Animals, Just Distribution, and Cost Effectiveness

Harry R. Lloyd (Yale University)

The talk is online and free to the public. For information on how to attend, please see the SSEA website (below).

Thursday, January 9, Noon EST (9AM PST/4PM GMT/5PM CET). Please note that because of time zones, the time of the talk in your location may differ than what is listed as the event time above on this page and in the PhilEvents calendar.

Harry Lloyd: "Animals, Just Distribution, and Cost Effectiveness"

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.