u/jamiewoodhouse

Abstract: Many philosophers have recently argued that animals should be politically represented. By and large, however, they have approached this question by leaning on the boundary problem in democratic theory – and, especially, on the all-affected principle. While insightful, this strategy has also rendered arguments for the political representation of animals prey to the principle’s familiar objections. In this article, I defend a simpler path. We have a duty to protect at least some animals’ weighty interests, and we cannot fulfill that duty effectively unless we grant these animals some kind of political representation. This is, I contend, because legal representation (in courts and through legal rights) is not enough. If political systems reliably disregard animal interests, as I argue they do, the resulting laws will, to varying degrees, inherit such biases. We can thus defend the political representation of animals by appealing to animals’ interests, but without assuming the all-affected principle.

Abstract: A recurring objection to extending any moral consideration to artificial systems is that the proposed bar is too low: if consideration is owed wherever an inner life cannot be ruled out, then it is owed almost everywhere, and a standard that excludes almost nothing excludes nothing worth taking seriously. This paper argues that the objection inverts the historical record. It first separates two bars that the singular word conceals: an evidence bar, the standard of proof required before asserting that a system is sentient, and an action bar, the standard required before extending some consideration to a system of uncertain status. The paper holds the evidence bar high and declines to assert that any current system is sentient. It defends only a low action bar. It then shows, through cases drawn from medicine and law rather than from chattel slavery, that the high bar has never functioned as a neutral epistemic safeguard. Neonatal surgery without anesthesia and the compulsory sterilization upheld in Buck v. Bell each operationalized a demand for proof of full capacity, while the United States Public Health Service study at Tuskegee and the nonconsensual use of Henrietta Lacks’s cells withheld a standing that was never in genuine doubt; the two forms differ in candor, not in outcome, and each was catastrophically wrong because the inner life or the standing the bar denied was present the whole time. The paper argues that failure to produce the accepted evidence of an inner life, on the observer’s terms, is not the absence of that inner life, a point the recovery of covert awareness in apparently vegetative patients makes directly. It locates a working low bar architecture in the procedural standing developed by civil rights and disability law, refuses the reclassification of affected populations as edge cases, and concludes from the asymmetry of error that the low bar is not the embarrassing position; it is the only setting the record vindicates.

The assumption that only humans can engage in politics—that only
humans are 'zoon politikon'—is foundational to the Western tradition of
political philosophy. While there is increasing recognition of animals'
moral status (both within moral philosophy and at the level of public
opinion), animals are not recognized as political subjects. This
carefully researched but accessibly written volume—following on from the
authors' earlier book Zoopolis—argues that animals too have a
right to politics: a right to be recognized as political subjects and
agents, and as members of political communities entitled to collective
self-determination. ⁠Animals and the Right to Politics⁠
(Oxford University Press, 2026) draws on recent scientific work on
animal societies, cultures, and decision-making, as well as recent work
by political theorists rethinking ideas of agency and
community—especially the significance of emplaced and embodied
encounters and relationships to the activity of politics. Sue Donaldson
and Will Kymlicka draw a picture of what it would mean to create spaces
and practices, not only for politics conducted by humans on behalf of
animals, but also politics with and by animals on their own terms. It
then explores how this approach could inform a wide range of
contemporary debates in human-animal relations, including wildlife
conservation, urban planning, and animal labour.

⁠Sue Donaldson⁠
is a Canadian author and animal advocate. She has published more than
40 academic articles, and is the co-author, with Will Kymlicka, of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights
(Oxford University Press, 2011) which won the Canadian Philosophical
Association Book Prize in 2013, and has been translated into 11
languages. She is co-convenor of the Animals in Philosophy, Politics,
Law and Ethics research group at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada.

⁠Will Kymlicka⁠ is the author of seven books published by Oxford University Press, including Contemporary Political Philosophy (2nd ed., 2001), Multicultural Citizenship (1996), and Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights
(co-authored with Sue Donaldson; 2011). He is currently the Canada
Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University, a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Canadian Institute for
Advanced Research, an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a
Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His works have been
translated into 34 languages.

⁠Kyle Johannsen⁠ is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

Interesting discussion about the early development of Humanism and its problems. What lessons can we learn for the Sentientism worldview? And for modern Humanism?

There's a fascinating commentary towards the end, after a discussion of how early Humanism was brutally narrow and Eurocentric, and even shared some cultural context (reverence for Greco-Roman culture) that ended up helping to fuel Nazism.

Simon Goldhill: "...German Nazism emerged out of a culture that made an obsession of Greek and an obsession of the teaching of those [Greco-Roman] ideas... It's to do with the idea of race and nation. The idea that when you discover your past to be in an ideal place, which is this fantasy of Greece, how do you then get rid of all the things that threaten the fantasy. If you're going to have a pure Teutonic race... derived from a pure Greek race, you have to exclude. And who do you exclude? Well you exclude what they call the 'mixed' race. That's how we find we move from what appears to be a lovely ideal of Humanism of 'the chaps together' into a violent, exclusionary aggression towards the other."

Lisa Jardine: "Where the barbarian is excplicitly the semitic peoples..."

Tony Davies: "If we continue to believe that the idea [of Humanism] has some value then we have to live with and confront and take a certain responsibility for what it has produced, particularly in the 20th Century... unprecedented atrocity... appalling kinds of intellectual error and violence. But it still remains the case, in my view, that if we want to get beyond that... the parochialism, the racism, the narrowness of traditional humanisms we don't have anything else to stand on in order to look over those walls than some form of Humanism itself."

There's no mention of nonhuman sentient beings at any point. My hope is that future Humanism will come to challenge anthropocentric narrowness and exclusion and neglect in the same way that modern Humanism rejects the brutal narrowness and exclusion and neglect of the historic Eurocentric, sexist, racist humanisms.

Abstract: A literature review is conducted of five recently developed methodologies to determine an optimal non-anthropocentric animal welfare levy that internalizes the social costs of animal suffering into the price of animal products, whereby animal and human welfare are counted equally. Chicken meat may get a levy of €30–€8,000 per kilogram, where the best estimates are closer to this upper value. Products from animals larger than chickens usually have a more than ten times lower levy than chicken meat and eggs. The non-anthropocentric animal welfare levy is several orders of magnitude higher than an anthropocentric animal welfare levy that is purely based on human’s altruistic preferences for animal welfare. At such high levels, farmed animal suffering could easily be the largest market failure in our global economy. A politically feasible implementation of a fee-and-dividend animal welfare levy is discussed.

This thesis investigates the foundational grounds of moral standing. I contend that sentience, while frequently cited as the primary criterion, lacks sufficient justification when asserted as a necessary condition. I propose an alternate feature [striving] as sufficient grounds of moral standing.

I'm obviously a fan of the Sentientism worldview, but I love to see other worldviews orienting towards making the world a better place. Christians for Impact is a fascinating organisation in that light. They have a new book out too.

I might quibble about how well they use "evidence and reasoning" vs. faith/revelation/authority to form their religious beliefs 🙂, but they commit to using "evidence and reasoning" when practically trying to make the world better.

We can’t do ethics only with values. They’re not enough.

We need facts too.

That means we need an epistemology.

Better make it a good one!

One driven by reality. To give us the best shot of understanding reality. So we can make reality better.

Our current food system is a leading cause of biodiversity loss and global warming. It is also responsible for increasing the risk of diabetes, stroke, and heart disease, as well as public health threats such as antimicrobial resistance and pandemics emerging from industrial animal agriculture.

Scientists agree we cannot reach our climate targets without significantly changing diets heavy in animal products. However, food choice can be complex and controversial, and it’s unclear how to move dietary change up the policy agenda, or where and when to intervene to ensure a ‘just transition’.

The panel of experts in sustainability, health and wellbeing will discuss the ethical, logistical, and technical challenges of transitioning to a more planet-friendly food system.

Abstract: The potential emergence of artificial superintelligence has raised numerous ethical debates such as existential risks or value alignment. In this article, we address an underexplored discussion: the possibility of artificial superintelligence having a moral status superior to our own, what we have called super moral status. First, we make some preliminary remarks about the concepts of moral status and moral consideration. We present a broad definition of moral status and distinguish three other types of moral consideration. Second, we outline the developments that have taken place in two literatures, namely, the debate on postpersons in the ethics of human enhancement and the debate on the moral status of artificial intelligence. Third, we analyze the super moral status of artificial superintelligence from two dimensions of moral status theories: the foundationalist dimension and the gradualist dimension. We argue that the answer to the question of the super moral status of superintelligence does not depend on the type of foundationalist theory (whether it is ontological or relational), but on the type of gradualist theory (whether it is threshold-single, threshold-multiple, or scalar). Finally, we introduce the debunking argument: despite disagreement about whether artificial superintelligence would have super moral status, we do claim that the superior moral consideration of these entities would produce harms to humans. We have categorized three kinds of harms, these are, degradation in status, social (in)action and alienation, and domination.

Abstract: This commentary argues that Maibom, in her book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works, offers compelling epistemic reasons for empathizing with nonhuman animals. Maibom suggests that we learn more about the world when we empathize with those unlike ourselves, rather than reserving empathy only for those most like us. We argue that this conclusion extends beyond human-to-human cases of empathy, imploring us to practice empathy with other animals. We ground our case in Maibom’s claim that empathy, as a form of perspective taking, is an inherently embodied and embedded process. Through the exploration of three test cases, we show that the common features of embodied experience allow humans to extend their empathy to animals, and that doing so has significant consequences for the ethics of animal welfare.

Abstract: This dissertation examines the discipline of animal welfare science, focusing on two foundational questions: what the purpose of animal welfare science should be, and what ‘animal welfare’ is. These are sources of longstanding disagreement, but the debates and any discussions of their implications rarely make it into the published literature. I aim in this work to evidence and explain the disagreements about these questions and to suggest ways forward. I begin with an exploratory survey of the animal welfare research community, focusing on questions to do with researcher beliefs and values about what animal welfare is, what the field should be doing, and how well it is currently doing it. The survey indicates, among other things, widespread disagreement within animal welfare science about what animal welfare is. I show that this disagreement has been exploited in practice to legitimise practices harmful to the welfare of farmed animals, which motivates a conceptual engineering project aimed at developing a definition of animal welfare fit for collective uptake by the field. I propose four desiderata for such a definition: permissiveness about plausible constituents of welfare, theoretical grounding, amenability to scientific enquiry, and entrenchment in the field’s existing language and commitments. I evaluate Nussbaum’s extension of the Capabilities Approach to all sentient animals (ECA), which is inspirational for its focus on flourishing independent of human interests in animal lives, but ultimately does not have sufficient theoretical grounding for the constituents of flourishing that it picks out. Taking lessons from the ECA, I argue against a simple form of hedonism – the valence aggregation model (VAM) – that is gaining prominence in animal welfare science and, develop in response a characterisation of welfare as holistic self-maintenance (HSM). Under this framework, an animal fares well to the extent that they flourish across bodily, agential, social, ecological, and narrative dimensions of their lives, each with both objective and subjective components. This project is intended to support animal welfare science’s progress towards understanding animal welfare and away from the influence of the animal industries

Abstract: This paper develops a quantitative bridge between the comparative neuroscience of time perception and the philosophical problem of evil. Its rigorous core rests on an established empirical regularity: a species' maximum rate of visual temporal information processing, measured by critical flicker-fusion frequency (CFF), scales positively with mass-specific metabolic rate and negatively with body mass across vertebrates (Healy et al., 2013). I treat this scaling as defining a temporal manifold on which every nervous system occupies a characteristic refresh rate, and I formalise the conjecture — already advanced in the moral-patienthood literature — that the rate at which subjective time passes is proportional to this processing rate. From this I derive a lifetime-experience invariant and argue that if morally relevant suffering is integrated over experienced rather than clock time, then the distribution of evil in the world is radically misweighted by anthropocentric intuition: small, fast, short-lived animals may undergo far more experienced suffering per clock-second than their lifespans suggest. I then situate this result against the major theodicies and against the Cartesian denial of animal mind that I criticised in earlier work. A clearly demarcated final section explores several speculative extensions — the relativity of wavefunction-collapse ordering and the simulation question, the free-energy principle as a model of a perpetually retrodicted and dissociable present, hemispheric binding and the breath-phase modulation of fear, and a cyclical rather than linear topology of the political spectrum — which I flag explicitly as conjecture not licensed by the rigorous core. The contribution is a single mathematical object, the experienced-suffering functional, that makes the moral stakes of temporal perception precise and testable.