Joel MacClellan

This commentary of Arshia Batra’s paper, “Becoming inanimate, Becoming-human, Becoming-animal: The Objectification and (de)Familiarization of Captive Animals in Photography" in Essays in Philosophy," develops four lines of criticism: (1) Photography is not necessarily a problematically “objectifying” medium, (2) the critique of “humanization through familiarization” avoids anthropomorphism by committing anthropocentrism, (3) the preferred model, “humanization through defamiliarization,” problematically reifies the particular animal subject photographed, and (4) Batra’s endorsement of looking at zoos is underdeveloped and problematic in what it suggests.

Monism versus pluralism about biological species concepts remains contested terrain in the life sciences. Monists countenance one species concept. Pluralists embrace several. I reject three main schools of monistic species concepts and endorse a broadly evolutionary species concept using thin adequacy criteria. I then distinguish two species of pluralism based on their response to the cross-classification problem: is there a uniquely correct scheme for grouping biological organisms? Chaste pluralists reject cross-classificationism whereas promiscuous pluralists embrace it. Deciding between chaste and promiscuous pluralisms hinges on the frequency of “messy situations” in taxonomy. Using the adequacy conditions and considering the frequency of messy situations, I argue against Dupré, Kitcher, and Ereshefsky, against Ruse's chaste pluralism, and in favor of a moderately chaste pluralism. I argue that we must distinguish global and local varieties of promiscuous pluralism and chaste pluralism, and that a novel “hybrid pluralism” comprised of local chaste and local promiscuous pluralisms may be the most reasonable general conclusion to draw or at least a viable alternative to global promiscuous pluralism. Lastly, I sketch the relationship between the different forms of species pluralism and realism about biological species and argue that chaste pluralisms are compatible with species realism whereas promiscuous pluralisms are not, which may speak in favor of chaste pluralism considering species' explanatory role in the life sciences.

The Department of Justice served a landmark monopoly-busting lawsuit to Live Nation-Ticketmaster in May 2024, 30 years after the grunge rock band, Pearl Jam, made essentially the same case against Ticketmaster in 1994 – and lost. While the lawsuit’s future is uncertain with the Trump administration now in office, it represents a redemption song in that Pearl Jam was right all along. This long-haired-David vs. Goliath tale serves as a microcosm of the roots of Gen X’s cynicism and disillusionment about the American dream: the Seattle alt-rockers defended free-market capitalism against a crony capitalist government that sided with the rent-seeking monopoly. After the technological optimism of their ‘80s childhood and seeing the world their parents inherited, the relatively small Gen-X cohort thought they’d have it the same yet they came of age at a time of great social and economic instability in the ‘90s as the first generation of Americans poorer than their parents. Independent and self-reliant, young Gen-X musicians created alternative music that took the world by storm only to realize that it was effectively impossible to play live without the middle-man, Ticketmaster, taking the lion’s share. Over all aspects of human life, including healthcare and the arts, corporate capitalism rules while democracy dies. This chapter first tells the history of Pearl Jam v. Ticketmaster, introduces some ideas from Rawls’ social contract theory, and then philosophically substantiate the case that this is a microcosm of Gen X disillusionment with the American Dream.

Ethical extensionism is a common argument pattern in environmental and animal ethics, which takes a morally valuable trait already recognized in us and argues that we should recognize that value in other entities such as nonhuman animals. I exposit ethical extensionism’s core argument, argue for its validity and soundness, and trace its history to 18th century progressivist calls to expand the moral community and legal franchise. However, ethical extensionism has its critics. The bulk of the paper responds to recent criticisms, including (1) environmental ethicists’ objection against its austere conception of moral value (2), feminist ethicists’ claim that extensionism fails to account for the moral significance of difference, (3) disability theorists’ concern that ethical extensionist arguments are offensive, and (4) animal rights theorists’ lament that extensionism is a practical failure. While something is to be gained from each criticism, I argue that they ultimately fail and that extensionism remains compelling.

The Cuyahoga River is a small Ohio river with an outsized influence in U.S. environmental history. The 1969 river fire ignited the public imagination, galvanized the environmental movement, and spurred the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Clean Water Act. Water quality has since improved markedly, yet several controversial dams continue to obstruct the Cuyahoga’s flow, reducing environmental quality. The U.S. and Ohio EPAs recently announced plans to remove all such dams by 2023. In this paper, I develop a rich environmental case study rooted in philosophy and environmental history about the Cuyahoga’s transition from literally being on fire to a 100-mile long, free flowing river from its headwaters to Lake Erie in less than 100 years. This transition involves dimensions of public policy with slow-moving, often reactive public institutions, corporations operating in bad faith with respect to informed dialogue in the public interest, and spirited environmental activists. I develop an environmental pragmatism to make sense of the negotiated shift in values and attitudes concerning our nation’s waters that emerged through public dialogue between GOs, NGOs, energy providers, activists, and local residents. More specifically, I leverage contemporary environmental pragmatism’s emphasis on value pluralism combined with John Dewey's insights about public reason concerning science policy in democratic polities and the tension between technical expertise and democratic decision-making in particular.

Animal size is a relevant and unappreciated consideration in moral evaluations of killing animals for food, especially for utilitarians, who must weigh the gustatory satisfaction of eating meat-the quantity of which varies greatly throughout the animal kingdom-against animal suffering in utilitarian calculations. I argue that animal size can drastically alter not only the extent but even the valence of such calculations. Then I show how the business ethics literature on vegetarianism is deficient for not taking animal size into account. Last, I argue that market conditions are also relevant in moral assessments of vegetarianism.

Biocentrism, a prominent view in environmental ethics, is the notion that all and only individual biological organisms have moral status, which is to say that their good ought to be considered for its own sake by moral agents. I argue that biocentrism suffers two serious problems: the Origin Problem and the Normativity Problem. Biocentrism seeks to avoid the absurdity that artifacts have moral status on the basis that organisms have naturalistic origins whereas artifacts do not. The Origin Problem contends that, contra biocentrism, an entity’s origin is not relevant to whether that entity has moral status. The Normativity Problem is that biocentrists are preoccupied with accounting for the goods or interests of nonsentient organisms yet fail to establish why interests so construed confer moral status; biocentrism fails to bridge the good-ought gap. It is shown how these problems emerge in three prominent book-length works representative of the biocentrists’ positions over three decades: Paul Taylor’s Respect for Nature, Gary Varner’s In Nature’s Interests?, and Nicholas Agar’s Life’s Intrinsic Value. At minimum, these criticisms suggest that biocentrism is crucially incomplete as a moral framework at present and, optimistically, where more work remains to be done. If biocentrism really is dead, then moral status should be restricted to a more plausible locus such as sentience or rationality, the value of organisms needs a different expression, and environmental ethics needs an axiological foundation different than bare life.

John Rawls’ account of our obligations towards future generations has received considerable criticism in the environmental ethics literature relative to the scant few passages in which he discusses the issue. I argue that much of this criticism is warranted because Rawls’ Heads of Family strategy for grounding obligations to future generations is not only independently problematic, but also inconsistent with his general framework. Furthermore, the oft-suggested Time Travel strategy will not work either, and for just those reasons which Rawls gave. However, I contend that the less often discussed “Universalizability Principle,” which Rawls discusses most prominently in Political Liberalism, is a plausible account of our obligations to future generations and is consistent with Rawls’ general framework. I then defend this Rawlsian account of our future-oriented obligations against objections in the environmental ethics literature such as those recently advanced by the consequentialist Tim Mulgan.

This paper critiques Clare Palmer’s “What do we owe wild animals?” on three grounds. First, it is argued that, Palmer’s opening case study notwithstanding, there are good empirical reasons to think that we should assist domesticated horses and not wild deer. Then, Palmer’s claim that “wildness is not a capacity” is brought into question, and it is argued that wildness connotes certain capacities which wild animals generally have and which domesticated animals generally lack. Lastly, the “supererogation problem” is developed against a version of Palmer’s preferred Contextualist view, which claims that, while her view doesn’t obligate us to eliminate predators and otherwise redesign nature in the name of wild animal welfare, it may nonetheless allow them. Therefore, this view has potentially unsettling environmental implications