Bioethics Beyond Humans: Animal, Food, Environmental Ethics

BETH 722 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This interdisciplinary course examines bioethics "beyond the human", focusing on our relationships with animals, food systems, and the environment. We will explore how everyday choices - what we eat, how we use animals, and how we treat the natural world - express personal values and shape questions of justice, dignity, intrinsic value, prejudice, and identity. Drawing on animal ethics, food ethics, and environmental ethics, the course investigates how we assign value to nonhuman life, what ethical duties we owe to animals and ecosystems, and how human health is inseparable from planetary health, sustainability, climate change, and biodiversity. Students will analyze practical controversies such as industrial agriculture, food justice, zoonotic disease, conservation, and biomedical uses of animals, while considering the ethical responsibilities of biomedicine toward the natural world. 

Much of the learning will be experiential: in addition to seminar-style discussions and case studies, students will engage in field trips, meetings with practitioners and innovators, interactive sessions, and creative assignments that illuminate the workings of food systems, human-animal relations, and environmental impacts. By the end of the course, students will have a grounded framework for answering normative questions such as "How should we treat animals?", "What should we eat?", and "What do we owe the planet?", and will be prepared to integrate nonhuman ethics into broader bioethical practice and policy.