• Within contemporary science, it is common practice to compare data points to the _average_, i.e., to the statistical mean. Because this practice is so familiar, it might at first appear not to be the sort of thing that requires explanation. But recent research in cognitive science gives us reason to adopt the opposite perspective. Research on the cognitive processes involved in people’s ordinary efforts to make sense of the world suggests that, instead of using a purely statistical notion of the…Read more
  • Should We Protect Animals from Hate Speech?†
    Josh Milburn and Alasdair Cochrane
    Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 41 (4): 1149-1172. 2021.
    Laws against hate speech protect members of certain human groups. However, they do not offer protection to nonhuman animals. Using racist hate speech as our primary example, we explore the discrepancy between the legal response to hate speech targeting human groups and what might be called anti-animal or speciesist hate speech. We explore two sets of possible defences of this legal discrepancy drawn from the philosophical literature on hate speech—non-consequentialist and harm-based—and find bot…Read more
  • There were excellent reasons to reform intensive animal agriculture prior to COVID-19. Unfortunately, though, intensive animal agriculture has grown rapidly over the last century. All signs indicate that it will continue to grow in the future. This is bad news for billions of animals. It’s also bad news for those who want an animal-friendly food system. Because the public isn’t very concerned about the plight of animals—or is concerned, but has a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance—animal ac…Read more
  • A Practice‐Focused Case for Animal Moral Agency
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (2): 226-243. 2021.
    Considerations of nonhuman animal moral agency typically base their reasoning and (very often negative) verdict on a capacity‐focused approach to moral agency. According to this approach, an entity is a moral agent if it has certain intrapersonal features or capacities, typically in terms of conscious reflection and deliberation. According to a practice‐focused notion of moral agency, however, an entity is a moral agent in virtue of being a participant of a moral responsibility practice (MRP). I…Read more
  • XI—Rights Externalism and Racial Injustice
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 120 (3): 253-276. 2021.
    Rights externalism, a view I defend in Rights, Race, and Recognition, takes social recognition to be a condition for being a rights bearer. I vindicate this view by answering two recent critics. I concede some ground, particularly with respect to their reservations about what we gain, but argue that claims about what we stand to lose are overblown. I conclude that rights externalism is not detrimental to the critique of racial injustice, and that embracing it has noteworthy virtues. The most sig…Read more
  • The badness of pain
    Utilitas 32 (2): 236-252. 2020.
    Why is pain bad? The most straightforward theory of pain's badness,dolorism, appeals to the phenomenal quality of displeasure. In spite of its explanatory appeal, the view is too straightforward to capture two central puzzles, namely pain that is enjoyed and pain that is not painful. These cases can be captured byconditionalism, which makes the badness of displeasure conditional on an agent's attitude. But conditionalism fails where dolorism succeeds with explanatory appeal. A new approach is pr…Read more
  • Environmental ethicists have been arguing for decades that swift action to protect our natural environment is morally paramount, and that our concern for the environment should go beyond its importance for human welfare. It might be thought that the widespread acceptance of moral anti-realism would undermine the aims of environmental ethicists. One reason is that recent empirical studies purport to show that moral realists are more likely to act on the basis of their ethical convictions than ant…Read more
  • Animal Agency
    Dale Jamieson
    The Harvard Review of Philosophy 25 111-126. 2018.
    The rise of physicalism and naturalism, the development of cognitive science, and the explosion and popularization of knowledge about animal behavior has brought us to see that most of the properties that were once thought to distinguish humans from other animals are shared with other animals. Many people now see properties that are morally relevant to how it is permissible to treat animals, such as sentience, as widely distributed. Agency, however, is one area in which the retreat from human un…Read more
  • Chimps as secret agents
    Caroline T. Arruda and Daniel J. Povinelli
    Synthese 193 (7): 2129-2158. 2016.
    We provide an account of chimpanzee-specific agency within the context of philosophy of action. We do so by showing that chimpanzees are capable of what we call reason-directed action, even though they may be incapable of more full-blown action, which we call reason-considered action. Although chimpanzee agency does not possess all the features of typical adult human agency, chimpanzee agency is evolutionarily responsive to their environment and overlaps considerably with our own. As such, it is…Read more
  • Two ways of relating to (and acting for) reasons
    Caroline T. Arruda and Daniel J. Povinelli
    Mind and Language 33 (5): 441-459. 2018.
    Most views of agency take acting for reasons (whether explanatory or justifying) to be an important hallmark of the capacity for agency. The problem, however, is that the standard analysis of what it is to act in light of reasons is not sufficiently fine grained to accommodate what we will argue are the myriad types of ways that agents can do so. We suggest that a full account of acting for reasons must also recognize the relationship that agents have with their reasons. We focus on two types of…Read more
  • This paper argues for a conception of the natural rights of non-human animals grounded in Kant’s explanation of the foundation of human rights. The rights in question are rights that are in the first instance held against humanity collectively speaking—against our species conceived as an organized body capable of collective action. The argument proceeds by first developing a similar case for the right of every human individual who is in need of aid to get it, and then showing why the situation o…Read more
  • Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi stud…Read more