Agriculture and Human Values 14: 19, 1997.

EDITORIAL

Agriculture and Human Values: Past, present, and future directions

Richard P. Haynes
Editor-in-Chief

In the last issue of 1996, I announced that Kluwer Academic Publishers would start publishing Agriculture and Human Values with the rst issue of 1997. With that announcement I described briey the interdisciplinary curriculum development initiatives that eventually led to the founding of this journal, which was rst published as a newsletter (1984), and to the formation of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society three years later. Since the current number is the premier issue of Kluwers publication of Agriculture and Human Values, I thought that it would be appropriate for me to reect once more on the journals origins, what it has accomplished during the thirteen years that it was published by Agriculture and Human Values Inc., what its present scope is, and what its future plans are. My nal comments will focus on what the journals publication by Kluwer Academic Publishers will mean for future readers, authors, and subscribers.

Background of the journal The rst issue of Agriculture and Human Values was published as a newsletter in the Winter of 1984. It featured ve articles that attempted to identify some of the major agricultural policy issues, reviews of four books that pregured the emerging agricultural issues for the 1980s and beyond, a report on the National Dissemination Conference: Food/Agriculture in the Liberal Arts that was held at the University of Florida in early January 1984, a list of bibliographies of American agricultural history, and an annotated bibliography of lms on food and agriculture. In my editorial, I extended the following invitation. Readers are invited to submit essays, book reviews, announcements, course syllabi, bibliographies, or brief discussions. Letters are welcome! The topics should be of general interest to a broad range of readers in the liberal arts and the agricultural disciplines, and written, so far as possible, for the general reader. Although the principal focus of this and early subsequent issues was on supporting the development of a broader, interdisciplinary curriculum in the areas where the agricultural and liberal arts disciplines should interface, we were also concerned with dening new areas of scholarship and with promoting research in these areas by provid-

ing a forum for its publication. It was this second concern that led us to change our format from a newsletter focused mainly on curriculum development to a journal devoted to the publication of cutting edge scholarship on agricultural/food issues. What was lacking, for the most part, in current scholarship on these issues was (1) an investigation of the limitations of economic assessments of agricultural policy based on production efciency goals, (2) input from a broader range of the social sciences besides agricultural economics, (3) the distinctive perspective that the humanities have to offer, (4) attempts to bridge the continued separation of production from consumption issues and (5) efforts to bring a concern for externalities from the area of marginal discourse into mainstream thinking. As a philosopher, I saw this lack as a failure on the part of the academic community to take greater responsibility for dening the moral imperatives of their disciplines as well as a failure of public policy to take responsibility for the social costs borne at the expense of a signicant sector of society in order to promote the interests of another sector. So my original conceptualization of the new area of research and scholarship that I wanted to help promote was on the model of professional ethics, conceived of as an area of applied philosophical ethics. In other words, I thought of this new area of research as Agricultural Ethics, so I helped organize two exploratory conferences in 1982 to try to dene the ethical issues that this new area should attempt to address (Haynes & Lanier 1982). The Center for Values at the University of Delaware had undertaken a similar effort the year before, except that their chief focus was Ethical Issues in Agribusiness, an extension of a eld of applied ethics, Business Ethics, that was rapidly emerging at that time, to the agricultural sector. However, I became increasingly persuaded that it would be a mistake to focus exclusively on the model of professional ethics or of business ethics for two reasons. One reason was that much of the work done by professional philosophers in the area of applied ethics used what I call the moral dilemmas approach to ethical issues. The moral dilemmas approach places the professional within the context of their workplace environment and shows that the basic moral principles to which that professional is (should be) committed must come into a seemingly irresolvable conict in certain situations. These are ethical

RICHARD P. HAYNES

dilemmas just because one must choose between two ethical principles which to compromise. The applied philosopher, on this model, seeks to dene some moral theory that justies ranking ethical principles as to their priority when they come into conict, and then seeks to apply this theory to the cases at hand in order to justify some choice. What is objectionable about this approach, in my view, is that it assumes as backdrop, the legitimacy of the institutions and their current practices that dene the contexts in which such conicts arise. What it does not propose is an analysis of alternative practices that might avoid such conicts altogether. In other words, the moral dilemmas approach was not radical enough for my taste. The second reason that I wanted to avoid focusing exclusively on ethical issues is that, to many at least, the notion of ethics implies an idea of individual responsibility that ignores the structural problems that dene the contexts in which individuals make choices and that limits the autonomy of individual actors. I thought that although both the physical and the social sciences were unduly cynical in accepting the historic distinction between facts and values, and that philosophers working in the area of ethics were right in exposing the limitations of this distinction and in arguing for a rational basis for ethical decision making, I also became persuaded that the relatively newly emerging eld of the social studies of knowledge (of science and technology) was starting to reveal both the background value commitments of the various sciences, including the humanities, and the distorted view of their own history that disciplinary texts promoted, again, including the humanities. To reect this broader conception of the new eld of research that we wanted to help promote, we chose to refer to it as agriculture and human values instead of agricultural ethics, partly to reect our sympathy with the approach taken by the publication Science, Technology, and Human Values, and partly to emphasize our belief that agricultural practices reect value choices, and these choices should be critically examined rather than uncritically assumed.

The emerging eld and its issues The theme of the rst number of Agriculture and Human Values (Winter 1984) was Agricultural policy issues. The ve articles were written by two sociologists (L. Busch & W. Lacy, Agricultural policy: Issues for the 1980s and beyond), a nutritionist (K. Clancy, Human nutrition, agriculture, and human value), a political scientist (D. Hadwiger, Issues in agriculture), an animal scientist and Dean of a College of Agriculture (H.O. Kunkel, Agricultural ethics, the setting) and a philosopher (W. Aiken, Value conicts in agriculture). These ve articles make some important claims, I said in my editorial:

Agricultural policy in the USA for the last decade has been largely ad hoc. Inadequate thought has been given to long-term planning. In considering long-term goals for agriculture, we should not let the agricultural sub-government do all of our thinking for us. Questions about agricultural policy raise ethical considerations of a serious nature. The issues are complex, and they frequently involve conicts of value and conicts of interest. These issues cannot be adequately addressed without understanding the settings in which they arise. And they cannot be solved without the input from many different disciplines, and orientations, and without dialogue. One of my major roles as editor of this edgling journal for the next several years was to promote the type of scholarship that addressing these issues required and to encourage those currently engaged in it to submit articles to an as yet unknown forum that had not yet acquired a reputation as an academically respected journal known for its high standards of scholarship. We should all be grateful to the scholars already working in these areas who graciously contributed their time and effort to support the development of Agriculture and Human Values by contributing essays to help dene this eld of inquiry. We should also be grateful for their vision. However, too few researchers representing only a small number of disciplines were currently providing interdisciplinary input to the issues mentioned above. Getting more disciplines involved and more dialogue going on was clearly needed. There have been obstacles to achieving both of these goals. The chief obstacle has been the way that research is organized by disciplines, its merits judged and rewarded, and its goals rather uncritically assumed. Two of the books reviewed in the rst number of Agriculture and Human Values identify some of the problems with the way research is organized and rewarded and its major paradigms uncritically accepted (Lawrence Busch & William B. Lacy, Science, agriculture, and the politics of research, Westview Press, 1983; and John H. Perkins, Insects, experts, and the insecticide crisis: The quest for new pest management strategies, Plenum, 1982). Over the last ten years, we have cast our net widely to include contributions and perspectives from an increasingly broad spectrum of disciplines, both from within and outside of the traditional colleges of agriculture. One strategy we have employed to draw in contributors from new disciplines has been to invite guest editors from various disciplines to develop a special issue of the journal on some important topic. To date we have published special, guest edited issues on the following topics: Accountability and collaboration in international development (G. Axinn & R. Herisse); Agrarianism and the American philosophical tradition (P. Thompson);

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Agriculture in Eastern Europe (A. Bonanno); Anachronisms or rising stars: The black land grant system in perspective (J. Schor); Animal health technologies and the Third World (M. Meltzer); Biotechnologies and agriculture: Technical evolution or revolution (P. Bye & M. Fonte); The continuing challenge of hunger (K. Clancy, J. Poppendieck & J. Powers); The crisis in European agriculture (A. Bonanno); Development pressures and ecological constraints: The deltaic forests of India and Bangladesh (R. Herring); The human dimensions of sustainability (J. Burkhardt); The human ecology of agricultural development: The ethics and rationale of international technical cooperation in agriculture and rural life (G. Axinn); Indigenous agricultural knowledge and development (M. Warren); Low-input sustainable agriculture in Cuba (J. Carney); Participation and empowerment in sustainable rural development (L.A. Thrupp); Rural economic development (M. Lapping & H. Jacobs); Value issues in agricultural information (A. Reisner & R. Hays); Women and agriculture (N. Flora); Multi-cultural considerations from cropping to consumption (J. Newman). Other numbers focusing on special topics, without guest editors, have also been published, including a special number on each of the following: Agricultural biotechnology issues; Agriculture and the social sciences; Agriculture in the USA: Its impact on ethnic and other minority groups; Alternative conceptions and models of sustainability; Assessing the agricultural curriculum; Building on local agricultural knowledge; Ethics and values in food safety regulation. Five numbers of the journal featured selected revised papers from conferences or workshops organized around some special theme. All of these special issues have served the dual purpose of involving contributors from previously unrepresented disciplines, and incorporating a greater variety of disciplinary perspectives on important issues that need to be addressed. They have also helped further the practice of disciplinary self-criticism, of raising intra-disciplinary value issues. Several recurrent themes have emerged in the development of this new eld of inquiry. One theme has been the role that disciplinary autocracy (one version of technocracy) has played in limiting the effectiveness of democratically-based decision making. An often proposed remedy is to develop institutions and practices that require otherwise marginalized perspectives to be given a hearing and taken seriously. This cannot be done unless disciplinary experts share their own perspectives with others in a relatively jargon free prose and are willing to engage their critics dialogically (Longino 1990, 1993). Agriculture and Human Values has contributed to this sort of dialogic discourse by requiring that authors prose be intelligible to those outside of the discipline of the author, that often marginalized perspectives be acknowledged, and that value/policy issues or implications be addressed.

Although the above editorial policies have played an important role in overcoming some of the obstacles to creating a broader range of perspectives that are being taken into consideration in developing long range goals for agriculture, several obstacles remain that we have made less progress is overcoming during our thirteen years of publication. One obstacle to developing more dialogue among disciplinary perspectives is the apparent reluctance of many disciplines within the sciences to engage in the sort of practice that is endemic to the discipline of philosophy: that is the practice of engaging previously published essays in critical discussion. My original invitation to potential authors to engage previously published articles in critical discourse has gone largely ignored. I believe that we have published less than half a dozen such pieces in spite of my repeated pleas for essays for our Discussion Department. Part of the reason for this, I suspect, is the publication practices of many of the sciences, which precludes criticism of disciplinary-monitored and peer reviewed publications. The idea seems to be that if a piece of research has passed peer review and published in a respectable journal of that discipline, then it can be cited but not publicly criticized, or, that a discussion piece focused on criticizing another piece of research is not a serious contribution to scholarship. By contrast, such criticism is a fundamental practice of most of the humanities. Another obstacle that we have not made adequate progress in overcoming is the reluctance of those outside of the humanities to engage in a critical analysis of values. Although a signicant degree of progress has been made in challenging the bifurcation of discourse into facts and values, the ghost of the subjectivity of values and the objectivity of facts still seems to haunt us. It is all too common for our science contributors to treat values as facts about peoples subjective preferences rather than facts about what people believe to be worthwhile and hence subject to critical analysis. In our annual society meetings, in spite of our commitment to raising and addressing value issues, there is not nearly enough discussion either about the values we, as discussants hold, nor about how to critically appraise our values and work toward the development of a system of values that can be shared by a larger community. Replacing the disciplinary atomistic approach to the analysis of agricultural policy issues with the conceptual apparatus implied by thinking of these issues in terms of food systems is a step in this direction (Kloppenburg et al. 1993). Kate Clancys Presidential address to the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society meetings in St Louis last year (which is forthcoming in the next issue of the journal) makes the plea for a greater commitment by the Society to incorporate such discussions, especially at a time when the larger society is lamenting the loss of community values and shared concern for the issue of justice.

4 The current number

RICHARD P. HAYNES

Clancys plea to Society members is to work toward the development of a philosophy of agriculture that integrates the disparate activities that fragment our larger societys population into interest groups. Interest groups do not know how to serve their own interests responsibly because they do not experience the connectedness of their activities to the activities of other groups. As educators, it is our responsibility not only to make the connections clear, but to offer up a vision of a less fragmented community that can be linked to the development of public policy. Instead, as concerned specialists, we have tended to promote single issue thinking. Single issue thinking is lamented by the authors of two of the papers in the current number. In Science policy and moral purity: The case of animal biotechnology, Paul B. Thompson equates single issue thinking with the notion of moral purity. In the case of animal biotechnology, Moral purication proceeds by isolating the social, environmental, animal, and human health impacts of biotechnology from each other in terms of discrete categories of moral signicance. Moral purication is an exclusionary strategy maintained alike by scientists and the regulatory bureaucracy that depends on them: Seen from one vantage point, the system of purication establishes a leviathan of science and government. The basic assumptions that partition knowledge also partition government power. Those who do not share the basic assumptions or who rely on ordinary language rather than technical denitions of concepts are outsiders. Their arguments have no standing and cannot be converted into policy by the agencies that have been established with limited mandates. Scientists and scientic organizations, in the meantime, have been placed at the center of the leviathan. They control the denitions that are used to translate regulatory mandates into operational terms. They do the research that will form the empirical basis for policy decisions. Les Levidow & Susan Carr raise a similar concern in their paper, How biotechnology regulation sets a risk/ethics boundary, in discussing how the state manages public criticism of the industrializing R&D carried out by public sector research: : : : the state separates risk and ethics, while assigning both realms to specialists. The risk/ethics boundary encourages public deference to the expert assessments of both safety regulators and professional ethicists. Biotechnology embodies a contentious model of control over nature and society, yet this issue becomes displaced and fragmented into various administrative controls. At stake are the prospects for democratizing the problem- denitions that guide R&D priorities. In the third paper, Inquiry for the public good: Democratic participation in agricultural research, Gerad

Middendorf & Lawrence Busch examine some of the important issues surrounding citizen participation in science and technology policy : : : and review and assess various institutional mechanisms for participation that have been implemented in diverse settings by institutions of science and technology. They conclude by arguing that a closer approximation of the public good can be achieved by encouraging the participation of the fullest range possible of constituents as an integral part of the process of setting research priorities. In the fourth paper, The bST debate: The relationship between awareness and acceptance of technological advances, David E. Smith, J. Robert Skalnik & Patricia C. Skalnik draw upon their analysis of the bST debate and the difference between the reaction of the state in the USA and in the EU to regulate its use to conclude that lack of awareness among government ofcials and the public at large serves as a signicant impediment to the adoption of new technologies. Accordingly, delays may occur in delivery of signicant social benets to the population as a whole. Obviously, the issue extends beyond bST. In Objection mapping in determining group and individual concerns regarding genetic engineering, the fth paper in this current number of Agriculture and Human Values, authors Frewer, Hedderley, Howard, and Shepherd examine overall patterns of objection to different applications of biotechnology, and conclude that although wider concerns of the public about the engineering of animal and human genetic material cannot be ignored, rejection of genetic engineering is more likely if the application is focused on humans or animals, or if the technology is discussed in general terms rather than in terms of specic applications. Therefore, Providing information about the tangible benets and risks of the technology is more informative to respondents, and this would seem to be the most effective route to the establishment of public discourse about the technology and its subsequent evolution. In the nal paper, Initiating home-style issues in a postreform congress, William P. Browne & Won K. Paik challenge over simplied views about how policy gets developed by the US Congress. They examine what they call the two-worlds view of Congress, which draws a dichotomy between home work and Washington work. Their analysis examines initiators of specic issues within one large and encompassing policy domain in Congress, agriculture. Their ndings, especially the high rate of issue initiator success, call into serious question many existing assumptions about exclusivity and specialization in committee deliberations. It suggests instead that homestyle behavior comes to Washington politics in ways that expand signicantly the range of policy players.

EDITORIAL

The journals scope and its future directions As we have already indicated, Agriculture and Human Values seeks to create educational and scholarly junctures among the humanities, the social sciences, food and nutrition studies, and the agricultural disciplines, and to promote an ethical, social, and biological understanding of agriculture. Contributions on a broad range of topics relating to the main journal theme are welcome, but they should be addressed to a general academic readership while maintaining high standards of scholarship. We have a commitment to continue to publish essays on normative issues in assessing conventional and alternative food production, marketing, distribution, and consumption systems, on the sociology of knowledge in the areas of agriculture, nutrition, and food systems, on the application of science and technology studies to agriculture and food systems, on the philosophy of the applied agricultural sciences, on critical theory applied to agriculturally related topics, on social, economic, and agricultural development theory, and on other value issues related to production and consumption systems, including topics on environmental values and on animal welfare. We will also continue to publish book reviews and reports and have not given up on our efforts to develop a discussion genre in our pages. For the benet of readers who are not familiar with our past publication policies, I will briey review the criteria we use for judging submissions and for determining what genre that we will assign them to. Agriculture and Human Values publishes articles, discussion pieces, in the eld reports, state of the eld reports, and book reviews. The working denition of these categories follow: Articles must address one or more issues that have been raised in the relevant literature and be thought by its reviewers to make some signicant contribution to that body of literature toward a resolution of those issues. Discussion pieces focus on one or more articles that have been previously published in Agriculture and Human Values in order to disagree with the analysis or the conclusions of its author(s). In the eld reports describe current research, education, or curriculum development projects, including case studies, when such projects are thought by the editors to hold a special interest for our readers. The distinction between In the eld reports and articles is sometimes a subtle one. We submit both types of papers to the review process (as we also do for discussion pieces). Generally, papers that report on or make observations about some practice, but do not attempt to illuminate the practice in terms of a body of theoretical literature, would be published in this section. State of the eld reports, generally of article length, are reports designed to illuminate a set of issues in terms of a

body of relevant literature without attempting to advocate some particular resolution or set of resolutions to those issues. Literature reviews and limited annotated bibliographies, and state of the eld reports are examples of the type of work that might be classieds as suitable for this section. Reports commissioned by organizations on topics that are of special interest to our readers are especially welcome (see, for example, Carlos M. Correa, Sovereign and property rights over plant genetic resources, 12, 4: 5879). Book reviews on relevant books or groups of books are welcome. In most issues of the journal, we publish a books received list to announce books that publishers have sent us for review and to inform potential reviewers of what is available. We have a considerable backlog of books that no one has offered to review. Many of these books are signicant contributions to the literature in elds of interest common to our readership. Potential reviewers are encouraged to scan current and back issue lists for books that they might wish to review, and then to contact the editor by e-mail to determine whether the book is still available for reviewing (e-mail: aghuval@ nervm.nerdc.u.edu). Book review lengths vary from a page to several pages. Book review essays that approach article length will be peer reviewed. We will continue our practice of publishing special numbers devoted to the examination of some issue or set of issues. These special numbers, in the past, have frequently been organized through the efforts of a guest editor who originally suggests the special topic, helps develop a call for papers, and participates in the review process and editing. We extend a continuing invitation to prospective guest editors to suggest new topics for exploration and to discuss with us how to develop a special number of the journal on this topic. Currently, Professor Jeffrey Lockwood, Department of Plant, Soil, and Insect Sciences of the University of Wyoming is serving as guest editor of a special number on the theme, The ethics of biological control. We published an article by Lockwood on this topic in the Winter 1996 issue of Agriculture and Human Values. The call for papers was published in the Fall 1995 issue with the deadline set for a year later. We are currently reviewing nine submissions for this special number, and will most likely publish the special number as the Summer or Fall issue this year. A call for papers for a memorial issue for Dr Joel Schor was published in our Winter 1966 issue. The theme was announced as The myriad faces of the USDA Impacts past, present, and future. Since the original deadline for submissions has past without any applicants, the call will be reissued. Joel Schor, who died unexpectedly in the Spring of 1996, devoted much of his scholarly efforts, as an employee of the USDA, to an investigation of

RICHARD P. HAYNES

the effects of USDA and land-grant research and extension on marginalized farmers, mainly the poor, Black, descendants of former slaves in southern USA. Topics for this memorial issue will include historical studies of the effects of USDA policy/research activities on the many constituencies it has purported to serve since its inception in 1862; sociological or political-economic analyses of the current or potential impacts of government-sponsored research on the broad spectrum of affected parties; critical or philosophical studies of the past, present, or future missions and directions of USDA and land-grant system work, including the new biotechnologies; and, more generally, special topics on those subjects Joel was committed to: the poor, the disenfranchised, minorities in food and ber production. The new deadline for submissions is 1 December 1997. Several years ago (the Summer of 1991) we issued a call for papers for a special number on the theme Improving the well-being of animals in agriculture. That special number never materialized, since no submissions were received. One of my goals is to reissue this call and to produce a special number on this topic within the next two years. As contributors, we would want papers from philosophers, animal scientists, ethologists, zoologists, veterinarians, and others interested in this topic. From the perspective of a philosopher interested in adopting Paul Thompsons hybridization approach to ethical thinking (see Science policy and moral purity: The case of animal biotechnology, this issue), animal welfare issues offer an excellent example around which to sketch out a topography of the various departments of applied philosophy. Since such a topography might prove useful to those of our readers who are not entirely familiar with the domain that philosophers encircle as their own, I have chosen to use my editorial prerogative to present a sketch of how this philosopher views the interelatedness of animal welfare issues.

because they have different conceptions of animal wellbeing. One question that is often asked when thinking about animal well-being concerns the extent to which it is appropriate to ascribe to non-human animals the same welfare states (or concepts) that we ascribe to humans. Welfare states such as health or physical wellbeing, though not entirely uncontroversial, are less so than states that appear to involve some mental or psychological component, such as happiness. One position about what constitutes non-human animal welfare seems committed to the view that it is inappropriate to ascribe to non-human animals the same psychological states that we ascribe to humans, or, at least that we should be very skeptical about which human states we ascribe to non-human animals. Uncritically ascribing human states to non-humans is often referred to as anthropomorphism. It is common currently for philosophers to subscribe to what they call critical anthropomorphism, which is the view that while it is appropriate to ascribe human states to non-humans, we should do so with a critical awareness about possible differences (Donnelley & Nolan 1990). One of the major difculties in resolving this question is that we often do not have a very clear conception of what these states consist of for humans, let alone non-humans, so that we lack an understanding of what criteria we should employ in determining whether non-humans are capable of being in the conditions that we are concerned about. Questions about how we conceptualize such states in humans are congregated under the heading philosophical (or moral) psychology. 2. Philosophical and moral psychology. Philosophical psychology is concerned with the following kinds of general questions: How do we study and know about the psychological states of humans? (This question is also addressed in the area of the philosophy of psychology, which is a branch of normative philosophy of science.) How are these states related to physical states? There is a long philosophical tradition in which it is typical to assume that individuals have some privileged access to their own mental (or psychological) life, but have to work to nd out about that of others. Some have thought that we just know our own minds by direct inspection, but have to infer what is going on in other minds. Some have held the position that we might not ever be sure that anyone but ourselves even have minds. It is easy to argue that we have good evidence that other humans have a mental life, because we can discuss that life with them. It is more difcult to inquire into the mental life of animals with whom we cannot (as easily) carry on such discussions. Moral psychology is concerned with understanding those psychological states that are constitutive of psychological well-being. They include such notions as desire, wanting, choosing, preferring, being happy, being satised, being in pain, being dissatised, being unhappy,

Philosophical issues in animal welfare: Sketch of a topography 1. What makes an issue a philosophical one? As a discipline, philosophy seems to be concerned with an identication and examination of the basic assumptions of an area of inquiry or of a social practice. Philosophical inquiry tends to be conceptual (rather than empirical) though this is a relative distinction. Issues are important questions that are difcult to resolve because people are divided as to which answers they favor (or which position they take) and there seems to be good reasons to support contending positions. An issue is philosophical (or has a philosophical dimension) when there is disagreement about how it should be conceptualized. For example, people often disagree about what constitutes animal well-being

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etc. Since most of these seem to involve some form of psychic awareness, or mental life, some philosophers have argued that we cannot know to what extent nonhuman animals are capable of being in such states since we dont know anything (or much) about their mental life, or even whether they have one. Some philosophers have argued that all of these states imply an awareness of oneself as being the subject-of-a life, which entails having a sense of oneself as having lived in the past and wanting to extend that life into the future, but this type of awareness is possible only if one has a self-concept. The next step in this argument is to claim that without a language it is not possible to have any concepts at all, since the ability to employ concepts in thinking and the ability to use language are intimately connected. The question about how we can know whether others have a mental life similar to our own could be thought of as an epistemological question. 3. Epistemology or theory of knowledge. Questions about what criteria we should use to sort out our beliefs or hypotheses in terms of the degree of credibility we should accord them are often congregated by philosophers under the heading epistemology. Epistemology is concerned with How we know. Sometimes philosophers distinguish between descriptive epistemology, which is concerned with describing how people actually acquire what they consider to be a credible systems of beliefs, and normative epistemology, which is concerned with identifying the criteria that we should apply to any system of beliefs in order to warrant our claiming that it deserves credibility. Often scientists or science proponents claim that science-based beliefs deserve more credibility than beliefs that are not science based. This appears to be a claim based on a normative theory of knowledge. Disputes about animal welfare sometimes have their roots in epistemological disagreements. Science proponents often consider the methodologies followed by the various sciences to be models for knowledge acquisition. Critics sometimes call such a view scientism, and argue that while science does produce knowledge, scientic knowledge is as circumscribed as any other type of knowledge production. Questions about what sort of knowledge science does produce are often congregated under the heading philosophy of science. 4. Philosophy of science. As in epistemology, it is common to distinguish between normative and descriptive questions. Philosophers have tended to be more concerned with normative questions: What justies the claim that scientists often make that their methodologies produce a more credible set of beliefs? What methodologies should the various sciences commit themselves to in order to warrant such a claim? Or, more generally, what warrants our belief that over the centuries science has made intellec-

tual progress? Or, What is scientic knowledge about? Is science objective (is it capable of disengaging itself from what it studies so that it can regard the object of study as it is in itself, or does science necessarily objectify what it studies (regard it as something that has properties that are of interest to the scientist). If science necessarily objecties what it studies, then that would have serious import for science-based information about animal welfare. Descriptive philosophy of science is done more frequently by historians and sociologists of science, many of whom claim that their studies about what criteria scientists actually use in xing their beliefs and what environmental factors inuence what these criteria shall be show a great discrepancy between the methodological or epistemological beliefs of the scientic community and the actual practices they employ. Finally, what are the links between these areas of philosophical inquiry and ethics? 5. Ethics. Philosophical ethics is generally concerned with understanding the concepts and criteria we employ (or should employ) in engaging in ethical discourse. Etymologically ethics is the science (or technical knowledge) about how to acquire good character (or good habits). Character is sometimes dened as a set of dispositions to make choices in choice-making situations. Good character is the disposition to make good choices. Choices, among other things, are concerned with producing things, conserving things, and respecting things, and so ethics is thought to be a branch of value theory, which is concerned with identifying and justifying criteria for what is of value or what it valuable, or what is good. Good character requires that we have the right values and act in accord with them. Again, it is common to distinguish between descriptive and normative ethics. What values do the members of various groups actually share, and what values should they share if their values (their beliefs in what is a good state of affairs) are to be warranted or correct. Philosophers often distinguish between character traits that are primarily self-regarding (that dispose the individual to promote their own long-term and enlightened interests) and those traits that are primarily other regarding, where other refers to others that are thought to have interests analogous to their own interests. To say that some other has moral considerability is to claim that this other has such interests. Whether this assumption is warranted in cases where the other seems to be radically different from oneself, and what such interests are is these cases, is clearly a question that needs to be addressed. One important question is, Do non-human animals have moral considerability, and if so, what considerations should a person of good character give them? Moral theory is concerned with identifying the criteria that should be (or are) used to decide whether a type

RICHARD P. HAYNES

of being has moral considerability and determining what consideration such beings deserve under varying social situations. Professional ethics is often regarded by philosophers as a branch of philosophical ethics applied to people who nd themselves in special positions of authority based on their claim to have authoritative knowledge about how to produce good conditions in or for others. DVMs are supposed to have authoritative knowledge about animal welfare, when it is lacking or present and how to produce or preserve it. As professionals they are hired by clients to produce a client-centered value. But their patients are beings who have their own interests. One ethical dilemma that DVMs must face is how to adjudicate conicts between client-centered values and patient-centered values. When such conicts occur, they are sometimes resolved by denying that there is any conict. This denial is sometimes justied by arguing that the patient has no interests independently of those interests that the client has in the patient. If the professional is an authority on the well-being of their patient and this authority is based on the claim that it has science-based information about the patient, then the issue is whether science-based information is objective or objectifying. 6. Social and political philosophy. One of the major questions in this branch of philosophy concerns the relationship between individual and social welfare. How should individuals organize themselves socially, and how should social groups reproduce their social knowledge in their young? What values should we try to develop in others when we help develop good character? One of the most important linking questions in this area concerns the notion of authority. What criteria should be used in deciding who is entitled to act in behalf of others because they are more informed about the well-being or interests of others and of the group? Contributors to the projected special number on Improving the well-being of animals in agriculture should try to t their paper into the above framework or propose amending it to accommodate their contribution.

Manuscript submissions will now be made directly to Kluwers Journals Editorial Ofce rather than to the editors ofce in Gainesville, Florida. Submissions must be accompanied by a diskette and must include an Abstract, some Key words (with a maximium of ve), and a several sentence Biosketch of each of the authors. Except those of essay length, however, book reviews or requests for books to review may be sent directly to the editor, whose address will remain Deptment of Philosophy, University of Florida, P.O. Box 118545, Gainesville, FL 32611-8545, USA. Agriculture and Human Values will remain the ofcial journal of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society. All private subscriptions will be handled through the ofce of the Societys Executive Secretary and are available only to Society members. The current annual membership fee, which includes the cost of subscription to Agriculture and Human Values, is US$ 60. In addition to a subscription to the journal, members receive the Society newsletter, have access to the Societys e-mail bulletin board, and may attend the Societys annual meetings at a reduced registration fee. For the past several years, and for at least the next several years, the Society holds its annual meetings in conjunction with the Association for the Study of Food and Society. The 1997 meetings will be held at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, 59 June. Meetings for 1998 are planned for Toronto, and for 1999, Asilomar, California. The Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society is an organization of professionals dedicated to an open and free discussion of issues related to an understanding of the values that underlie alternative visions of the food and agricultural systems. It was founded in 1987. The annual three-day meetings are attended by people from a variety of disciplines, including the social sciences, the humanities, the applied biological and agronomical sciences, nutritionist, nutrition education, the food sciences, ecology, psychology, extension education, resource development, agricultural communication, and home economics. Student participation is encouraged. Meetings include sessions in which papers are presented, poster sessions, panel discussions, and eld tours, as well as the annual business meeting. Attendance ranges between 100 and 200 people and the atmosphere is friendly, informal, intellectually stimulating, and intimate. Applications for membership should be directed to the Executive Secretary, Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society, Department of Philosophy, University of Florida, P.O. Box 118545, Gainesville, FL 32611-8545, USA. A copy of The Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society history is available to Society members upon request to the Executive Secretary free of charge.

A new publisher The current number is the rst issue of Agriculture and Human Values published by Kluwer Academic Publishers instead of Agriculture and Human Values, Inc. What implications does having a new publisher have for the future of this journal? One implication was evident to you when you rst set eyes on the current number: A new cover design with the table of contents of the back cover instead of the front cover. I will remain as editor for the foreseeable future and there will be no change in editorial policy.

EDITORIAL

There will be minimal changes in the journal format. All announcements will be presented on two pages of the journal devoted exclusively to Society announcements. Requests for announcement space should be sent directly to the Executive Secretary at the above address. Preferences will be given to Society members or to business of special interest to Society members, on a space available basis. All other advertisements must be handled directly through Kluwers Journals Editorial Ofce. Manuscript texts (double-spaced, all pages numbered throughout, in ve copies with disk) should be sent directly to Agriculture and Human Values Journals Editorial Ofce P.O. Box 990 3300 AZ Dordrecht, The Netherlands or P.O. Box 283 Accord Station Hingham, MA 02018-0283, USA. The review process will be carried out through the Journals Editorial Ofce. Institutional subscriptions will be handled by Kluwer Academic Publishers, Distribution Center, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Requests for permission to reprint previously published material should now be made directly to Kluwers rights department. Requests can be made by e-mail or fax either to Kluwer rights and permissions ofcer, Ms Berendina van Straalen, e-mail: vanStraalen@wkap.nl, or to Hendrik-Jan van Leusen, e-mail: vanLeusen@wkap.nl, fax: +31 78 6392-254.

References
Donnelley, S. & Nolan, K., eds. (1990). Animals, science, and ethics. A special supplement to The Hastings Center Report, May/June. See especially, Section III. Haynes, R.P. & Lanier, R. (1982). Agriculture, change, and human values. Proceedings of a multidisciplinary conference, 1821 October 1982. 2 vols. Gainesville, FL. Kloppenburg, J. Jr, Hendrickson, J. & Stevenson, G.W. (1996). Coming into the foodshed, Agriculture and Human Values 13(3): 3342. Longino, H.E. (1990). Science as social knowledge: Values and objectivity in scientic inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Longino, H.E. (1993). Essential tensions Phase Two: Feminist, philosophical, and social studies of science, in L.M. Antony & C. Witt (eds.), A mind of ones own. Feminist essays on reason and objectivity (pp. 257272). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.