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All colloquia will be conducted online and are an hour long. They are free and do not require advance registration.
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The SSEA will be holding a one-day mini-conference on August 6 in Boulder, Colorado, just prior to the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (RoME). Click here for more information!
Dayton Martindale, University of Colorado Boulder: "Liberty for Animals: On Respect for Nonhuman Agency"
Thursday, April 10, noon EDT
Click here for the zoom link.
Abstract: Animal ethicists disagree as to whether animals have an interest in liberty, or control over their own lives. In one perspective, most non-human animals have no such interest, as they are not autonomous persons who frame, revise, and pursue their own conception of the good. If true, there is nothing wrong with their confinement, ownership, or use so long as this does not result in suffering or death. After first explaining this view, I will show that it is unconvincing. Drawing on the ethological literature, I suggest instead that the free exercise of agency, or self-willed action, is important to animal well-being, thus grounding a strong interest in liberty. Finally, I argue that respecting animal liberty requires more than releasing them from the most obvious forms of captivity, but requires significant social transformation on at least three levels: the interpersonal, the infrastructural, and the institutional.
2025 Pacific APA SSEA Group Meeting, San Francisco
Group Session G5O, Friday April 18, 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Chair:
Cheryl Abbate (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
Speakers:
Jasmine Gunkel (National Institutes of Health and University of Western Ontario)
“Quasi-Intimacy and Our Animal Companions”
Avram Hiller (Portland State University)
“Animal Ethics: Recent Trends and Future Directions”
Adriano Mannino (University of California, Berkeley)
“Nonhuman Animals as Utility & Justice Monsters”
Recent Events
Harry Lloyd, Yale: "Animals, Just Distribution, and Cost Effectiveness"
Thursday, January 9, 2025, Noon EST (9AM PST/5PM GMT/6PM CET)
Click here for the zoom link.
ABSTRACT: When philosophers discuss patterned theories of distributive justice – like egalitarianism, prioritarianism, sufficientarianism, and desertism – they almost always (implicitly) assume that these theories only extend to cover human beings, rather than also extending to cover nonhuman animals. Recently, however, several philosophers have begun to discuss what the implications would be of the Radical view that we should incorporate nonhuman animals into our existing theories of distributive justice on an equal footing with ordinary human beings. Many of these philosophers have influentially argued that the implications of Radicalism would in fact be “crazy,” “wildly implausible” (Vallentyne), “absurd,” “impossible to take seriously” (Kagan) and “obviously” false (McMahan). However, my aim in this presentation will be to argue that Radicalism does not in fact have the kind of highly implausible implications that have been imputed to it by philosophers like McMahan, Vallentyne, Holtug, and Kagan. On the contrary, I argue that Radicalism is much more intuitively plausible than its critics would have you believe.
Frauke Albersmeier, University of Münster: “Human-Nonhuman Animal Conflict and the Hopeless Aspiration of Sentient Equality”
Thursday, February 13, 11AM EST (8AM PST/4PM GMT/5PM CET)
ABSTRACT: Conflicts between the vital interests of human and nonhuman animals remain an awkward issue for sentientists who claim that Sentient Equality – the prescription to consider and treat nonhuman animals as moral equals – is both a morally correct and in principle perfectly acceptable norm for human beings. In order to avoid impressions contrary to this claim, sentientists typically present existential conflicts between human and nonhuman animals as relatively rare occurrences and/ or gesture toward moral justifications for resolving such conflicts in favor of humans. However, the latter strategy is inconsistent with sentientism, while the former denies basic facts of interspecies coexistence. Both ways of engaging (or failing to engage) with the fact of pervasive human-nonhuman animal conflict introduce a speciesist bias into theorizing about interspecies justice. In this talk, I will argue that in a world of scarce resources, the application of sentientism to reality must lead to the inconvenient conclusion that the basic requirements of human civilization are incompatible with sentient equality. I argue that any problem with this result goes only to the actual acceptability of sentientism, not to its moral justification. I then show in what sense it might be justified to regard Sentient Equality as a “hopeless” aspiration (Estlund 2014), and how recasting theories of interspecies justice as non-ideal theories might help to remedy an inconsistency and speciesist flaw in sentientist thinking about what nonhuman animals are owed as a matter of justice.
Lucia Schwarz, Tulane: "Voting with Your Dollars – a Binomial Model of Vegan Consumer Choice"
Wednesday, March 5, 11 AM EST (8AM PST/4PM GMT/5PM CET)
Event postponed; new date/time:
Thursday, March 13, 11 AM EST (8AM PST/4PM GMT/5PM CET)
Click here for the zoom link.
Abstract: A simple consequentialist argument for ethical veganism says that we should make vegan consumer choices because doing so leads to a decline in meat production and, therefore, reduces the amount of animal suffering in the world. The reality is a bit more complicated because it would take thousands or millions of consumers to reduce their meat consumption before the meat industry would respond with a decline in production. This means that, most likely, your own vegan consumer choice makes no difference to the amount of animal suffering in the world. However, it also means that you have a very small chance of making the "decisive consumer choice" that pushes aggregate meat consumption below a threshold that triggers a large decline in meat production. In that case, your consumer choice would be enormously beneficial. What exactly is your chance of being the decisive consumer, and is it large enough to justify the costs you incur from foregoing meat? Proponents of ethical veganism have traditionally answered in the affirmative. By contrast, proponents of the so-called inefficacy objection to ethical veganism argue that your chance of being decisive is basically zero, such that there is no expected benefit—just costs—to foregoing meat. Neither proponents of ethical veganism nor their critics, however, have heretofore produced a plausible mathematical model of vegan consumer choice that would allow us to properly estimate the individual consumer's chance of being decisive. To remedy this shortcoming, we develop a binomial model of vegan consumer choice, building on the influential binomial model of voting. Our model yields the result that, even when other consumers are highly unlikely to reduce their meat consumption and when the threshold that would trigger a decline in meat production is very large, the expected utility of vegan consumer choice can still be substantial.
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