Jessica Pierce

Jessica Pierce (born October 21, 1965) is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and writer. She currently has a loose affiliation with the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado Denver, but considers herself mostly independent. She has previously worked variously at the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and Randolph-Macon Women's College, having studied at the University of Virginia, Harvard Divinity School and Scripps College.

Early in her career, she focused on questions of human health and the environment, co-authoring Environmentalism and the New Logic of Business (Oxford, 2000) and The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care (Oxford, 2004). Since the 2000s, much of her work has focused on human relationships with animals. She collaborated with Marc Bekoff for Wild Justice (Chicago, 2010), and authored The Last Walk (Chicago, 2012) and Run, Spot, Run (Chicago, 2016).

Career[]

Pierce completed her Bachelor of Arts at Scripps College, before studying for a Master of Divinity at Divinity School of Harvard University. She then received a PhD in religious studies (specialising in religious ethics) at the University of Virginia.^[1][2] In 1993, she briefly worked as an assistant professor in the Randolph-Macon Women's College Department of Religion. From 1993 to 2000, she was an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in the Humanities and Law section of the Department of Preventive and Societal Medicine.^[1] Pierce's first book, Environmentalism and the New Logic of Business, co-written with R. Edward Freeman and Richard H. Dodd, was published by Oxford University Press in 2000.^[3] She was a visiting fellow at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law from 1990 to 2000, and then, from 2001 to 2006, she lectured at the University of Colorado Boulder, working in departments focussed respectively on philosophy, religious studies and environmental studies.^[1] During her time at Colorado, her second book, The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care (co-written with Andrew Jameton) was published by Oxford,^[4] and her third, Morality Play: Case Studies in Ethics, was published by McGraw-Hill in 2005^[5] (with a second edition published by Waveland Press in 2013^[6]). Pierce co-edited the reader Contemporary Bioethics with George Rendels, which was published by Oxford in 2009.^[7]

Having previously focussed her research on human health, including her early research interests in the connections between health and the environment, Pierce began to focus her research on animals in the 2000s.^[2] She co-authored Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals with the ecologist and ethologist Marc Bekoff, and this was published in 2010 by the University of Chicago Press.^[8] In the book, the authors draw upon evolutionary theory and ethology to argue that many animals display evidence of consciousness, as well as a range of behaviours which they categorise under the categories of cooperation, empathy and justice. These observations are used to make a case that animals may have a sense of morality.^{[9][10][11][12][13][14]} Subsequently, her sole-authored books The Last Walk: Reflections on our Pets at the End of Their Lives and Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets were published by Chicago in 2012 and 2016 respectively.^[15][16] The Last Walk explores the ethics of companion death, with a focus on Pierce's own relationship with Ody, a Hungarian vizsla who was at one time her companion.^{[17][18][19][20]} Run, Spot, Run explores the ethical ambiguity of pet ownership in general.^[21][22][23]

As of 2016, she is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado Denver.^[1] However, this connection is a loose one; she no longer teaches, and considers herself an "independent entity", focusing on writing instead of the administration and bureaucracy of university work.^[17] She has two books forthcoming; with Bekoff, she has written a book entitled Freedoms for Animals: Compassion and Coexistence in the Anthropocene, which is to published by Beacon Press, and with the veterinarians Amir Shanan and Tami Shearer, she has written Hospice and Palliative Care for Companion Animals: Principles and Practice, which is to be published by Wiley.^[2]

Selected bibliography[]

Pierce has authored or co-authored over 30 articles in peer reviewed journals and chapters in scholarly edited collections.^[24]

• Freeman, R. Edward, Jessica Pierce and Richard H. Dodd (2000). Environmentalism and the New Logic of Business. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Pierce, Jessica, and Andrew Jameton (2004). The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Pierce, Jessica (2005). Morality Play. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Pierce, Jessica and George Rendels, eds. (2009). Contemporary Bioethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Bekoff, Marc, and Jessica Pierce (2010). Wild Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Pierce, Jessica (2012). The Last Walk. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Pierce, Jessica (2016). Run, Spot, Run. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

References[]

External links[]

• Official site
• All Dogs Go to Heaven, Pierce's blog with Psychology Today