Department of Philosophy

""I've never felt so free as when I'm in this classroom," says Roy B., a sixty-two year student in my philosophy course. We had just finished a discussion on Descartes, and Roy said this in his truck-driver twang, the wrinkles around his smiling eyes radiating behind his taped glasses. Roy has been incarcerated in a Texas prison for the past twenty years—for what or how long, I have no idea.

For the past six years, I have had the wonderful opportunity to teach philosophy in prisons in Texas and New York. My experiences here have been inspiring and heartbreaking. After each class, I exit the series of reinforced doors, thick walls, and razor wire feeling rejuvenated and drained. My students go back to their cells or dorms to ruminate: Aristotle on happiness, Augustine on temptation, Marx on alienation, Camus on death. We pull no punches, and by the end of the semester, we share the collective joy of struggling valiantly, perhaps in futility, through questions that may have no final answer. But, we press forward, and most, like Sisyphus and Roy B., choose to allow themselves the occasional smile.

My paper will recount these experiences teaching in prison, making the argument for the importance of education for the incarcerated. More broadly, this paper articulates the term "habilitation," a notion of education that emphasizes that learning is a process whereby teacher and student are "habilitated" to their world, a theory of pedagogy that develops "habits" of character and cultivates skills that help us to construct a genuine "habitat" in the world. I argue that it is at society's margins, especially the prison, where education can come to understand its successes and failures, and it is the great duty of teachers and philosophers to spend time entering into our prisons."

In response to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, a "solution" of providing body cameras to police officers was proposed. The following week, Eric Garner's death was caught on tape, but no indictment occurred.

Will body cameras help to reduce and prevent unjustified use of force? Or are they another technology that helps to make the "disciplinary society" more pervasive, another tool of surveillance that extends the Panoptic gaze ever further?

Animal ethicists have recently debated the ethical questions raised by disenhancing animals to improve their welfare. Here, we focus on the particular case of breeding hens for commercial egg-laying systems to become blind, in order to benefit their welfare. Many people find breeding blind hens intuitively repellent, yet 'welfare-only' positions appear to be committed to endorsing this possibility if it produces welfare gains. We call this the 'Blind Hens' Challenge'. In this paper, we argue that there are both empirical and theoretical reasons why even those adopting 'welfare-only' views should be concerned about breeding blind hens. But we also argue that alternative views, which (for example) claim that it is important to respect the telos or rights of an animal, do not offer a more convincing solution to questions raised by the possibility of disenhancing animals for their own benefit.

In his paper "The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken problem" (Nanoethics 2:305-316, 2008) Paul Thompson argues that the possibility of "disenhancing" animals in order to improve animal welfare poses a philosophical conundrum. Although many people intuitively think such disenhancement would be morally impermissible, it's difficult to find good arguments to support such intuitions. In this brief response to Thompson, I accept that there's a conundrum here. But I argue that if we seriously consider whether creating beings can harm or benefit them, and introduce the non-identity problem to discussions of animal disehancement, the conundrum is even deeper than Thompson suggests.

It is frequently claimed that breeding animals that we know will have unavoidable health problems is at least prima facie wrong, because it harms the animals concerned. However, if we take 'harm' to mean 'makes worse off', this claim appears false. Breeding an animal that will have unavoidable health problems does not make any particular individual animal worse off, since an animal bred without such problems would be a different individual animal. Yet, the intuition that there is something ethically wrong about breeding animals -such as purebred pedigree dogs -in ways that seem negatively to affect welfare remains powerful. In this paper, an animal version of what is sometimes called the non-identity problem is explored, along with a number of possible ways of understanding what might be wrong with such breeding practices, if it is not that they harm the animal itself. These possibilities include harms to others, placeholder arguments, non-comparative ideas of harm, an 'impersonal' approach, and concerns about human attitudes and dispositions.

Few biologists have studied the evolutionary processes at work in indoor environments. Yet indoor environments comprise approximately 0.5% of ice-free land area -an area as large as the subtropical coniferous forest biome. Here we review the emerging subfield of 'indoor biome' studies. After defining the indoor biome and tracing its deep history, we discuss some of its evolutionary dimensions. We restrict our examples to the species found in human houses -a subset of the environments constituting the indoor biome -and offer preliminary hypotheses to advance the study of indoor evolution. Studies of the indoor biome are situated at the intersection of evolutionary ecology, anthropology, architecture, and human ecology and are well suited for citizen science projects, public outreach, and large-scale international collaborations.