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Be a Professional: Attend to the InsectsAmerican Entomologist 3 (65): 176-179. 2019.What kinds of ethical considerations, if any, are relevant to research, management, or conservation efforts involving insects? What limits might be appropriate for those actions? These are questions we ask as members of a profession—one that’s devoted to the study of certain organisms. We probably won’t make any progress as a discipline by beginning the way philosophers generally do: namely, by trying to assess whether insects have intrinsic value; that is, whether they have value even when we d…Read more
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Rawls Goes to ChurchTheologica. forthcoming.Many mainline Protestant communities want to be welcoming while preserving their identities; they want to be shaped by the central claims of the faith while making room for those who doubt. And crucially, they want to do this in a way that leads to vibrant, growing communities, where more and more people gather to worship, encourage one another, and live out the Gospel. How should the Episcopal Church—and other mainline Protestant denominations, insofar as they’re similar—try to achieve these go…Read more
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15Quantifying the Valuation of Animal Welfare Among AmericansJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 33 (2): 261-282. 2020.There is public support in the United States and Europe for accounting for animal welfare in national policies on food and agriculture. Although an emerging body of research has measured animals’ capacity to suffer, there has been no specific attempt to analyze how this information is interpreted by the public or how exactly it should be reflected in policy. The aim of this study was to quantify Americans’ preferences about farming methods and the suffering they impose on different species to ge…Read more
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44Shelly Kagan, "How to Count Animals, More or Less." Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 39 (4): 180-182. 2019.
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760Don’t Demean “Invasives”: Conservation and Wrongful Species DiscriminationAnimals 871 (9). 2019.It is common for conservationists to refer to non-native species that have undesirable impacts on humans as “invasive”. We argue that the classification of any species as “invasive” constitutes wrongful discrimination. Moreover, we argue that its being wrong to categorize a species as invasive is perfectly compatible with it being morally permissible to kill animals—assuming that conservationists “kill equally”. It simply is not compatible with the double standard that conservationists tend to e…Read more
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983The Problem with Person‐Rearing Accounts of Moral StatusThought: A Journal of Philosophy 8 (2): 119-128. 2019.Agnieszka Jaworska and Julie Tannenbaum recently developed the ingenious and novel person‐rearing account of moral status, which preserves the commonsense judgment that humans have a higher moral status than nonhuman animals. It aims to vindicate speciesist judgments while avoiding the problems typically associated with speciesist views. We argue, however, that there is good reason to reject person‐rearing views. Person‐rearing views have to be coupled with an account of flourishing, which will …Read more
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5Collecting Insects to Conserve Them: A Call for Ethical CautionInsect Conservation and Biodiversity 12 (3). 2019.1. Insect sampling for the purpose of measuring biodiversity – as well as entomological research more generally – largely assumes that insects lack consciousness. Here, we briefly present some arguments that insects are conscious and encourage entomologists to revisit their ethical codes in light of them. 2. Specifically, we adapt the Three Rs, guidelines proposed in 1959 by WMS Russell and RL Burch that have become the dominant way of thinking about the ethics of using animals in research. 3. T…Read more
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39How Lewis Can Meet the Integration ChallengeJournal of Philosophical Research 44 129-144. 2019.We show that Lewis’s modal realism, and his serviceability-based argument for it, cohere with his epistemological contextualism. Modal realism explains why serviceability-based reasoning in metaphysics might be reliable, while Lewis’s contextualism explains why Lewis can properly ignore the possibility that serviceability isn’t reliable, at least when doing metaphysics. This is because Lewis’s contextualism includes a commitment to a kind of pragmatic encroachment, so that whether a subject know…Read more
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30How to Reply to Some Ethical Objections to EntomophagyAnnals of the Entomological Society of America 112 (6). 2019.Some people have moral objections to insect consumption. After explaining the philosophical motivations for such objections, I discuss three of them, suggesting potential replies. The first is that insect consumption ignores the precautionary principle, which we can gloss here as “Don’t know, don’t farm.” In other words, while there might be evidence that insects are not conscious, we do not know that they are not; so, we should not take the moral risk associated with killing them en masse. The …Read more
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60Boycotting and Public MourningRes Publica 26 (1): 89-102. 2019.Some people feel that they should boycott Israel or their local anti-LGBTQ bakery, despite it being difficult to establish these obligations based on standard consequentialist or deontic considerations. I develop a framework on which such self-reports are accurate: I propose that we see some boycotting as akin to a public mourning practice, such as the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva. Mourning practices are complex and socially recognized ways of honoring the dead, as well as expressing and di…Read more
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7Individuals in the WildAnimal Sentience 23 (8). 2018.If many wild animals have net negative lives, then we have to consider how likely it is that the good for animals, considered as individuals, aligns with the good for species, or the climate, or the preservation of wild spaces.
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Introduction to Modal Epistemology After RationalismIn Bob Fischer & Felipe Leon (eds.), Modal Epistemology After Rationalism, Springer. 2016.
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343Ethics, Left and Right: The Moral Issues that Divide Us (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2019.The only contemporary moral problems text to focus directly on the ethics of current, divisive political issues, Ethics, Left and Right features newly commissioned essays on twenty contentious debates, written expressly with undergraduate students in mind. It offers two position pieces on each issue--one left-leaning, one right--followed by a reply from each author, giving you and your students the opportunity to engage in in-depth discussions of serious issues. The essays cover compelling topic…Read more
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11New Waves in Philosophy of Religion. Edited by Yujin Nagasawa and Erik J. Wielenberg (review)Heythrop Journal 50 (5): 908-910. 2009.
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17Knowledge of God (Blackwell Great Debates in Philosophy). By Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley (review)Heythrop Journal 50 (3): 513-515. 2009.
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8388Field Deaths in Plant AgricultureJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31 (4): 409-428. 2018.We know that animals are harmed in plant production. Unfortunately, though, we know very little about the scale of the problem. This matters for two reasons. First, we can’t decide how many resources to devote to the problem without a better sense of its scope. Second, this information shortage throws a wrench in arguments for veganism, since it’s always possible that a diet that contains animal products is complicit in fewer deaths than a diet that avoids them. In this paper, then, we have two …Read more
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16Kenneth Asher, Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions. Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 38 (1): 1-3. 2018.
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17Review of Steven McMullen's Animals and the Economy (review)Between the Species 20 (1). 2017.N/A.
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44Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating (review)Philosophical Review 126 (2): 295-300. 2017.
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21Theology in Search of Foundations. By Randal Rauser. Pp. vii, 313, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, £60.00 (review)Heythrop Journal 55 (1): 152-153. 2014.
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7Teaching for Our GoodIn Steven M. Cahn, Alexandra Bradner & Andrew P. Mills (eds.), Philosophers in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching, Hackett Publishing Company. 2018.
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17Speech and War: Rethinking the Ethics of Speech RestrictionsIn Donald Alexander Downs & Chris W. Surprenant (eds.), The Value and Limits of Academic Speech: Philosophical, Political, and Legal Perspectives, Routledge. 2018.Universities regulate speech in various ways. How should we assess when such restrictions are justified, if they ever are? Here, we propose an answer to this question. In short, we argue that we should think about speech restrictions as being like acts of war, and so should approach their justification using just war theory. We also make some suggestions about its implications. For instance, one of the jus ad bellum requirements for a just war is that you have a reasonable hope of success; you s…Read more
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12Animals as Honorary HumansIn Andrew Linzey & Clair Linzey (eds.), Ethical Vegetarianism and Veganism, Routledge. 2018.Many philosophers who defend veganism are not defending strict veganism. Although they think that you shouldn’t support animal agriculture, they also think there’s nothing wrong with eating roadkill, or meat from a dumpster. 1 Granted, they claim, there are a whole host of reasons not to support animal agriculture, but if an animal’s body is available due to an accident, or if consumption wouldn’t support animal agriculture, then eating is morally permissible. Let’s call the diet that these argu…Read more
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252Arguments for Consuming Animal ProductsIn Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 241-266. 2017.What can be said in favor of consuming animal products? This chapter surveys the options, with special focus on it attempts to exploit pro-vegan principles for anti-vegan ends. Utilitarian, rights-based, contractualist, and agrarian proposals are explored, as well as some recent arguments that attempt to revive a form of speciesism. Ultimately, the chapter considers how such arguments might inform a broad case for consuming animal products—that is, one that might earn respect from those in a var…Read more
Rochester, NY, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Animal Ethics |
Well-Being |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Moral Psychology |
Normative Ethics |