Matthew C. Halteman

Calvin University
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
  •  36
    When consumers choose to abstain from purchasing meat, they face some uncertainty about whether their decisions will have an impact on the number of animals raised and killed. Consequentialists have argued that this uncertainty should not dissuade consumers from a vegetarian diet because the “expected” impact, or average impact, will be predictable. Recently, however, critics have argued that the expected marginal impact of a consumer change is likely to be much smaller or more radically unpredi…Read more
  •  198
    In “Diversifying Effective Altruism’s Longshots in Animal Advocacy”, Matthew C. Halteman acknowledges the value of aspects of the EA method but considers two potential critical concerns. First, it isn’t always clear that effective altruism succeeds in doing the most good, especially where long-shots like foiling misaligned AI or producing meat without animals are concerned. Second, one might worry that investing large sums of money in long-shots like these, even if they do succeed, has the oppo…Read more
  •  156
    "Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation" (revised and updated for Food, Ethics, and Society)
    In Anne Barnhill, Mark Bryant Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text With Readings, Oxford University Press. pp. 292-300. 2016.
    Through careful interpretive analysis, the piece argues that the Christian cosmic vision reveals the wrongness of industrial animal agriculture and that taking up more intentional eating practices is a morally significant spiritual discipline for Christians. It also testifies to our claim in the introduction [to the "Food and Religion" chapter of *Food, Ethics, and Society*] that religious food ethics have practical advantages over purely secular ethics insofar as the latter usually tries to beg…Read more
  •  190
    Though commentators have paid little thematic attention to Heidegger’s 1928 treatise “On the Essence of Ground” (OEG), recently available subsequent writings suggest that Heidegger himself saw OEG as a pivotal step on the way to “overcoming” his analysis of fundamental ontological transcendence. Among these writings is a set of rarely discussed lettered notes originally scribbled into his personal copy of OEG in which Heidegger offers a point-for-point deconstruction of the treatise’s fundamenta…Read more
  •  12
    Paul Edwards, Heidegger's Confusions (review)
    Philosophical Review 116 (2): 310-313. 2007.
  •  636
    Beyond Stewardship: Reimagining Our Kinship With Animals
    In David Paul Warners & Matthew Kuperus Heun (eds.), Beyond Stewardship: New Approaches to Creation Care, Calvin College Press. pp. 121-134. 2019.
    This book chapter is a work of popular philosophy that offers general readers an opportunity to reimagine their relationship to non-human creatures by living vicariously through the experience of Jasmin--a hypothetical college student whose encounters with a cow, goat, and rooster on a visit to a local farm trigger a transformation in her views and actions toward other animals, allowing her to see them for the first time as subjects of their own lives rather than as objects for human use. Though…Read more
  •  353
    "Meat and Evil"
    In Andrew Chignell (ed.), Evil: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts), Oxford University Press. pp. 88-96. 2019.
    In a world where meat is often a token of comfort, health, hospitality, and abundance, one can be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the conjunction “meat and evil.” Why pull meat into the orbit of harm, pestilence, ill-will, and privation? From another perspective, the answer is obvious: meat—the flesh of slaughtered animals taken for food—is the remnant of a feeling creature who was recently alive and whose death was premature, violent, and often gratuitous. The truth is that meat has a checke…Read more
  •  6231
    When consumers choose to abstain from purchasing meat, they face some uncertainty about whether their decisions will have an impact on the number of animals raised and killed. Consequentialists have argued that this uncertainty should not dissuade consumers from a vegetarian diet because the “expected” impact, or average impact, will be predictable. Recently, however, critics have argued that the expected marginal impact of a consumer change is likely to be much smaller or more radically unpredi…Read more
  •  569
    "We Are All Noah: Tom Regan's Olive Branch to Religious Animal Ethics"
    Between the Species 21 (1): 151-177. 2018.
    For the past thirty years, the late Tom Regan bucked the trend among secular animal rights philosophers and spoke patiently and persistently to the best angels of religious ethics in a stream of publications that enjoins religious scholars, clergy, and lay people alike to rediscover the resources within their traditions for articulating and living out an animal ethics that is more consistent with their professed values of love, mercy, and justice. My aim in this article is to showcase some of th…Read more
  •  1167
    Ontotheology
    Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2015.
    This article aims to serve as an accessible introduction to the idea of "ontotheology" and to the so-called "ontotheological critique of Western metaphysics" for which the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger is especially well known. I begin by distinguishing two uses of "ontotheology" employed respectively by Kant and Heidegger, and go on to develop the Heideggerian interpretation and critique of ontotheology under three main headings: The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Wes…Read more
  •  1551
    Varieties of Harm to Animals in Industrial Farming
    Journal of Animal Ethics 1 (2): 122-131. 2011.
    Skeptics of the moral case against industrial farming often assert that harm to animals in industrial systems is limited to isolated instances of abuse that do not reflect standard practice and thus do not merit criticism of the industry at large. I argue that even if skeptics are correct that abuse is the exception rather than the rule, they must still answer for two additional varieties of serious harm to animals that are pervasive in industrial systems: procedural harm and institutional oppre…Read more
  •  815
    Living Toward the Peaceable Kingdom: Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation
    Humane Society of the United States Faith Outreach. 2008, 2010.
    As evidence of the unintended consequences of industrial farm animal production continues to mount, it is becoming increasingly clear that, far from being a trivial matter of personal preference, eating is an activity that has deep moral and spiritual significance. Surprising as it may sound, the simple question of what to eat can prompt Christians daily to live out their spiritual vision of Shalom for all creatures--to bear witness to the marginalization of the poor, the exploitation of the opp…Read more
  •  36
    Review of Judith Wolfe's Heidegger and Theology (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 112. 2015.
    When a slim, winsomely-written introductory volume manages accessibly to survey many of the most important signposts across Heidegger's path, does so in a way that both excavates new sources and puts them to constructive use, is historically-informed but futurally-minded and generous but critical -- that's an achievement. What's more, Judith Wolfe accomplishes these things while illuminating the rich but underemphasized hermeneutic significance for Heidegger's work of his lifelong struggle to re…Read more
  •  938
    "Food Ethics and Religion"
    In Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings, Oxford University Press. 2016.
    How does an engagement with religious traditions (broadly construed) illuminate and complicate the task of thinking through the ethics of eating? In this introduction, we survey some of the many food ethical issues that arise within various religious traditions and also consider some ethical positions that such traditions take on food. To say the least, we do not attempt to address all the ethical issues concerning food that arise in religious contexts, nor do we attempt to cover every tradition…Read more
  •  108
    Everyone is talking about food. Chefs are celebrities. "Locavore" and "freegan" have earned spots in the dictionary. Popular books and films about food production and consumption are exposing the unintended consequences of the standard American diet. Questions about the principles and values that ought to guide decisions about dinner have become urgent for moral, ecological, and health-related reasons. In _Philosophy Comes to Dinner_, twelve philosophers—some leading voices, some inspiring new o…Read more
  •  1054
    My aim in this paper is to draw Plotinus and Derrida together in a comparison of their respective appropriations of the famous “receptacle” passage in Plato's Timaeus (specifically, Plotinus' discussion of intelligible matter in Enneads 2.4 and Derrida's essay on Timaeus entitled “Kh ō ra”). After setting the stage with a discussion of several instructive similarities between their general philosophical projects, I contend that Plotinus and Derrida take comparable approaches both to thinking the…Read more
  •  2411
    The Problem of Transcendence in Heidegger and Derrida
    Dissertation, University of Notre Dame. 2004.
    This dissertation seeks to clarify the import of the transcendence problem in Heidegger and Derrida. The guiding suggestion of my interpretations of both thinkers is that following the development of this problem through their respective projects can help to demonstrate in each an underlying continuity in light of which their seemingly discrepant shifts in emphasis from early to late can be understood as moments of an ongoing hermeneutic task. ;My argument unfolds in four chapters and a brief co…Read more
  •  3623
    Religion and the Sublime
    In Timothy M. Costelloe (ed.), The sublime: from antiquity to the present, Cambridge University Press. pp. 183-202. 2012.
    Warning: includes two somewhat graphic images. This paper is an effort to lay out a taxomony of conceptual relations between the domains of the sublime and the religious.
  •  512
    Recourse to a variety of well-constructed arguments is undoubtedly a significant strategic asset for cultivating more ethical eating habits and convincing others to follow suit. Nevertheless, common obstacles often prevent even the best arguments from getting traction in our lives.  For one thing, many of us enter the discussion hampered by firmly-entrenched but largely uninvestigated assumptions about food that make it difficult to imagine how even well-supported arguments that challenge our …Read more
  •  112
    From its inception in Kant's efforts to articulate a "religion within the limits of reason alone," the Continental tradition has maintained a strict division of labor between theological and philosophical reflection on religion. In what follows, I examine this continental legacy in the context of Jacques Derrida's recent work on the concept of responsibility. First I discuss three guiding themes (the limits of speculative analysis, the idea of nondogmatic religion, and the importance of the othe…Read more
  •  2214
    Knowing the Standard American Diet By Its Fruits: Is Unrestrained Omnivorism Spiritually Beneficial?
    Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 67 (4): 383-395. 2013.
    My aim in this article is to challenge the standard North American diet’s (SAD) default status in church and among North American Christians generally. First, I explain what is at stake in my guiding question—“Is unrestrained omnivorism as typified by SAD spiritually beneficial?”—and then I attempt to allay some common skeptical concerns about the suitability of food ethics as a topic for serious Christian discernment. Second, I develop a prima facie case that SAD is not spiritually beneficial,…Read more