CAE Public Seminar | Finding Common Ground on Animal Welfare

Speaker: Bob Fischer, Professor of Philosophy, Texas State University

There are philosophical frameworks that allow us to say that the feasible policy reforms are usually the right reforms. According to these frameworks, respecting differences in a pluralistic society just means allowing competing values to shape policy, even if that means that animals are much worse off than they would be in a political order that was less deferential to certain stakeholders’ values. This talk considers the ethical advantages and disadvantages of this kind of thinking, ultimately recommending a pragmatic approach toward the compromises required for change.

Bob Fischer is an American philosopher whose work focuses on ethics, especially animal ethics, and epistemology. He is a professor of philosophy at Texas State University and a senior research manager at Rethink Priorities, where he studies topics such as animal welfare and interspecies comparisons of welfare. Fischer has written and edited numerous books on animal ethics and philosophy, including The Ethics of Eating Animals and Animal Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction.