Tyler John

Longview Philanthropy
  •  583
    The moral inefficacy of carbon offsetting
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Many real-world agents recognise that they impose harms by choosing to emit carbon, e.g., by flying. Yet many do so anyway, and then attempt to make things right by offsetting those harms. Such offsetters typically believe that, by offsetting, they change the deontic status of their behaviour, making an otherwise impermissible action permissible. Do they succeed in practice? Some philosophers have argued that they do, since their offsets appear to reverse the adverse effects of their emissions. …Read more
  •  167
    Securing Political Accountability to Future Generations with Retrospective Accountability
    In Jacob Barrett, Hilary Greaves & David Thorstad (eds.), Essays on Longtermism, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    Political short-termism costs the global economy hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars annually, and leads to many millions of deaths from disasters and suboptimal spending. In this paper, I propose a futures assembly explicitly incentivised to promote the interests of future generations as a promising strategy to ameliorate short-termism. The assembly I propose is governed by citizens randomly selected from among the populace, who are rewarded in the future to the extent that they succes…Read more
  •  292
    The Philosophers' Brief in Support of Happy's Appeal
    with Gary Comstock, Sue Donaldson, Andrew Fenton, L. Syd M. Johnson, Robert C. Jones, Will Kymlicka, Letitia M. Meynell, Nathan Nobis, David M. Peña-Guzmán, James Rocha, Bernard Rollin, Jeff Sebo, and Adam Shriver
    New York State Appellate Court. 2021.
    We submit this brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to secure habeas corpus relief for the elephant named Happy. The Supreme Court, Bronx County, declined to grant habeas corpus relief and order Happy’s transfer to an elephant sanctuary, relying, in part, on previous decisions that denied habeas relief for the NhRP’s chimpanzee clients, Kiko and Tommy. Those decisions use incompatible conceptions of ‘person’ which, when properly understood, are either philosophically inadequ…Read more
  •  57
    The Philosophers’ Brief on Elephant Personhood
    with Gary Comstock, G. K. D. Crozier, Andrew Fenton, L. Syd M. Johnson, Robert C. Jones, Nathan Nobis, David M. Peña-Guzmán, James Rocha, Bernard E. Rollin, and Jeff Sebo
    New York State Appellate Court. 2020.
    We submit this brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to secure habeas corpus relief for the elephant named Happy. We reject arbitrary distinctions that deny adequate protections to other animals who share with protected humans relevantly similar vulnerabilities to harms and relevantly similar interests in avoiding such harms. We strongly urge this Court, in keeping with the best philosophical standards of rational judgment and ethical standards of justice, to recognize that,…Read more
  •  263
    Growing awareness of the ethical implications of neuroscience in the early years of the 21st century led to the emergence of the new academic field of “neuroethics,” which studies the ethical implications of developments in the neurosciences. However, despite the acceleration and evolution of neuroscience research on nonhuman animals, the unique ethical issues connected with neuroscience research involving nonhuman animals remain underdiscussed. This is a significant oversight given the central …Read more
  •  514
    Empowering Future People by Empowering the Young?
    In Greg Bognar & Axel Gosseries (eds.), Ageing Without Ageism: Conceptual Puzzles and Policy Proposals, Oxford University Press. 2023.
    This chapter starts from the claim that the state is plagued with problems of political short-termism: excessive priority given to near-term benefits at the expense of benefits further in thefuture. One possible mechanism to reduce short-termism involves apportioning greater relative political influence to the young, since younger citizens generally have greater additional life expectancy than older citizens and thus it looks reasonable to expect that they have preferences that are extended furt…Read more
  •  1310
    Enclosed is a guidebook for philanthropists, advocates, and policymakers who want to do the most good possible. This book introduces the philosophy of “longtermism,” the idea that it is particularly important that we act now to safeguard future generations. The future is vast in scale: depending on our choices in the coming centuries, the future could stretch for eons or it could dwindle into oblivion, and be inordinately good or inordinately bad. And yet future generations are utterly disenfran…Read more
  •  2733
    In all probability, future generations will outnumber us by thousands or millions to one. In the aggregate, their interests therefore matter enormously, and anything we can do to steer the future of civilization onto a better trajectory is of tremendous moral importance. This is the guiding thought that defines the philosophy of longtermism. Political science tells us that the practices of most governments are at stark odds with longtermism. But the problems of political short-termism are neithe…Read more
  •  2008
    Consequentialism and Nonhuman Animals
    with Jeff Sebo
    In Douglas W. Portmore (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism, Oxford University Press. pp. 564-591. 2020.
    Consequentialism is thought to be in significant conflict with animal rights theory because it does not regard activities such as confinement, killing, and exploitation as in principle morally wrong. Proponents of the “Logic of the Larder” argue that consequentialism results in an implausibly pro-exploitation stance, permitting us to eat farmed animals with positive well- being to ensure future such animals exist. Proponents of the “Logic of the Logger” argue that consequentialism results i…Read more
  •  2036
    First Come, First Served?
    Ethics 130 (2): 179-207. 2020.
    Waiting time is widely used in health and social policy to make resource allocation decisions, yet no general account of the moral significance of waiting time exists. We provide such an account. We argue that waiting time is not intrinsically morally significant, and that the first person in a queue for a resource does not ipso facto have a right to receive that resource first. However, waiting time can and sometimes should play a role in justifying allocation decisions. First, there is a duty …Read more
  •  3775
    In December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a petition for a common law writ of habeas corpus in the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee living alone in a cage in a shed in rural New York (Barlow, 2017). Under animal welfare laws, Tommy’s owners, the Laverys, were doing nothing illegal by keeping him in those conditions. Nonetheless, the NhRP argued that given the cognitive, social, and emotional capacities of chimpanzees, Tommy’s confinement constituted …Read more
  •  826
    The Philosophers' Brief on Chimpanzee Personhood
    Proposed Brief by Amici Curiae Philosophers in Support of the Petitioner-Appelllant Court of Appeals, State of New York,. 2018.
    In this brief, we argue that there is a diversity of ways in which humans (Homo sapiens) are ‘persons’ and there are no non-arbitrary conceptions of ‘personhood’ that can include all humans and exclude all nonhuman animals. To do so we describe and assess the four most prominent conceptions of ‘personhood’ that can be found in the rulings concerning Kiko and Tommy, with particular focus on the most recent decision, Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc v Lavery.
  •  447
    In Defense of Animal Universalism
    with Blake Hereth and Shawn Graves
    In T. Ryan Byerly & Eric Silverman (eds.), Paradise Understood: New Philosophical Essays about Heaven, Oxford University Press. pp. 161-192. 2017.
    This paper defends “Animal Universalism,” the thesis that all sentient non-human animals will be brought into Heaven and remain there for eternity. It assumes that God exists and is all-powerful, perfectly loving, and perfectly just. From these background theses, the authors argue that Animal Universalism follows. If God is perfectly loving, then God is concerned about the well-being of non-human animals, and God chooses to maximize the well-being of each individual animal when doing so does not…Read more
  •  1411
    One widely used method for allocating health care resources involves the use of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) to rank treatments in terms of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained. CEA has been criticized for discriminating against people with disabilities by valuing their lives less than those of non-disabled people. Avoiding discrimination seems to lead to the ’QALY trap’: we cannot value saving lives equally and still value raising quality of life. This paper reviews existing response…Read more