Event
About the Event
A vast literature now exists on the ethical status of non-human animals (for short, “animals”). Much of this scholarship is utilitarian, going back to Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and much earlier, of course, to Bentham. Another substantial portion is rights-based, as in Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983). Relatively less work addresses the status of animals for purposes of broadly egalitarian ethical views. “Broadly egalitarian,” here, includes telic welfare-egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and sufficientism; these views modified to incorporate considerations of desert, responsibility, or opportunity; deontic versions of these views; relational egalitarianism; and accounts of distributive justice framed in terms of resources rather than welfare or desert/responsibility/opportunity-adjusted welfare.
How animals figure in such views is, to be sure, a topic that some scholarship has taken up. Shelly Kagan’s How to Count Animals, more or less (2019) is a prominent recent example. But the question of animals and equality has been less central to the literature on animal ethics than other topics.
This conference, “Animals and Equality,” will focus on the role of animals in broadly egalitarian ethical views. Both philosophical scholarship and scholarship in welfare economics/social choice theory is invited. On a different axis, we invite contributions arguing that animals have full status within a broadly egalitarian view; alternatively, arguing that animals have diminished status or fall outside the scope of such view; and scholarship exploring the details of how to incorporate animals into a broadly egalitarian account. Other work on animals and broad egalitarianism also falls within the scope of the conference (for example, analyzing the questions that animal well-being poses for egalitarianism among humans).