Pablo Magaña

I wrote about the race to stop octopus farming before it starts. This issue has been covered a fair amount, so I wanted to look at one under-covered aspect of it -- why do so many people who study octopuses, and are fascinated by them, support farming them?

Call for Nominations: Onora O’Neill Political Theory Prize European Consortium for Political Research

Pls share/re-post! New Onora O'Neill Prize! Here's a brand new @ecpr.bsky.social book prize in pol-theory, regardless of whether it's your 1st/10th book! Had honour of asking Onora myself if she would lend us her good name: ecpr.eu/news/news/de... @biapt.bsky.social @psapolthought.bsky.social

I once e-mailed the Solipsistic Society, but never got an answer :(

Reminds me of the time a reviewer asked my co-author and I why we were discussing X when the Supreme Court had said Y. Nowhere in the paper did we way we where discussing the US!!

Started reading the nth-paper purporting to explore some interesting, apparently general phenomenon, only to end up (without any indication) exploring it *in the specific context of the US* (no attempt to generalize at all). Byee!

On the latest episode of Knowing Animals, I speak to Dustin Crummett of the Insect Institute and University of Washington Tacoma about his work on the environmental impact of insect farming. The episode is available below or in all the usual podcast places.

knowinganimals.libsyn.com/episode-244-...

So, is "When Prophesy Fails"—the foundation of cognitive dissonance theory—debunked?

Unclear. The article making this claim is... odd.

It describes Festinger and Schachter as leftwing radicals, critiques the political slant of their funding, generally refers to their work as failed...

1/n

My life right now:

My father has sent me this photo of the dog and now my afternoon is ruined lol 🥲

Becoming Speciesist: How Children and Adults Differ in Valuing Animals by Species and Cognitive Capacity - Lucius Caviola, Matti Wilks, Claudia Suárez-Yera, Carter Allen, Guy Kahane, Luke McGuire, Nadira S. Faber, Antonio J. Rojas-Tejada, María Sánchez-Castelló, Jorge L. Ordóñez-Carrasco, Paul Bloom, 2025 Children morally prioritize humans over animals less than adults do. Is this because children are less speciesist—meaning they place less moral weight on mere s...

Becoming Speciesist: How Children and Adults Differ in Valuing Animals by Species and Cognitive Capacity - Lucius Caviola, et al. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

High Stakes Instrumentalism - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice In this paper, I aim to establish that, according to almost all democratic theories, instrumentalist considerations often dominate intrinsic proceduralist considerations in our decisions about whether...

No orthodoxy, I'd say. This paper by John Halstead includes many references and a useful overview - it also defends a position I am sympathetic to, but that's more controversial: link.springer.com/article/10.1....

Above link is broken. Fixed: link.springer.com/collections/...

If you work on animals and AI, consider submitting an abstract to this excellent special issue in the Journal of Ethics, co-ordinated by the no-less-excellent Catia Faria (UCM) and Yip Fai Tse (NUS). Reposts also appreciated: link.springer.com/collections/...

This is hapenning tomorrow. Join us!

Thanks, Teresa!! 🙂🙏

The paper: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

"Intergenerational Subjection" - Pablo Magaña (Trinity College Dublin) & Iñigo González-Ricoy (University of Barcelona) Legal Theory, 2025 (published online)

The blog post: newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/intergener...

Iñigo González-Ricoy and I have published a blog post on New Work in Philosophy where we summarize our recent paper in Legal Theory defending the possibility of legal subjection among non-overlapping generations. Links below 👇

What's wrong with people who go to concert to TALK? And I don't mean a few comments here and there. I mean long conversations spanning several songs. Just go to a pub? It's cheapter and you won't be acting like an asshole.

Longtermist Political Philosophy: An Agenda for Future Research This online seminar series brings together researchers from philosophy, political science, psychology, and related disciplines to explore how humans think or should think about decisions concerning fu...

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

Next Thursday, November 20 (at 1pm CET), Andreas Schmidt (U. of Groningen) will present at the Moral Minds and Ethical Futures online seminar co-organized by @hugoviciana.bsky.social and me. He'll be talking about "Longtermist Political Philosophy." You're welcome to join us! Info below:

Relational equality and the status of animals - Philosophical Studies Can the ideal of relational equality—or, more generally, the relational approach to justice—be applied to animals? Animals have, across time and place, held different social statuses (e.g. as incarnat...

link.springer.com/article/10.1... In 2023, over a few beers in Lisbon, Devon Cass and I teamed up to explore whether animals can be subjected to the kinds of wrongs relational egalitarians are concerned with. The result was this paper just published in Philosophical Studies:

Looking forward to welcoming Professor Bart Streumer from @rug.nl to the #Philosophy Colloquium later today for his talk, ‘How Berkeley Can Go Quasi and Lose His Mind-Dependence’.

More on this term’s series:
🔗 www.tcd.ie/philosophy/r...

Easy answer: made this meme in, like, 30 seconds, so I didn't notice the redundancy 😅

Oh, the Irish Autumn...

Congrats! Looking forward to reading it when it's out ✊

The mighty Patterson Hood

Cool cat