as we are thinking right now

“I think one of the things we should do, and that I am experiencing more and more, is that, in order to think differently we have to look to the past, to find out why we are thinking as we are thinking right now”.

Let us welcome Jes Lynning Harfeld, an associate professor of applied ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy at Aalborg University, Denmark. Currently, his research focuses on the connections between animal welfare and ethics in the realm of human-animal interactions and the way that language interacts with thinking and character.

It was not until Jes’s PhD when he came across Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, did he develop an interest in the ethical dilemmas regarding animal welfare. As such, he focused his thesis on the ethical dilemmas of modern agriculture. Querying, what it means to have a find and the different approaches of ethics and how it relates to animals. “Animal welfare understandings as types of interpretations, reading their signals then jumping to conclusions."

Jes and Sabrina then discuss the ethics and the varying interpretations of animal welfare, an intrinsically subjective phenomenon, across different audiences. Jes then, using a couple of his papers, explains the development of animal welfare sciences.

“Making barriers between disciplines is one of the things that is not a good thing for animal welfare science, we have to break down disciplinary boundaries to do even better animal welfare science”

Read about ‘What is animal happiness’ HERE
Read about ‘Rights, solidarity, and the animal welfare state’ HERE
Read about ‘Bearing Witness’ by Class Kirchelle HERE

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