Josh Milburn

Have you seen the brand new 'impact and engagement' pages on our website? Learn more about our department's impactful research on climate change, Arctic geopolitics, emergency management, LGBTQ+ lives in culture, the politics of pregnancy, and much more.

www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/pol...

On the latest episode of Knowing Animals, I speak to Dr Jack Waverley about his efforts to link animal studies and marketing/consumer research, and his work bringing animals into instutional DEI/EDI policies. Free in all the usual places!

knowinganimals.libsyn.com/episode-242-...

There's an interesting (inadvertent) #animalrights theme on Wikipedia's main page today: Jane Goodall's death leads 'in the news', the mauling of Roy (of Siegfried and Roy) leads 'on this day', and Anne, the UK's last circus elephant, leads 'did you know'.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_(e...

📢Call for Papers for free #Pacifism & #Nonviolence workshop (to be held in April 2026). Deadline 5 Nov. Full info in PDF in CfP tab here: brill.com/view/journal.... Please circulate widely.

"I asked Chat GPT"

Well we asked an expert and then we asked other experts in that field to review the first expert's work.

Next week, thanks to a very generous invitation from Gianfranco Pellegrino, I will be delivering a keynote paper at Luiss, Rome, at a conference on 'Liberal Politics and Nature'. Registration is open. If you're in or near Rome, you should consider coming along!

www.luiss.it/evento/2025/...

Not your typical research seminar...

Earlier this week, Orit Shimoni (@oritshimoni.bsky.social) and Dan Bern discussed the potential for music and art to foster cross-cultural solidarity with the Pacifism and Nonviolence Research Group, complete with live performances.

Just published: my review of Ethical Omnivores: Better Eating for everyone, by Samantha Noll.

It's good we now have a sustained philosophical defence of this position. But I suggest that there are lots of places where Noll's arguments fall short.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

‘Hegseth said soldiers should have maximum “authority” when fighting, and the Pentagon would “unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement.”’

From Cory Doctorow: "AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations" damn I wish I had written that line
pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e...

Friday saw us welcome over 250 new undergraduate students across our seven programmes. Welcome to Team IRPH!

Pictured: one of the induction talks delivered by Guy Aitchison, and some of the winners of our 'IRPH Bingo', which was more fun than it sounds – honestly!

A Novel Consideration for New Omnivorism - Food Ethics New omnivorism is a novel view in food and animal ethics that stipulates that relative to a vegan diet, we ought to scale back arable farming by substituting plant foods, such as wheat, barley, beans, and potatoes, for animal products, such as beef. We should do this, counterintuitively, in virtue of animal welfare considerations. Specifically, we should scale back arable farming because it harms non-human animals. In this paper, I provide a novel consideration which counts against new omnivorism. I start by highlighting that new omnivorism assumes that scaling back industrial arable farming will reduce overall harm to non-human animals. I then argue that we have reason to doubt this assumption in light of the alternative outcome for field animals – their existence (and death) in the wild. Thereafter, I note that this underexplored consideration has significant implications for the extant objections to new omnivorism. Finally, I consider possible objections to the consideration I offer.

Another really exciting response to work on ‘new omnivorism’, including mine. This one is from Louis Austin-Eames.

Austin-Eames contends that defenders of new omnivorism help themselves to contestable assumptions about animals’ lives in the wild; potentially undermining their case.

I've long said that serious research linking animal ethics and political realism would be a valuable contribution to both literatures; now we have some! This is a really fascinating paper, and I look forward to hearing what political realists have to say in response.

Glad Science collected this data (though the results are entirely unsurprising). GenAI cannot accurately summarize scientific papers, sacrificing accuracy for simplicity.

And shame on publishers who are pushing genAI summaries on readers. Great way to accelerate an epistemic apocalypse.

An article I wrote featured on Wikipedia's main page earlier this week.

Did you know that an 1890 short story by the author of Dracula was unknown to scholars until its rediscovery in the 21st century?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbet_...

This was such a great conference. It is always brilliant to meet people working on stuff you're enthusiastic about, but working on animal rights often means we're "the animal person" in our departments. It's so rare to get such a large group together, and it's so affirming when it happens!

Really look forward to this semester’s workshop in political theory!

I’m at the University of Leicester today for ‘Forgotten Animal’, which is the latest instalment of the long-running Animal Politics workshops. It’s a packed schedule!

The Guardian University Guide 2026 – the rankings Find a course at one of the top universities in the country

It's another successful year for IRPH in the Guardian University Guide. Loughborough lands sixth for International Relations, ninth for Politics, and eleventh for History.

Forgotten Animals Historically, animals have been forgotten or ignored by political philosophy. Sometimes, it has been assumed that moral questions about animals lack a political dimension. Other times, animals’ ...

getting ready for the "forgotten animals" conference in Leicester, very much looking forward!!

philevents.org/event/show/1...

@stevecooke.org
@joshmilburn.bsky.social
@drsvg.bsky.social

I've made two fixes (see below); hopefully that clarifies things. And I've just recognized your name! I can't imagine how you must have felt when you realized what you'd found.

The article is due to appear on Wikipedia's main page in the 'did you know' column soon.

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...

Thanks! Happy to fix any errors if you have sources — you can leave a message on the article talk page or tell me here. Or, of course, you can fix it yourself!

Why do we assume some people are like us, politically speaking? Why do we assume some people aren't?

To find out, take a look at the latest paper from Dr Anthony Kevins (@avkevins.bsky.social), Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies in IRPH.

Be Careful What You Teach: Trump’s Minions May Get You Fired - Daily Nous A lecturer in the English Department at Texas A & M University was fired from her position after a student in one of her courses complained that she was "not entirely sure [material on gender identity...

Texas A&M president fires an instructor after a politician complains about what is being taught in her course, then says "this isn't about academic freedom."

Articles mentioning JME McTaggart, by year 1890-1980 in Edhiphy. Note peak in the late 1930s. McTaggart's most influential publication was in 1908.

Philosophers tend to receive most discussion late in life, typically a couple of decades after producing their most influential work. Data and analysis in blog post in comments.

We are extremely proud to share that Dr Joe Davidson, Vice-Chancellor's Independent Research Fellow here in IRPH, has won the @biapt.bsky.social Early Career Prize for his groundbreaking research and his contributions to the discipline of political theory.

Great job, Joe; well deserved!

I think there’s so much work waiting to be done to discover threads of animal-sympathetic thought in the history of philosophy/political thought. I’m contributing to a forthcoming book edited by @serrinrp.bsky.social and André Krebber about exactly this topic, but it can only scratch the surface!

Review of Josh Milburn: Food, Justice and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully Reviewed by John Hadley, Western Sydney University This book is not your standard rollcall of the ethics of food production. Milburn's concern is neither to draw attention to the suffering of anim...

There's a non-paywalled author accepted version below, if anyone wants to read the full review.

www.academia.edu/127591689/Re...

Hadley writes: 'This book is ambitious and dense. Milburn has done well to produce a normative theory that is ideal yet foreseeably realizable. He painstakingly addresses objections to his arguments and explains at length the latest dietary technologies.'

Food, Justice and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully by Josh Milburn - Volume 22, Issue 1, Spring 2025

Huge thanks to John Hadley for his review of my 2023 book Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully. The review was published earlier this year in Environmental Philosophy.

www.pdcnet.org/envirophil/c...