Description
How does the patient position- the perspective held by someone or something defined as the recipient of action- inform moral being and ethical stances? What kinds of descriptions can flow from paying closer ethnographic attention to intersections between moral agency and moral patiency? These questions have informed my current investigations into the individual commitment and organizational practice of animal welfare, in Scotland and the wider UK. More specifically, I propose to explore how an animal welfare moral orientation to the world can operate in the field of policy and the process of lawmaking, where the virtue of balance- on occasions invoked through the popular phrase ‘heart and head’- and pragmatist attitudes towards ethical positions tend to dominate. This focus includes a wider consideration of moral positioning in public life. It also broadens to reflect upon the strengths and limitations of what is sometimes termed the ethical turn, to the issue of what kind of distinctive contribution anthropologists can make to the study of moralities and moral persons; and in my case to a particular exploration of what it means to work for and live with an ethical concern to protect animals| Period | 2019 |
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| Held at | University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom |
| Degree of Recognition | International |