What I've been up to
Rats, moral status, food, and persons
Why urban wildlife matters: Yes, even rats
This was the title of my inaugural lecture for the Department of Philosophy at the College of Charleston.
Abstract. A wide range of overlooked animals live among us—in our streets, our backyards, even our houses, right in our midst, at the edge of town, or underground. Until recently, urban critters had met only sparse academic interest, including in animal ethics. But they were hiding in plain sight. What do we owe rats, pigeons, raccoons, and coyotes? Is there anything morally distinctive about urban animals? What implications do they have for urban design and infrastructure?
The talk was recorded but I don’t have an edited version to share yet. Here are my slides though.
Comme un poisson dans l’eau
My interview with Victor Duran-Le Peuch for his podcast (in French):
Also available on all the usual podcast apps.
Support Victor’s work (he does it all by himself!).
Review of Josh Milburn, Food, Justice, and Animals in Utilitas
Josh Milburn, Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 224.
An excerpt.
Imagine a perfect food system. What would you find there? Only good food! Such food tastes good; it is, more broadly, aesthetically valuable. But it also plays cultural and symbolic roles, featuring in people's identities, sense of place, and traditions. Such a system also needs to preclude scarcity, cruelty, and injustice. A perfect food system is just. The central thesis of Josh Milburn's new book is that such a system need not be a vegan food system, even though it would be “rights-respecting” (i.e., would prohibit and prevent the violations of rights of both humans and other animals). Milburn's provocative claim, at least to readers familiar with animal ethics, is that non-vegan, animal-rights-respecting food production methods should not only be allowed by the zoopolis – the polity that recognizes the political rights of other animals – but also institutionally supported.
Milburn situates himself in the wake of Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's influential work but sees a major shortcoming in their zoopolis (as in much of the animal rights literature): it does not make much room for farm animals outside of a few sanctuaries imagined as “intentional communities.” In his zoopolis, you could have your cow and eat her too. Milburn is imagining a world in which we phase out most of the current animal agricultural system yet coexist with many domesticated animals – cows, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, and so on. It is a place where sentient animals cannot be raised, harmed, exploited, and killed to produce food that we do not need, yet where we can, in good conscience, consume meat, fish, eggs, dairy, honey, and many other animal products.
Full review (if you lack institutional access, email me).
Relational nonhuman personhood
The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2023)
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.111…
Abstract. This article defends a relational account of personhood. I argue that the structure of personhood consists of dyadic relations between persons who can wrong or be wronged by one another, even if some of them lack moral competence. I draw on recent work on directed duties to outline the structure of moral communities of persons. The upshot is that we can construct an inclusive theory of personhood that can accommodate nonhuman persons based on shared community membership. I argue that, once we unpack the internal relation between directed duties, moral status, and flourishing, relations can ground personhood and include nonhuman animals.
In plain English, I defend two main claims. First, being a person should be understood in relational terms—it’s something we are with other people, as members of communities. We become persons through our relations to others and the groups that determine what’s good for us. Second, some animals can participate in the communities in which we become persons and so should be considered persons too.
The article is open access so anyone can read and download it for free.