After acquiring my BA in philosophy, I worked for a while as an animal activist. One part of me found this work immensely fulfilling; I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. The other part, however, was dismayed to find how ineffective many of the arguments I had inherited from the philosophers I had idolized at the time—Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and the rest—were at persuading others of the value of animal life and of motivating them to do better. Eventually, my misgivings won out. Though I continued to do activism, I put the bulk of my efforts towards pursuing a graduate education in literature and philosophy. Two masters degrees and one PhD later, I am now closer to an answer to the problems that beset me many years earlier, problems such as these:
What are we disagreeing about when we disagree about animals?
What are the obstacles in place that prevent our society from evolving in its attitudes all them who are not human?
Why does rational argument so often fail to persuade and what other alternative method of persuasion can be employed in its stead?
Why has our movement in its over 50 year history failed to make meaningful progress on any of the goals that were envisioned, and how may we better fashion ourselves to promote the spread of the message of animal liberation?
The posts on this substack represent the latest developments in my thinking on these questions. Typically, these thoughts would go into a notebook and perhaps eventually resurface as a scholarly article somewhere. I’ve decided to share them publicly here in a fragmented form in the hopes of receiving feedback from those who are fighting for animals on the front lines and who are therefore better able to judge the merit of what I say by scrutinizing it under the light of their experience, and also because I intend (at least eventually) to move away entirely from publishing in academic journals (where hardly anyone reads, much less cares about what I write) towards publishing my work in more public facing outlets.
On a different note, if ever you have a question about animals and philosophy you’d like to pose to me, please send it my way and I will do my best to respond to it in a post.
