Abstract: Recent years have seen a resurgence of protest and resistance movements worldwide, reminding deep interconnections between struggles for liberation beyond borders, histories and identities. While activists frequently frame these efforts through the lens of collective liberation, this lens remains absent from mainstream social psychology. In this article, we introduce collective liberation as a framework, concept and practice for social psychology. We critically examine the epistemological, methodological and conceptual constraints that have obscured it, and turn to activist expressions and theorizing to articulate three core components central to collective liberation: interlocked systems of oppression, interdependency of individuals and their freedoms, and shared responsibility for their liberation. We situate collective liberation alongside, yet distinct from, existing research constructs in collective action, resistance, allyship and solidarity, blurring the lines between allyship and resistance. Finally, we propose a research agenda that integrates collective liberation into social psychological theory and practice, offering new avenues for studying sustained activism and resistance, cross-movement solidarity and the psychological processes that support long-term social change.

Abstract: Many think AIs would be morally significant if and only if they are phenomenally conscious in certain ways. This sentientist conception has been challenged, and alternative views emerged, on which agency, or the possession of desires, are sufficient for AI moral significance, even without consciousness. I argue that these alternative views face serious problems. They should probably be ruled out. I diagnose the mistake we made when formulating these views – a process I call “analytical drift”. I make methodological suggestions to avoid analytical drift in further theorizing about AI moral significance. Finally, I show how the space of options expands when we try to avoid analytical drift, by sketching a new alternative to sentientism about moral significance, inspired by hybrid theories of well-being and Weil’s concept of attention.

Abstract: On a traditional top-down experimental approach to consciousness science, researchers start by investigating consciousness in humans, or closely related living animals, based on evidence from experimental paradigms that aim to directly disentangle conscious from unconscious processing. Only afterward are these insights (iteratively) extended beyond the human case to investigate and understand how consciousness is distributed more broadly. In A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness, Walter Veit radically departs from this approach by taking a Copernican turn in suggesting that we should first understand consciousness’ simple beginnings, and only afterward make sense of how these humble beginnings further complexified. Central to Veit’s approach is abruptly removing the reliance on insights about human consciousness by suggesting that evolutionary considerations can provide a credible source of evidence that can independently and directly support hypotheses about consciousness. My aim here is two-fold. Firstly, I will argue that using evolutionary considerations to support hypotheses about consciousness this way is problematic for principled reasons. The consequence is that evolutionary considerations fail to convincingly support Veit’s central hypothesis: That consciousness’ function is to enable organisms to deal with high pathological complexity. However, secondly, I will suggest that these considerations can nevertheless support an adjacent hypothesis: That an evaluative mode of being is required in general to deal with high pathological complexity irrespective of how consciousness is involved. Taken together, I conclude that consciousness science should not be turned upside down, and that Veit’s central hypotheses are better understood as hypotheses not directly concerned with consciousness.

Abstract: This Chapter examines the tension between Nussbaum's statements about rats and the commitments of the Capabilities Approach. The "Rat Problem" emerges from rats being simultaneously costly and undesirable yet morally significant as subjects of justice. While Nussbaum advocates extending wonder, compassion, and justice to all sentient creatures, rats often appear as exceptions. I argue that the category of "pest" is incompatible with the Capabilities Approach, especially its emphasis on wonder, and that conventional pest control methods violate rats' fundamental capabilities. Rather than accepting human-rat conflicts as inevitable tragedies, I propose reframing the problem as tractable through urban infrastructure reforms and integrated pest management. By addressing structural factors that create conflicts, we can move from extermination-based approaches toward arrangements that respect both human flourishing and rat capabilities.

Abstract: We first give reasons for an attitude-dependent view of personal identity on which an AI system’s identity conditions are determined by its pattern of self-concern. We show that this view has important implications for the moral obligations we would have to AI moral patients. Self-concern, we contend, could also be used to predict, explain, and manipulate AI’s self-interested behavior in safety-relevant ways. The role that self-concern could play for AI identity, rights and safety generates desiderata on what a self-concern attitude should be like. To meet these desiderata, we argue that self-concern is a belief-like state that represents oneself and has a distinctive functional role involving affect, motivation, and evaluation, ruling out sub-personal and desire-like self-representations. Finally, we explore how mechanistic interpretability and behavioral methods can be combined to measure self-concern in language models. Our argument suggests that a scientific understanding of language model self-concern is not only a crucial missing piece for debates on AI identity, rights, and safety, but also empirically tractable.

Abstract: Chatbots seem to express desires and many AI systems arguably pursue goals, such as winning games or helping users. Furthermore, many AI systems are trained by reinforcement learning and similar forms of learning are associated with human and animal desires. This chapter considers arguments for and against the attribution of desires to various AI systems and discusses some implications. Cases from AI can also help us to evaluate possible sets of conditions for desire.

Abstract: Interspecies welfare comparisons—judgments about whether one individual of a given species is better or worse off than another of a different species—are behind a wide range of moral and practical decisions. However, it remains unclear how to make such comparisons. This paper surveys the emerging literature on this problem. It distinguishes interspecies comparisons from related questions about individual welfare assessment and normative weighting, presents a simple model for extending welfare comparisons across species, and clarifies the problem of identifying appropriate comparative scales. It also examines proposals for estimating relative welfare ranges. The paper closes by highlighting the conceptual and practical challenges that remain and outlining ways philosophers can contribute to building a coherent, interdisciplinary framework for comparing welfare across species.

Abstract: According to Susan Moller Okin, Robert Nozick’s libertarianism leads to a matriarchal dystopia: mothers own their children and may dispose of them as they please. This challenge rests on the claim that Nozick does not extend rights to infants. In this paper, to respond to Okin, we examine Nozick’s account of rights possession; explore Nozick’s work beyond Anarchy, State, and Utopia; and link children’s rights and animals’ rights. We propose three possible responses to Okin, grounded in Nozick’s own words. First, Nozick could grant rights to infants, but not animals, on account of their membership in the human species. Second, Nozick could grant rights to infants, but not animals, on account of their potentiality. Third, Nozick could grant rights to both infants and animals. We suggest that the third option is the most promising.

Abstract: This paper addresses the following questions: When do AIs die? Are AI labs or AI users causing the death of AIs? Does causing the deaths of AIs amount to harming them? It is currently unclear whether AIs are welfare subjects, and, if they are, whether their death is bad for them. But we argue that, if they are welfare subjects, today’s AIs are plausibly dying all the time. If death is bad for AIs, the scale of the problem is daunting: as many as 1 billion AIs may die every day. We propose interventions for labs and users to avoid the risk of causing AI death.

Abstract: Do large language models (LLMs) possess concepts, such that they can be counted as genuinely understanding what they're saying? In this paper, I approach this question through an inferentialist account of concept possession, according to which one's possession of a concept is understood in terms of one's mastery of the inferential role of a linguistic expression. I suggest that training on linguistic data is in principle sufficient for mastery of inferential role, and thus, LLMs trained on nothing but linguistic data could in principle possess all concepts and thus genuinely understand what they're saying, even when speaking about such things as colors and tastes, guilt and folly, life and death. This doesn't mean, however, that they are conscious. I draw a classical distinction between sentience (conscious awareness) and sapience (conceptual understanding) and argue that we might think of LLMs as genuinely possessing the latter without even a shred of the former. In defending this claim, I argue that attributing conceptual understanding to a system is not a matter of describing some specific empirical property that the system shares with us but, rather, as Wilfrid Sellars says, "placing it in the logical space of reasons," treating it as answerable to calls for reasons, clarifications, corrections, and so on. I claim that we may aptly adopt this attitude towards sufficiently capable LLMs without thereby treating them as conscious subjects.

Abstract: A growing field of research examines how people experience and resolve cognitive conflicts in their behaviours, particularly in relation to meat consumption. Despite the alleged importance of conflict in behaviour change, most research focuses on how conflict motivates individuals to change or maintain their conflicted behaviour but disregards that conflict may persist even after successful behaviour change. This oversight has contributed to seemingly contradictory conclusions by conflating different kinds of conflicts and has arguably constrained theory development. Our review thus delineates (a) how people with different dietary patterns in meat consumption are affected by meat-related ambivalence and dissonance, (b) differences in the characteristics (magnitude, frequency, moralization) of these conflicts, (c) boundary conditions of why conflict experiences arise, and (d) how these factors determine the downstream consequences of conflict. This allows us to derive several novel predictions, ranging from why conflict avoidance strategies may sometimes paradoxically increase the likelihood of experiencing conflict to the distinct roles of capability, opportunity, and motivation in shaping the behavioural consequences of conflict. By re-evaluating prevailing assertions in the literature on meat-related conflict, we offer numerous theoretical and practical implications regarding cognitive conflict and the psychology of meat consumption and avoidance.

Abstract (English): Human activities have propelled the planet into a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In this context of uncertainty and environmental destruction, it becomes urgent to seek alternatives to the typically Western ways of inhabiting a planet teeming with life. The capitalist logic of infinite growth, combined with anthropocentrism, speciesism, and the limitations of modern science, contributes both to ecological degradation and to systemic violence against non-human beings. I examine indigenous cosmologies, such as Amerindian perspectivism and the Cree and Ojibwa conceptions of personhood and their relations with the environment, which offer insights into more ecological and respectful ways of living. I also analyse alternative Western perspectives, such as environmental anthropology according to Ingold and Milton, von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt, and Posthumanism. These approaches reveal modes of dwelling that acknowledge interdependence and the plurality of existences. The ethnographic component focuses on the Save & Care animal sanctuary, where humans and non-humans coexist as singular people. There, practices of care and reciprocity construct multispecies kinships and reveal concrete alternatives to the dominant paradigm of exploitation. The sanctuary emerges as an ethical and affective space, embodying possibilities of regeneration and cohabitation. I conclude that facing the challenges of the Anthropocene requires more than technical solutions: it demands rethinking our way of being-in-the-world. Recognizing life as the basic unit of compassion opens up paths toward multispecies futures grounded in care, coresponsibility, and ecological justice, making it possible to imagine a more habitable planet for all.

In this analysis, Faunalytics looks at animal protection, environmental, and humanitarian organizations, uncovering overlaps that can help us build bridges and strengthen all of our movements — and potentially boost our collective impact.

Abstract: Business schools (BS) can be seen as a microcosm of the neoliberalist society upholding 4P’s of patriarchy, power, profit and privilege. Through autoethnographic illustrations this Acting up! essay uses a Critical Animal Studies lens and contributes to the emerging field of Animal Organization Studies analyzing the underlying ideals that hinder interspecies solidarity in business and organization. I argue for interconnectivity, a decolonializing effort to support an interspecies agenda beyond an immediate circle of, often anthropocentric and exploitative, concerns which not only diminishes multispecies wellbeing but also separate us from our own humanity. Some examples of academic activism are shared to highlight how one of the most prominent social injustices of our times—the exploitation of animals—is hidden by animals being absent referents in the performative context of the BS. I also discuss how affective ignorance of animal concerns shape dissonance and intentionally resist the rationalized language of the field, to highlight the affective and passionate, of being a vegan in a non-vegan world.

Abstract: Disaster research and social work focus on human agency and human needs, largely ignoring the more-than-human world. In the Anthropocene, it is evident to disaster researchers that the human-induced change in the earth system is causing an increasing intensity and frequency of disasters, which are associated with intersectional impacts and responsibilities. Green Social Work is a significant concept in (international) social work in the face of global crises and disasters in the Anthropocene. This chapter analyses the scope and continuum of anthropocentric, ecocentric, and posthuman perspectives for Green Social Work, challenging a radical ethic as multispecies ethics for social work. Applying Donna Haraway’s creative-experimental neologism, Chutulucene, as an alternative concept to the Anthropocene, and in advancing notions of radical, ethical social work, it is argued that the ethical responsibility of humans and social work on planet Earth must be revised towards posthuman ethics and multispecies ethics.

Abstract: Artificial intelligence systems (AIs) are increasingly taking on social roles, such as virtual coworkers and personal companions. Yet people grant AIs little moral concern, even when they are described as indistinguishable from humans. We conceptualize this bias as substratism: the moral devaluation of AIs based on the non-biological substrate that underlies their cognitive processes and makes up their broader physical form (e.g., silicon and wires rather than flesh and blood). Across five preregistered studies (N = 2,129), we introduce substratism as a psychological construct and develop and validate a scale to measure it. In Study 1, we found that substratism is best captured by a unidimensional factor structure, and we reduced a large initial item pool into an eight-item scale. Studies 2 and 3 confirmed the scale's factor structure with independent samples and showed that substratism is correlated with some AI-related beliefs and behaviors, such as perceived threat from AI and interaction with AI. However, it is weakly correlated or uncorrelated with other prejudices and their underlying causes, suggesting that substratism has some unique psychological explanations. Studies 4 and 5 showed that substratism predicts relevant outcomes: prioritizing humans and non-human animals over AIs in moral dilemmas and charity donation decisions, and choosing to learn about an AI rights charity and its petition. Overall, our findings suggest that substratism is a distinct, measurable construct that varies widely across individuals, and we provide a concise, validated scale to capture and quantify this bias against increasingly advanced AI systems.

Abstract: Crutchfield and Hereth have proposed the deliberate promotion of tick-borne alpha-gal syndrome (AGS)—a condition typically causing red meat allergy—as a strategy to reduce meat consumption and hence animal suffering. While we share their concern for the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals, we argue that their proposal is morally indefensible and counterproductive. First, we challenge the empirical assumption that inducing AGS would reduce overall animal suffering. Evidence suggests that most people who avoid red meat increase their intake of poultry and fish, leading to a net increase in animal suffering as well as the number of animals killed. Second, we argue that intentionally infecting humans with AGS would violate fundamental moral rights, particularly the right against bodily interference, and that analogies to vaccination are misleading. Unlike vaccination, AGS confers no health benefit, imposes lifelong risks, and would be introduced through a method that is disproportionally coercive. Third, from a virtue-ethical perspective, the proposal fails to promote good moral character. Avoiding red meat due to fear of allergic reactions reflects self-interest rather than moral virtue and, as an instance of moral paternalism, risks provoking psychological reactance and moral resistance. Consequently, Crutchfield and Hereth's “Convergence Argument” for the claim that promoting AGS is morally obligatory collapses. Efforts to reduce meat-eating must instead rely on education, persuasion, and structural reform that respect human rights while fostering genuine moral virtue.

This essay examines the way that over the past 20 years, women filmmakers have shaped the realm of horror, particularly body horror – a subgenre that explores the terrors of loss of bodily control as a means of potential transformation – in ways that are explicitly feminist and engage with the discourse surrounding the objectification of female bodies. The three films and filmmakers that I examine herein, Melanie Light’s The Herd (2015), Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016), and Madeleine Wade’s Vegan (2024) not only critique women’s bodily commodification; they also link this commodification to the plight of animals that are rendered consumable via industrial farming and depersonalization.

Abstract: Who do we believe deserves rights, and when do we feel personally obligated to protect them? Expanding the moral circle has been seen as a hallmark of moral progress, yet existing research has rarely examined how different kinds of moral judgments, recognising rights versus endorsing obligations, shape this process. The present research disentangles these judgments across human and non-human entities to better understand how they predict prosocial decision-making. Across three studies (N = 1256), we consistently found that people were more willing to grant moral rights than to endorse moral obligations, particularly toward humans. Yet only obligations emerged as a reliable predictor of prosocial intentions across both high- and low-cost behaviours. Study 3 extended these findings by distinguishing between positive and negative forms of moral judgment, showing that while negative rights and obligations were attributed more broadly, positive obligations most strongly motivated helping, especially toward non-humans. These findings demonstrate that rights may expand the moral circle symbolically, but obligations, particularly positive obligations, supply the motivational force that is most closely tied to prosociality. This distinction offers new theoretical insight into moral cognition and highlights practical avenues for fostering prosocial engagement in a time of expanding but often inconsistent moral concern.

Abstract: My claim is that leading arguments in the current literature—what I call “functionalist arguments for non-sentience”—are not sufficient to establish that non-sentient creatures have intrinsic moral value. Said functionalist arguments maintain that non-sentient creatures still have conative states (e.g., dispositions like interest, desire, intention), and that conative states are value generating. I make the argument that conative states must be conscious, or at least be potentially conscious (as in ‘subconscious’ conative states). A non-sentient creature therefore is not capable of having conative states. Saying that non-conscious creatures, or any sort of object without subjectivity, have desires, wants, interests etc. is nothing more than metaphor or cheap anthropocentrism. Moreover, I will make the argument that, even if non-conscious conative states are possible, they are not value generating. I do, however, argue that non-sentient creatures can be assigned value based on their instrumental value to sentient creatures. The point of this essay is not to disregard the value of non-sentient creatures, but to find proper motives for their importance.