Ethics of Eating and Drinking Food and Relations

This book presents and discusses some of the problems that are increasingly emerging today in our relationship with food as well as in our style of eating and drinking. The first three chapters focuses on issues concerning eating, and on our relationship with what we can eat. The fourth chapter deals with the act of drinking, with our relationship with water, and discusses justice aspects in the use of water. The main idea is that the acts of eating and drinking are to be understood as relationships, i.e. as a way human beings relate to other beings. As such, they can be performed ethically well or badly. Therefore, an ethics of eating and of drinking should be developed. Not only the book highlights some key ethical problems associated with the act of eating and drinking, yet it also describes some ethically sustainable solutions to them. It ends with a list of reflections, which are intended to guide our choices in the relations with food and drinks with a normative approach. Mainly written for university students and researchers in the field of applied ethics, this book will also offer an inspiring reading to a wider audience of academics and professionals.

Eating as a Wrong Relationship.- The Sacred Meal. Religion and Secularism, amidst Need and Desire.- Food Ethics as Relational Ethics.- The ethics of drinking.- Conclusion.

Adriano Fabris is Full Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Pisa. He also teaches Ethics of Communication, serving as Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research in Communication at the same University. President of the Consulta Nazionale di Filosofia, and member of the Board of Directors of the Fondazione Golinelli, he is also co-supervisor of the Project “Legal and Ethical Design of Trustworthy AI Systems” of the Fondazione FAIR, Pisa. Adriano Fabris serves as Director of the research Institute ReTe (Religions and Theology) of the University of Lugano (USI), at the Faculty of Theology, Switzerland, where he is promoting research on interreligious dialogue and on digital religions. There, he is also responsible of an international online master’s degree in “Science, Philosophy and Theology of Religions”.  Among his publications: Ethics of Information and Communication Technology (Springer, Cham 2018); and Trust. A Philosophical Approach (ed., Springer, Cham 2020).