Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
Invited paper given at Trolley Problem Anthropology conference, U of Cambridge: I explore the role of lifeboat problems or lifeboat scenarios in Tom Regan’s influential philosophical argument (The Case for Animal Rights), and by extension within wider animal activism. This includes a consideration of the tension between realist and non-realist narratives or forms of moral exampling but also a look at attitudes to principles of consistency and exceptionality. At what point do these lifeboat examples break down? How far can they be stretched? Why does repetition (& variation) seem so important to their telling? Who are they for and how do they persuade? This reading emerges from the context of my own long-term ethnographic work with self-titled ‘moderate animal activists’ in Scotland.