Category Archives: philosophy

Hooray! Entirely Virtual APA Central Meeting in February

climate, justice, philosophy, travel, , , ,

As a member of Philosophers for Sustainability, I’m so excited that our APA 2+1 Campaign is bearing fruit! This February 20-22 & February 27 – March 1, the American Philosophical Association’s Central Division Meeting will be held entirely online, via Zoom.

Among other benefits, the fully virtual conference will:

  • Substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions (no flying!),
  • Be much more affordable for participants (no hotels or flights to pay for!),
  • Be more accessible to students, folks with various disabilities, health conditions, caring responsibilities, and others (no uncomfortable ballrooms!)
  • Try out new session formats (read-ahead sessions, fully public sessions, optional watch parties for student groups, and more), and
  • Allow for access to recorded sessions for a whole year (finally – I need not miss out when interesting sessions are scheduled concurrently)!

The program has just been published, and a lot of people have put a lot of work into making this fully virtual conference a reality. I’m very grateful to them all.

Let’s make the experiment a success by registering, showing up, participating, thinking critically, and giving constructive feedback en masse!

We’ll be doing one of three annual APA conferences virtually in 2026 and 2027 as well, so we’ve got opportunities to improve based on what we learn this time around. As a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Virtual Meetings, I know that I’ll be giving a lot of thought to this, so feel free to get in touch with me if you’ve got ideas we should consider trying.

“Creating Carnists” published

food, justice, philosophy, , ,

My second co-authored paper with Jeremy Fischer, “Creating Carnists,” has finally, officially been published by Philosophers’ Imprint!

We’re so glad to be able to share our work in another open access venue, so that anyone and everyone can read it free of charge.

In the paper, we argue that there are child-centered reasons (relating to kids’ moral development, autonomy development, and physical health) for all caregivers (individual and institutional) to provide kids with maximally plant-based diets and related education – even if there is no general moral duty for adults to be vegan (although we think there is such a duty).

Since it has been two years (!) since the paper was initially accepted, there are a few things in it that we would say/do differently now. But in the intervening time, we’ve continued developing our arguments in various related works, so stay tuned to learn about how our ideas change (and don’t) over time!

Moral Courage, Environmental Style

climate, philosophy, , ,

Around the country, professors are hard at work creating and updating syllabi for fall, which can be both exciting and exhausting. Thankfully, Philosophers for Sustainability is here to help!

They’ve just posted a new section on their website, called Teaching Modules, with resources that can easily be slotted into existing courses, used to create new courses, or shared and discussed in philosophy clubs.

The first module is called “Moral Courage, Environmental Style,” and it contains a bunch of materials to accompany an article I published (gulp, 10 years ago) called “Courage as an Environmental Virtue.” We’re talking: a 15-minute summary video made by yours truly, a set of slides, an hour-long video conversation between myself and Dr. Nora Mills Boyd, video transcripts, discussion questions, activity prompts, and a list of related resources.

These free materials may be particularly useful in courses that discuss virtue ethics, activism, sex & gender norms, courage in military contexts, and climate change.

I had a lot of fun working with both Nora and Sadie Warren on this project and I’m hoping that this module will be the first of many shared there, so if you have an idea or a request for other materials of this general sort, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Nora at nboyd@siena.edu.

Book recommendation: When Doing the Right Thing Is Impossible, by Lisa Tessman

book recommendations, philosophy

I’ve been meaning to read Lisa Tessman’s When Doing the Right Thing Is Impossible for some time – and I’m very glad I finally got around to it!

This book is both accessible for a general audience and dense with food for thought. When we see people around us, in the news, and maybe ourselves in positions where some sort of moral failure seems guaranteed, that can really wear on us. But I think it feels better to openly acknowledge that reality, as Tessman does, than to try to fool ourselves about the possibility of always keeping our hands clean.

I’ll admit that I went into the book already very sympathetic with the conclusion that, indeed, sometimes one is going to violate a moral duty no matter what one choose to do, but I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why nearly as eloquently and thoroughly as Tessman has. I’m less sure where I stand on Tessman’s constructivism, but that is something to continue pondering for the future (for me).

If lots more people would read this book and take some of the central ideas on board, I think that maybe we could be both more forgiving of ourselves and each other, and also more motivated to change social structures for the better – so that the moral dilemmas she discusses wouldn’t arise quite so often in the first place!

Upcoming Food, Family, and Justice Conference

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I’m excited to be presenting “Unjust Social Structures and Plant-Based Caregiving for Kids” with my co-author, Jeremy Fisher, at the upcoming “Food, Family, and Justice” conference June 21-23, 2024.

Even more exciting for me, though, are the amazing presenters from around the world who are slated to share about a whole bunch of fascinating, important, related topics! I’ve got my eye on multiple sessions by folks whose work I’ve read and enjoyed, but who I’ve never had the good fortune to meet before.

This conference will be a hybrid of remote and in-person presentations at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. My heartfelt gratitude to the organizers and sponsor (the Society for Applied Philosophy) for pursuing the hybrid format, which makes participation possible for those of us who are minimizing travel for environmental, health, family, financial, or other reasons!

Directory of Feminist Philosophy Archives

justice, philosophy,

Back when I was working for Hypatia as a graduate student, I helped set up a digital archive for the journal’s own internal use. It was a huge project (one that has continued and morphed since my time with the journal), but it was also one that I really enjoyed working on, in no small part because of the crucial role that archives play in helping transmit knowledge about our past, our present, and our future possibilities. Such knowledge is especially valuable for historically marginalized communities.

So it was with great pleasure that I learned about a new directory that makes various feminist philosophy archives more accessible to all sorts of scholars and members of the general pubic.

I encourage you to check it out!

Upcoming Talk: “Justice in the Cafeteria”

food, justice, philosophy, travel,

On September 14th, I’ll be giving a talk with my co-author, Jeremy Fischer, at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario called “Justice in the Cafeteria.” Here’s the abstract:

School meal reform efforts generally center around health, financial accessibility, and environmental sustainability, all of which are important. However, key ethical and political aspects of school meal programs have not received adequate attention in public discussion. We argue that whether school meal programs provide animal-based foods is a matter of justice for kids and for the society in which they live. Our child-centered arguments against providing such foods offer animal advocates and others who have a stake in the school meal debates a motivationally potent resource for their advocacy—without presupposing any particular view about our duties to animals.

Since COVID isn’t over, I’m doing what I can to minimize the risks of the trip for everyone concerned, but at the same time, I’m looking forward to a bit of a philosophy road trip, spending some time in Canada, and the chance to meet some friends from the APPLE reading group in person!

Video of My Recent Lecture

justice, philosophy

If you want to check out the lecture that I gave to the Conceptual Engineering Network back in May, that video is now posted on YouTube!

The talk is called “Conceptual Engineering as Taking Responsibility for Concepts.” It builds on a pair of papers I published in the European Journal of Philosophy a few years back, in which I argued that we can be (backwards-looking) morally responsible for the concepts that we possess and use. In this lecture (a work in progress!), I argue that sometimes, doing conceptual engineering projects involves taking forwards-looking moral responsibility for concepts.

The key example that I talk about in the latter portion of the talk is the concept EMPLOYMENT, and the possible replacement concept HUMAN RENTALS. There, I draw on some fascinating work about workplace democracy by David Ellerman – you can download the whole book here!

Online Lecture May 16: “Conceptual Engineering as Taking Responsibility for Concepts”

philosophy
On Tuesday, May 16th, from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM Central Time, I’ll be giving a talk as part of the Conceptual Engineering Network (CEN)‘s online lecture series.

While philosophers tend to talk about moral responsibility in its backward-looking form, moral responsibility also comes in a future-oriented form. In this talk, I’ll focus on the forward-looking kind of responsibility and make a case for the claim that when we undertake conceptual engineering projects for moral reasons, we are taking forward-looking moral responsibility for our conceptual repertoires. To illustrate my position, in the latter part of the talk, I’ll explore the moral reasons we have to do some conceptual engineering when it comes to the concept EMPLOYMENT.

You’re welcome to join us on Zoom for approximately an hour’s worth of lecture and an hour of Q & A. (But if you miss it, the lecture portion will be posted on the CEN YouTube channel after the fact.)

Zoom meeting ID: 614 8076 0079
Zoom passcode: CEN23

Online Workshops, Reading Groups, & Lecture Series

philosophy

There are so many cool (free!) online workshops, reading groups, and lecture series nowadays! I’ve been taking part in more of them of late, and really getting a lot out of them, so I want to take a moment to say kudos to all the organizers and participants that I’ve been learning with and from (and to give other folks a nudge to join if they are so inclined)!

Check out the following links to some of my recommendations:

Work In Progress Groups

Workshop on Gender and Philosophy (WOGAP)

Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (APPLE)

Emotion and Society Lab Works–In-Progress Series (brand new – I’m looking forward to the first session)

Lecture Series

Conceptual Engineering Lecture Series (CELS)

Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals (SSEA) Online Colloquium Series