Andrew Lopez

In this paper, I argue that nonhuman animals can be subject to epistemic injustice. I consider Miranda Fricker’s (2007) account of the nature of the harm of epistemic injustice and highlight that it requires that a knower be invested in being recognized as a knower. I argue that a focus on know-how, rather than testimony or concepts for self-understanding and communication, can serve to highlight how nonhuman animals can suffer epistemic injustice without an investment in recognition, by focusing on distributive justice concerning epistemic goods. Drawing from work in animal ethology and movement ecology, I argue that human interruption of animal lifeways has negative downstream effects on nonhuman animals’ ability to acquire ‘answers’ to ‘questions’ they have an interest in answering: namely, acquiring both true beliefs about conspecifics and their environment, as well as acquisition of behaviors and skills that enable everyday successful coping, and that these interruptions can constitute epistemic injustice.

I argue that the philosophy of Jorge Portilla can help us understand the current social and political conditions of the United States. In particular, I draw from Portilla's account of relajo and his writing on community as horizon. I argue that Portilla's account of the person who engages in relajo accurately describes the character of individuals posting on various online spaces, particularly 4chan. Integral to Portilla's analysis of relajo is a disavowal of agency and a recognition of the affective forces that lead individuals to participate in these spaces: the disavowal of one's agency does not mean that one stops having desires and resentments. A continuous disavowal of one's agency and one's responsibility to account for these affects places one in a position where one's agency can be hijacked and reoriented towards other goals. Hence, Portilla provides us with an analytic framework for understanding how a website that encourages nihilistic humor can be commandeered toward extremist politics.

In this paper, we argue that there are good, scientifically credible reasons for thinking that some nonhuman animals might have genders. We begin by considering why the sex/gender distinction has been important for feminist politics yet has also been difficult to maintain. We contrast contemporary views that trouble gender with those typical of traditional sex difference research, which has enjoyed considerable feminist critique, and argue that the anthropocentric focus of feminist accounts of gender weakens these critiques. Then, drawing from Jordan-Young’s concept of gendered norms of reaction and van Anders’ Sexual Configurations Theory, we consider what it might mean to say that animals other than humans are gendered in a scientifically robust sense that does not simply reduce gender to sex or project human gender norms onto other animals. It is important that such an account is not only sensitive to its political ramifications for feminist and queer politics but is also sensitive to the ways in which troubling the human–nonhuman animal divide may seem to threaten those humans whose oppression is constituted by dehumanization and animalization. We suggest that, in fact, the contrary is true. We find that decolonial feminists have plausibly argued that animalizing oppression is premised on the human–animal divide and that the idea of nonhuman animal genders fits naturally with some traditional Indigenous ways of thinking about other animals and their relations with humans.

This paper seeks to bring two disparate areas of research into conversation with each other: 1) philosophy of biology on conceptions of organismality, and 2) environmental ethics on the determination of bearers of value. We believe that environmental ethics, as a field invested in the value of beings beyond the human, can benefit from work focused on determining organismality. In this paper, we take algal systems as our engine of thought and argue for an eliminativist position that organisms as individuals do not exist; instead, we propose that organisms are constellations of processes. Conceptions of organismality, however, do capture something about the world, and so our eliminativism gives way to a realist eliminative pluralism about organismality; in other words, we argue that accepting different conceptions of organismality does not lead to relativism, because different conceptions of organismality capture different features of life, broadly understood. This eliminative pluralism can ultimately aid us in ethically attending to the more-than-human world around us.