My research is in ethics, with a focus on animal ethics, particularly arguments for and against humane animal agriculture

          My dissertation, defended in the spring of 2021, substantiates four theses that bear on the moral obligations that human beings have to non-human animals. 

          I argue first that non-conscious entities (e.g., plants and bacteria) cannot have well-being. Call this claim ‘the consciousness restriction.’ In its defense, I enumerate the plausible constituents of well-being, i.e., states of affairs that plausibly contribute, non-instrumentally, to an individual’s well-being. These states of affairs—e.g., having positive mental states, satisfying conscious desires—are necessarily unavailable to non-conscious entities. According to perfectionism, however, my list is incomplete, because exercising natural capacities is also a constituent of well-being. Since non-conscious organisms do exercise natural capacities, perfectionism implies that they do have well-being. By considering cases in which human beings exercise their natural capacities without enjoyment and without a desire to do so, I argue that exercising natural capacities does not in itself contribute to well-being. So, there is good reason for accepting the consciousness restriction. The consciousness restriction, in turn, rebuts an objection to an interest (or well-being) theory of rights, according to which the capacity for well-being is sufficient for possessing moral rights. The objection is that an interest theory implies the implausible claim that non-conscious organisms such as plants and bacteria have rights. The consciousness restriction undermines this objection: if non-conscious entities lack well-being, then an interest theory does not imply that plants or bacteria have rights. An interest theory of rights bears on obligations to animals because, if it is correct, then many animals have rights, simply in virtue of being sentient.

          In chapter 2, I defend a prominent argument schema in animal ethics: (i) there are no morally relevant differences between non-human animals and those severely intellectually disabled human beings who are their cognitive peers, and (ii) it would be wrong to confine, kill, and experiment on such human beings; therefore, (iii) it is also wrong to treat animals in these ways. The cogency of these arguments depends on the absence of morally relevant differences between the animals and human beings in question. To support this claim of moral parity, I criticize the view that distant genealogical relationships—relationships of ancestry and descent of the kind that link all human beings more closely than they do any human-animal pair—are morally relevant. I do so by arguing that one’s obligations to quite distant relatives, with whom one has no personal relationship, are not stronger than those to a (hypothetical) individual with whom one has no genealogical relationship.

          The final two chapters address an alleged justification for humane animal agriculture. According to “the logic of the larder,” the fact that humanely raised animals would not exist but for the actions of farmers and consumers, together with the fact that they have lives worth living, implies that to humanely raise and kill such animals, or to purchase their products, benefits these animals and thus is not wrong. I draw out the implicit ethical premise of this argument—that one cannot wrong an individual by doing the best thing one can do for them—and explain that, while defensible, this principle does not in fact apply to a farmer’s act of slaughter. Although the collective process of creating and then killing humanely raised animals is a net benefit for them, the individual act of slaughter is not. I then turn to consumers. The implicit premise of the logic of the larder likely does apply to consumers: by purchasing humane animal products they do (likely without intending to) the best thing they can do for those animals who will be created in the future. Thus, consumers likely do not wrong those animals with their purchases. However, consumers’ purchases also cause farmers to slaughter their animals, which is morally impermissible. I argue further that acting impermissibly is a negative constituent of well-being—to act impermissibly makes one worse off, independent of any consequences of one’s action. Thus consumers make farmers worse off by causing them to do what is morally wrong. And so to purchase humane animal products is also wrong.