People disagree. Along with doubt, modesty and curiosity, disagreement is one of the most valuable assets reasoning beings can have. Disagreements give us alternatives. Sometimes we need to decide among alternatives. This paper is for such times; it addresses the development of a rational model for the resolution of disagreement. The goal is to reach rational agreement, or to reach the stage at which disagreement can be clearly described and turned over to rational consensus theories. A rarely noticed problem with all such rational consensus models is that they do not provide for generating either rational agreement or clearly described disagreement before turning to procedures designed to produce consensus. One purpose of this paper is to close that gap.

This paper examines the often-mentioned similarity in comparative moral philosophy between the Hindu Text Bhagavad-Gita’s notion of duty and Kant’s notion of duty. It is commonly argued that they are similar in their deontological nature where one is asked to perform one’s duty for the sake of duty only. I consider three related questions from Gita’s and Kant’s perspectives. First, What is the source of our duties: Self or Nature; second, How do we know that an act x is our duty, and third, What would be an acceptable example of a duty. In all these three cases I show that their respective answers diverge quite clearly and conclude by arguing that the reason for this divergence lies in their respective contexts: while the ideal of Kantian morality is to become a member of the ‘kingdom of ends’, the aims of the Gita’s system of duties are the sustenance of the social order and the realization of one’s identity with the Supreme Self.

In this paper, I attempt to demonstrate that environmental virtue ethics (EVE) fails to provide sufficient justification for the hunting of nonhuman animals. In order to do this, I examine an EVE justification for the hunting of nonhuman animals and argue that it gives rise to the following dilemma: either EVE justifies the hunting of both human and nonhuman animals, or it justifies the hunting of neither. I then submit that the first lemma ought to be rejected as absurd and, thus, that the second lemma ought to be embraced