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The idea of cooperation has been recently used with regard to human–animal relations to justify the application of an associative theory of justice to animals. In this paper, I discuss some of these proposals and seek to provide a reformulation of the idea of cooperation suitable to human–animal relations. The standard idea of cooperation, indeed, presupposes mental capacities that probably cannot be found in animals. I try to disentangle the idea of cooperation from other cognate notions and distinguish it from exploitation, use, and relationship. The upshot is a minimal taxonomy of human–animal relations that covers most possibilities, from the worst type of relation (exploitation) to that which is most favourable to animals’ welfare (relationship). In this taxonomy, cooperation is a form of relation where animals are used to produce a valuable good in a way that is compatible with their ethological features and without being harmed.

According to the prevalent reading, we are today witnessing an epistemological conflict that takes the form of a war on science, which is nurtured by disinformation and instrumentalised by populist parties. The aim of this article is to contribute to a more complex reading of the phenomenon, over and above the science vs. anti-science dichotomy. As a result of the entry of science – and scientists – into public debate and public interaction between experts and non-experts we witness the overcoming of the perception of science as a monolith, which is followed by the tendency to overcome a deferential attitude towards scientific expertise. The legitimate exercise of criticism and skepticism towards institutions, however, often ends up conforming to a Manichean vision, which distinguishes good and bad, friend and foe, truth tellers and liars. The unconditional faith in institutions, demanded by technocrats, is overturned by an unconditional mistrust, which does not allow for open claims and compromises. Not denying the centrality of the epistemic dimension of conflict, our hypothesis is that conflicts over science are in fact also – and above all – conflicts of a political nature, that is, conflicts that do not usually have science and technology per se as their object, but rather political decisions on scientific-technical and health-related issues. This suggests, implicitly, that the application of a technology by the market may be more accepted, and thus that the market enjoys greater legitimacy than politics, because the market promises, in the abstract, freedom of choice. The contrast between technocracy and populism, between a policy reduced to conforming to scientific knowledge whose limits and ambiguities are downplayed – or not recognized – and a policy that rejects the role of experts – highlights a generalised distrust of democratic politics.  The public sphere, as a place of deliberation and democratic management of complexity and plurality, is thus reduced to the clash between irreconcilable visions.

Although the idea of dignity has always been applied to human beings and although its role is far from being uncontroversial, some recent works in animal ethics have tried to apply the idea of dignity to animals. The aim of this paper is to discuss critically whether these attempts are convincing and sensible. In order to assess these proposals, I put forward two formal conditions that any conception of dignity must meet (non-redundancy and normative determinacy) and outline three main approaches which might justify the application of dignity to animals: the species-based approach, moral individualism and the relational approach. Discussing in particular works by Martha Nussbaum and Michael Meyer I argue that no approach can convincingly justify the extension of dignity to animals because all fail to meet the formal conditions and do not provide an appropriate basis for animal dignity. I conclude by arguing that the recognition of the moral importance of animals and their defense should appeal to other normative concepts which are more appropriate than dignity.

This paper aims to put in question the all-purposes function that sentience has come to play in animal ethics. In particular, I criticize the idea that sentience can provide a sound basis of equality, as has been recently proposed by Alasdair Cochrane. Sentience seems to eschew the standard problems of egalitarian accounts that are based on range properties. By analysing the nature of range properties, I will show that sentience cannot provide such a solution because it is constructed as a sui generis range property. After criticizing the approaches seeking to ground animals’ equal status, I turn to Singer’s principle of equal consideration of interests. Despite its seeming non-controversiality, I argue that it cannot do without referring to the moral status of a being in order to determine the weight of a being’s interests. Moreover, it outlines a weak egalitarian basis because it relies on the presumption of equality of interests in virtue of our lack of knowledge of the weight of individuals’ interests. I conclude in a more positive tone by arguing that, irrespective of the troubles of range property egalitarianism, animal ethics can rely on other normative resources to defend the cause of animals.

In this article I provide a conceptual analysis of an underexplored issue in the debate about effective altruism: its theory of effectiveness. First, I distinguish effectiveness from efficiency and claim that effective altruism understands effectiveness through the lens of efficiency. Then, I discuss the limitations of this approach in particular with respect to the charge that it is incapable of supporting structural change. Finally, I propose an expansion of the notion of effectiveness of effective altruism by referring to the debate in political philosophy about realism and the practical challenge of normative theories. I argue that effective altruism, both as a social movement and as a conceptual paradigm, would benefit from clarifying its ideal, taking into account the role of institutions, and expanding its idea of feasibility.

Singer has argued against the permissibility of killing people (and certain animals) on the grounds of the distinction between conscious and self-conscious animals. Unlike conscious animals, which can be replaced without a loss of overall welfare, there can be no substitution for self-conscious animals. In this article, I show that Singer's argument is untenable, in the cases both of the preference-based account of utilitarianism and of objective hedonism, to which he has recently turned. In the first case, Singer cannot theoretically exclude that a self-conscious being's stronger preferences may only be satisfied by killing another self-conscious being. In the second case, he fails to demonstrate that the rules of ordinary morality, demanding that killing be strictly forbidden, could not frequently be overruled by the principles of esoteric morality. In both cases, his theory cannot solve the classical utilitarian problem of prohibiting the killing of people in secret.

Speciesism is standardly considered an unjustied discrimination on the basis of a natural characteristic species membership which should have no moral value. As known, the charge of speciesism has frequently been used by animal ethicists as a knock-down argument to reject claims based on the moral priority of humans over animals. A typical charge of speciesism is made against the alleged unwarranted preference for granting rights to severely mentally disabled human beings and not to animals with an equivalent (or even superior) level of consciousness, rationality, sentience (or any other property on which the ascription of rights and moral personality is taken to obtain).1 Other theorists claim that such an approach is in error insofar as species belonging is not a morally irrelevant property. Humanity, on this view, carries with it a moral value because it is the value of humanity itself that grounds other moral values. Let us call such an approach humanism.2 The rejection of speciesism has typically taken two main forms. As we will see below, McMahans theory is more consequentialist and interest-based, but also includes some deontological features.

I attempt to solve the apparent inconsistency between expressivism and cognitivism in Spinoza’s metaethics by appealing to Spinoza’s naturalistic approach. According to Spinoza, good and evil are neither properties of the world, nor entities independent of individual appetite. It is the very activity of one’s conatus that defines as good and evil certain events. But, insofar as each conative state has a correspondent cognitive state, each evaluative judgment is both an expression of one’s conatus and a cognitive statement. Spinoza can be both expressivist and cognitivist because the reality of moral facts depends on one’s conatus , but these moral facts can, nevertheless, be either adequate and true, or inadequate and false.

I attempt to solve the apparent inconsistency between expressivism and cognitivism in Spinoza's metaethics by appealing to Spinoza's naturalistic approach. According to Spinoza, good and evil are neither properties of the world, nor entities independent of individual appetite. It is the very activity of one's conatus that defines as good and evil certain events. But, insofar as each conative state has a correspondent cognitive state, each evaluative judgment is both an expression of one's conatus and a cognitive statement. Spinoza can be both expressivist and cognitivist because the reality of moral facts depends on one's conatus, but these moral facts can, nevertheless, be either adequate and true, or inadequate and false. Pour réduire l'incohérence qui existerait entre expressivisme et cognitivisme au sein de la métaéthique de Spinoza, on peut s'appuyer sur l'approche naturaliste qui est la sienne. Pour Spinoza, le bien et le mal ne sont ni des propriétés du monde, ni des entités indépendantes de l'appétit individuel. C'est en effet l'activité même du conatus de chacun qui définit certains événements comme bons ou mauvais. Mais, dans la mesure où à chaque état conatif correspond un état cognitif, tout jugement évaluatif est à la fois l'expression d'un conatus particulier et une proposition avec un contenu cognitif. Spinoza peut donc être à la fois expressiviste et cognitiviste, parce que la réalité des faits moraux dépend d'un conatus particulier mais que ces faits moraux peuvent tout de même être adéquats et vrais, ou inadéquats et faux.

Current laws on the treatment of animals in all liberal countries demand that animals be stunned before being slaughtered in order to prevent their suffering. This is derived from a widely-shared concern for animal welfare. However, in many Western countries, exemptions from this legal requirement have been granted to Jewish and Muslim communities so that they can continue to perform ritual slaughter. Hence, there seems to be a clash between the right to religious freedom and the duty to minimize animal suffering during slaughter. In this paper, I want to propose a solution to this seemingly irreconcilable clash. To understand whether these two principles are really incompatible, we need to establish exactly what they demand of us. I argue that there is no convincing reason to take the suffering involved in the killing of animals more seriously than the suffering experienced by animals during their lives (on farms). If so, we might demand that ritually slaughtered animals be \"compensated\" for their experiencing a more painful death by raising these animals in better conditions than others.