Loren Lomasky

Last updated
Loren Lomasky
OccupationPhilosopher

Loren E. Lomasky is an American philosopher, currently the Cory Professor of Political Philosophy, Policy and Law at the University of Virginia.

Contents

Biography

Lomasky earned his PhD from the University of Connecticut, and has previously taught at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and the Australian National University in Canberra. He has also been a contributing editor to Reason magazine.

Lomasky has written principally on ethics and political philosophy. His book Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community established his reputation as a leading advocate of a rights-based approach to moral and social issues. [1] Besides these, his teaching interests include the philosophy of religion, medieval philosophy, and other periods in the history of philosophy.

Lomasky has been the recipient of many awards including the 1991 Matchette Prize for his Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community. Professor Lomasky has held research appointments sponsored by the NEH, the Center for the Study of Public Choice, the Australian National University and Bowling Green's Social Philosophy and Policy Center.

On meat eating

Lomasky is a noted opponent of animal rights. He authored the paper "Is it wrong to eat animals?", in 2013 which defends meat eating and criticizes the arguments of moral vegetarianism. [2] Lomasky argues that the pleasures of consuming meat "afford human beings goods comparable qualitatively and quantitatively to those held forth by the arts. Lives of many people would be significantly impaired were they to forgo carnivorous consumption." [3]

Selected publications

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Singer</span> Australian moral philosopher (born 1946)

Peter Albert David Singer is an Australian moral philosopher and Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics, approaching the subject from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He wrote the book Animal Liberation (1975), in which he argues for vegetarianism, and the essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", which favours donating to help the global poor. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian, but he revealed in The Point of View of the Universe (2014), coauthored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">T. H. Green</span> British philosopher (1836–1882)

Thomas Hill Green, known as T. H. Green, was an English philosopher, political radical and temperance reformer, and a member of the British idealism movement. Like all the British idealists, Green was influenced by the metaphysical historicism of G. W. F. Hegel. He was one of the thinkers behind the philosophy of social liberalism.

David Schmidtz is a Canadian-American philosopher. He is Presidential Chair of Moral Science at West Virginia University's Chambers College of Business and Economics. He is also editor-in-chief of the journal Social Philosophy & Policy. Previously, he was Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic at the University of Arizona. While at Arizona, he founded and served as inaugural head of the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen R. L. Clark</span> British philosopher

Stephen Richard Lyster Clark is an English philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Clark specialises in the philosophy of religion and animal rights, writing from a philosophical position that might broadly be described as Christian Platonist. He is the author of twenty books, including The Moral Status of Animals (1977), The Nature of the Beast (1982), Animals and Their Moral Standing (1997), G.K. Chesterton (2006), Philosophical Futures (2011), and Ancient Mediterranean Philosophy (2012), as well as 77 scholarly articles, and chapters in another 109 books. He is a former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Applied Philosophy (1990–2001).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethics of eating meat</span> Food ethics topic

Conversations regarding the ethics of eating meat are focused on whether or not it is moral to eat non-human animals. Ultimately, this is a debate that has been ongoing for millennia, and it remains one of the most prominent topics in food ethics.

Cora Diamond is an American philosopher who works in the areas of moral philosophy, animal ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy and literature, and the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, and Elizabeth Anscombe. Diamond is the Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Virginia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Rachels</span> American philosopher and ethicist

James Webster Rachels was an American philosopher who specialized in ethics and animal rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Otteson</span> American philosopher (born 1968)

James R. Otteson is an American philosopher and political economist. He is the John T. Ryan Jr. Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. Formerly, he was the Thomas W. Smith Presidential Chair in Business Ethics, Professor of Economics, and executive director of the Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest University. He is also a Senior Scholar at The Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C., a Research Professor in the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom and in the Philosophy Department at the University of Arizona, a Visitor of Ralston College, a Research Fellow for the Independent Institute in California, a director of Ethics and Economics Education of New England, and a Senior Scholar at the Fraser Institute. He has taught previously at Yeshiva University, New York University, Georgetown University, and the University of Alabama.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Animal rights</span> Belief that animals have interests that should be considered

Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all sentient animals have moral worth independent of their utility to humans, and that their most basic interests—such as avoiding suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings. Broadly speaking, and particularly in popular discourse, the term "animal rights" is often used synonymously with "animal protection" or "animal liberation". More narrowly, "animal rights" refers to the idea that many animals have fundamental rights to be treated with respect as individuals—rights to life, liberty, and freedom from torture that may not be overridden by considerations of aggregate welfare.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mylan Engel</span> American philosopher

Mylan Engel Jr. is a full professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.

Jefferson Allen McMahan is an American moral philosopher. He has been White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford since 2014.

Mary Anne Warren was an American writer and philosophy professor, noted for her writings on the issue of abortion and animal rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geoffrey Sayre-McCord</span> American philosopher

Geoffrey Sayre-McCord is an American philosopher who works in moral theory, ethics, meta-ethics, the history of ethics and epistemology. He teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also the director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Society.

Contemporary debates about animal welfare and animal rights can be traced back to ancient history. Records from as early as the 6th century before the common era (BCE) include discussions of animal ethics in Jain and Greek texts. The relations between humans and nonnhumans are also discussed in the books of Exodus and Genesis, Jewish writings from the 6th or 5th century BCE.

Raymond G. Frey was a professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, specializing in moral, political and legal philosophy, and author or editor of a number of books. He was a noted critic of animal rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason Brennan</span> American philosopher and business professor (born 1979)

Jason F. Brennan is an American philosopher and business professor. He is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

<i>An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory</i> 2010 textbook by Alasdair Cochrane

An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory is a 2010 textbook by the British political theorist Alasdair Cochrane. It is the first book in the publisher Palgrave Macmillan's Animal Ethics Series, edited by Andrew Linzey and Priscilla Cohn. Cochrane's book examines five schools of political theory—utilitarianism, liberalism, communitarianism, Marxism and feminism—and their respective relationships with questions concerning animal rights and the political status of (non-human) animals. Cochrane concludes that each tradition has something to offer to these issues, but ultimately presents his own account of interest-based animal rights as preferable to any. His account, though drawing from all examined traditions, builds primarily upon liberalism and utilitarianism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alasdair Cochrane</span> British political theorist and ethicist

Alasdair Cochrane is a British political theorist and ethicist who is currently Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on animal rights from the perspective of political theory, which is the subject of his two books: An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory and Animal Rights Without Liberation. His third book, Sentientist Politics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He is a founding member of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a UK-based think tank focused on furthering the social and political status of nonhuman animals. He joined the Department at Sheffield in 2012, having previously been a faculty member at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics. Cochrane is a Sentientist. Sentientism is a naturalistic worldview that grants moral consideration to all sentient beings.

<i>Reason and Morality</i> 1978 book by Alan Gewirth

Reason and Morality is a 1978 book about ethics by the philosopher Alan Gewirth. The work for which he is best known, it received positive reviews. The work is defended by the legal scholar Deryck Beyleveld in The Dialectical Necessity of Morality (1991).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Varner</span> American philosopher (1957–2023)

Gary Edward Varner was an American philosopher specializing in environmental ethics, philosophical questions related to animal rights and animal welfare, and R. M. Hare's two-level utilitarianism. At the time of his death, he was an emeritus professor in the department of philosophy at Texas A&M University; he had been based at the university since 1990. He was educated at Arizona State University, the University of Georgia, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison; at Madison, where he was supervised by Jon Morline, he wrote one of the first doctoral theses on environmental ethics. Varner's first monograph was In Nature's Interests?, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1998. In the book, Varner defended a form of biocentric individualism, according to which all living entities have morally considerable interests.

References

  1. "Loren Lomasky". ppl.virginia.edu. Retrieved 3 June 2022.
  2. Lomasky, L. (2013). "Is It Wrong to Eat Animals?". Social Philosophy and Policy. 30 (1–2): 177–200. doi:10.1017/S0265052513000083. S2CID   144082120.
  3. Bramble, Ben; Fischer, Bob. (2016). The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat. Oxford University Press. p. 142. ISBN ISBN   978-0-19-935390-3
  4. Jecker, Nancy S. (1989). "Reviewed Work: Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community by Loren Lomasky". Law and Philosophy. 8 (2): 279–285. doi:10.1007/BF00160015. JSTOR   3504699. S2CID   189901846.