Federico Zuolo

Università degli Studi di Genova | UNIGE · Dipartimento di Antichità, Filosofia e Storia (DAFIST)

According to the prevalent reading, we are today witnessing an epistemological conflict that takes the form of a war on science, which is nurtured by disinformation and instrumentalised by populist parties. The aim of this article is to contribute to a more complex reading of the phenomenon, over and above the science vs. anti-science dichotomy. As...

Healthy eating policies have become a hot and thorny domain of public concern because they affect people’s liberties, life prospects, and public expenditures. However, what policies state institutions may legitimately enforce is a controversial matter. Is state paternalism for the sake of public health permissible? Could people be incentivized to e...

In this chapter, I provide a set of guidelines to navigate the thorny question of choosing between agency or sentience as a basis for moral status in animal ethics (and beyond). I will argue that both options have advantages and limits, and the choice depends on what one wants to do with the idea of moral status. In assessing the merits of each app...

This paper investigates Tom Regan’s attitude towards violence as a litmus test to understand the justifiability of the use of violence in animal rights activists (ARAs). Although Regan’s take seems uncontroversially against a recourse to violence, there is an ambiguity in his position. By comparing Regan’s conditions for the legitimate use of viole...

The conclusion briefly discusses the possible application of this procedure to some thorny topics (the issue of hunting and genetic engineering) and provides some considerations on whether real, and not merely hypothetical, people may uphold and accept the spirit and implications of this procedure.

This chapter provides an analysis of the disagreement about the moral status of animals. To check whether epistemically justified disagreements are possible in practice, two paradigmatic cases of peer disagreement are discussed: the first regarding the admissibility of the use of animals in research laboratories and the second regarding the problem...

This chapter applies the public justification procedure by discussing whether some of the most important principles regarding the treatment of animals may be supported by neutral reasons and by reasons internal to the main views. These principles are divided into three families: principles protecting animals’ interests in life, in freedom and in we...

This chapter argues that, given that we cannot rule out one of the positions in reasonable disagreement as false, we need a different method to find publicly acceptable principles. Such a method is a procedure of public justification. After discussing the main models of public justification, a hybrid procedure between the consensus approach and the...

This chapter outlines the main views about the moral status of animals that pass the test of minimally rational acceptability: Animal Subjectivism, Pathocentrism, Relationalism, Environmentalism and Humanism. The rest of the chapter explains why these views are sufficient to partially represent some other socially widespread views (religions and so...

This chapter discusses what response liberal institutions ought to give to the problem of radical dissent, in particular the dissent expressed through illegal acts. The response should be dependent on the type of claim put forward by the unreasonable parties and their attitude. By analyzing a range of cases, including cases of civil disobedience an...

The idea of cooperation has been recently used with regard to human–animal relations to justify the application of an associative theory of justice to animals. In this paper, I discuss some of these proposals and seek to provide a reformulation of the idea of cooperation suitable to human–animal relations. The standard idea of cooperation, indeed,...

This book explores the problem of disagreement concerning the treatment of animals in a liberal society. Current laws include an unprecedented concern for animal welfare, yet disagreement remains pervasive. This issue has so far been neglected both in political philosophy and animal ethics. Although starting from disagreement has been the hallmark...

This paper aims to put in question the all-purposes function that sentience has come to play in animal ethics. In particular, I criticize the idea that sentience can provide a sound basis of equality, as has been recently proposed by Alasdair Cochrane. Sentience seems to eschew the standard problems of egalitarian accounts that are based on range p...

In this paper I provide a conceptual analysis of an underexplored issue in the debate about effective altruism: its theory of effectiveness. First, I distinguish effectiveness from efficiency and claim that effective altruism understands effectiveness through the lens of efficiency. Then, I discuss the limitations of this approach in particular wit...

Although compulsory vaccinations have sparked protests since their institutions long time ago, recently there has a been a surge in this debate because of the diffusion of fake news in our communication environment characterized by "bubbles" and epistemic niches. In this paper I reconstruct the main positions about vaccinations as a measure to purs...

This paper addresses the problem of pluralism in democratic societies, by exploiting some insights from the debate about the epistemology of disagreement. First, by focusing on the permissibility of experiments on nonhuman animals for research purposes, we provide an epistemic analysis of deep normative disagreements. We understand that to mean dis...

The principle of equal consideration of interests (ECOI) is a very popular principle in animal ethics. Peter Singer employs it to ground equal treatment and solve the problem of the basis of equality, namely the problem of why we should grant equal treatment despite the variability of people’s features. In this paper, I challenge Singer’s argument...

The myth of the age of Kronos and Zeus in Plato’s Statesman is very ambiguous. In this article, I propose a new set of grounds for upholding the traditional interpretation of the myth against some recent interpretations - by Luc Brisson, Gabriela Carone and Charles Kahn-that seek to view the age of Kronos as a positive condition. To do so I argue t...

Although the idea of dignity has always been applied to human beings and although its role is far from being uncontroversial, some recent works in animal ethics have tried to apply the idea of dignity to animals. The aim of this paper is to discuss critically whether these attempts are convincing and sensible. In order to assess these proposals, I...

Jeff McMahan has recently provided a forceful defense of methodological anti-speciesism against speciesists’ claim that species standard is a meaningful criterion to assess the value of lives and the nature of deprivation. In this paper I discuss McMahan’s favored account (the Intrinsic Potential Account) to assess the value of life and the nature...

Singer has argued against the permissibility of killing people (and certain animals) on the grounds of the distinction between conscious and self-conscious animals. Unlike conscious animals, which can be replaced without a loss of overall welfare, there can be no substitution for self-conscious animals. In this article, I show that Singer's argumen...

I attempt to solve the apparent inconsistency between expressivism and cognitivism in Spinoza’s metaethics by appealing to Spinoza’s naturalistic approach. According to Spinoza, good and evil are neither properties of the world, nor entities independent of individual appetite. It is the very activity of one’s conatus that defines as good and evil c...

In this paper I analyze the issue of how ancient Greek political theory conceived of the realization of the normative ideal. I define what I mean by realizability through three main dimensions: Realization of what, by whom, and how. First, I deal with the problem of realization in Plato's Republic where the problem of implementing a model was for t...

In this paper I analyze Corrado Del Bò's most recent contribution to the debate about neutrality (La neutralità necessaria, ETS, 2014). In particular I focus on two issues: first, Del Bò's claim that neutrality of effect is the genuine meaning of neutrality and, second, his analysis of the relation between neutrality and laïcité in Italy. Del Bò ar...

"Gleichberechtigung unter Tieren und religiose Schlachtung". Current laws on the treatment of animals in all liberal countries demand that animals be stunned before being slaughtered in order to prevent their suffering. This is derived from a widely-shared concern for animal welfare. However, in many Western countries, exemptions from this legal re...

Most contemporary Western laws regarding the treatment of animals in livestock farming and animal slaughter are primarily concerned with the principle that animal suffering during slaughter should be minimized, but that animal life may be taken for legitimate human purposes. This principle seems to be widely shared, intuitively appealing and capabl...

In this article, we engage critically with the understanding of majority-minority relations in a liberal democracy as relations of toleration. We make two main claims: first, that appeals to toleration are unable to capture the procedural problems concerning the unequal socio-political participation of minorities, and, second, that they do not offe...

The ‘agents’ of toleration can be divided into three categories: public institutions, groups and individuals. If it is mostly accepted that both public institutions and individuals are capable of toleration, it is not clear that such a capacity can be attributed to groups, although in daily discourse we seem ready to say that a certain social group...

How ought political philosophers to deal with cases where justice needs to be balanced against other values? For instance, how should they fix the rate at which justice can be compromised for the sake of efficiency? In this paper we take on G.A. Cohen's treatment of this problem, usually defined as the problem of trade-off values, comparing and con...

In multicultural debates, groups are normally defined in terms of culture, religion or ethnicity. However, these notions typically feature contested boundaries, and they do not necessarily express a clear normative meaning. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a nuanced framework for understanding the diverse types of sharing and the relative no...

In this paper I would like to criticize the Aristotelian interpretation of Sen's theory of human capabilities, suggesting a Spinozistic approach to tackle the problems in Sen's theory and develop a new perspective on the questions of development. First of all I will discuss the effective assumptions and needs in Sen's theory, then I will analyse Nu...