Dans le cadre des midis de l’éthique du CRÉ, Eze Paez nous offrira une présentation intitulée « Wild Animal Suffering: The Freedom-based Approach ».

La présentation d’environ 40 minutes sera suivie d’une discussion d’environ la même durée. Via zoom.

Wild Animal Suffering: The Freedom-based Approach

Résumé

Wild animals probably have net negative lives because of the naturogenic harms they suffer (Ng 1995; Horta 2010; Tomasik 2015; Faria 2016). Since there are over 1 quintillion of them (Tomasik 2009), they constitute the majority of sentient individuals. It is important to determine what reasons, if any, we have to assist them.

Arguments for a permission or a requirement to help wild animals have been typically based on a concern for their well-being, rather than their freedom (Pearce 1995; Horta 2010; Palmer 2010; Faria 2014; McMahan 2015; Paez 2019a, 2019b). Even political accounts of our duty to help deny that animals have an interest in autonomy (Cochrane 2018). When a concern for the freedom, or sovereignty, of wild animal communities has appeared in the literature, it has been to argue for non-intervention (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011).

In my talk I will present a freedom-based account of our duty to assist wild animals. I will argue, first, that animals can be free or unfree. They cannot assess normative or evaluative principles, but they update their intentional states and choose according to them in pursuit of their aims. This kind of control is all that freedom requires. In order not to compromise it, we should relate to animals in ways compatible with the practical standards implicit in their rational and volitional activity.

Second, guaranteeing their freedom requires us to recognise animals as our fellow citizens, immune from the unjustified interferences of others. But being in control is compatible with both scant and abundant opportunities for choice. The most important choice-situations of wild animals are restricted to flee-or-fight, greater or lesser suffering, or a more or less painful death. Concern for their freedom also requires us to improve the richness of their choices, if necessary by modifying nature.

Présentation de Yann Allard-Tremblay intitulée « Dans l’ombre des circonstances de la justice », dans le cadre du cycle de conférences du thème phare Antiracisme et décolonisation.

Via Zoom.

Résumé:

La philosophie politique occidentale prend généralement pour objet l’idée de justice. David Hume et John Rawls ont formulé de manière canonique l’idée que la justice est un concept dont la pertinence s’impose dans des circonstances particulières. Suivant ces penseurs, les circonstances de la justice sont comprises comme un contexte de rareté relative entre individus plus ou moins égaux ayant des passions et des intérêts conflictuels. Or, cette idée ne permet pas uniquement de situer le contexte du discours portant sur la justice, il limite également notre capacité à concevoir la justice autrement.

Afin de déconstruire cette idée, nous nous intéresserons à l’action de grâce de la Confédération Haudenosaunee. Ces mots qui viennent avant tous les autres visent à remercier le Créateur ainsi qu’à reconnaître nos relations avec les autres-qu’humains. Ils nient la perception occidentale de rareté pour plutôt mettre l’accent sur l’abondance. Conséquemment, nous proposons de réfléchir aux manières de concevoir la justice politique et sociale rendues possibles lorsque l’on débute avec ces circonstances autres. Nous argumentons, notamment, que le Juste peut dès lors être pensée comme reposant sur des relations de dépendance et de responsabilités plutôt que comme cherchant à établir une distribution équitable et à garantir le tien et le mien. Ultimement, ceci permet de mettre la lumière sur des conceptions du Juste qui reposent dans l’ombre des circonstances de la justice.

Le GRÉEA reçoit Simona Capisani (Harvard University), qui offrira une présentation intitulée « The Right to a Livable Locality and Climate Displacement in the Territorial State System ».

Résumé

People have primarily inhabited a restricted range of temperatures on the surface of the earth for most of human history. This “human climate niche” is now threatened due to anthropogenic climate change, and a significant portion of these areas is likely to become far less habitable. Many have and will continue to be forced to move within and across national borders. Those without the means to adaptive mobility face a myriad of challenges and intersecting injustices as the livability of the places they occupy continues to deteriorate.

This talk takes a “practice-based” approach to answering questions regarding the nature of our obligations to those displaced by climate change. The normative ground I defend can help identify what kinds of adaptive adjustments are both reasonable and necessary for meeting the demands of justice for climate-induced displacement and migration. Specifically, the talk identifies and explicates a basic right people at risk of displacement have a claim to– the right to a livable locality. I argue that such a right establishes a correlative moral “associative obligation” to climate displaced persons. A principle of protection thus emerges as a requirement of legitimacy for the international state system understood as a social practice. To more fully account for the right, this talk raises and aims to answer the following question: what is an embodied individual and community’s relation to its space in a territorial state system such that, if the qualities or the physical location changes, that space is still livable?

In answer to this question, I argue that we need a “dynamical” notion of a livable space, which allows us to assess what changes in location people can or cannot be reasonably asked to adapt to. Second, we need an account that explains why “basic needs” are related in a constitutive, rather than merely instrument way, to location. I argue that as embodied human beings within a territorial state system, the relationship to a livable space is not merely incidental. Rather, being under conditions where livable space can no longer be guaranteed is morally relevant for participants in a social practice which is territorially all-encompassing and territorially exclusive.

8e rencontre du Groupe de lecture en philosophie de l’écologie (via ZOOM)
(Coorganisé par Anne-Marie Boisvert, Antoine C. Dussault, Véronica Ponce)

Préinscription: boisvert.anne-marie@uqam.ca

Article à l’étude : Bryant, R. (2012). “What if Communities are not Wholes? », in Kabasenche, W.P. et al. (eds.), The Environment: Philosophy, Science, and Ethics, MIT Press, pp.37-56.

Ce groupe de lecture est organisé dans le cadre des activités du Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (CIRST) et du Groupe de recherche en éthique environnementale et animale (GRÉEA)

Dans le cadre des midis de l’éthique du CRÉ, Federica Berdini nous offrira une présentation intitulée « A Place for Coping in Action Theory ».

Sur Zoom.