Mark Rowlands

University of Miami, Philosophy, Faculty Member

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Address: Department of Philosophy
University of Miami
Coral Gables, FL 33124
USA

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Papers by Mark Rowlands

Animal Rights: The Three Waves

Animal Rights, 2023

This is a draft of the opening chapter of my book, Animal Rights: Essential Knowledge, forthcomin... more

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Animals, Energy, Land: An Overview

World on Fire: Humans, Animals and the Future of the Planet, 2021

This chapter introduces the central themes, and outlines the central argument, of the book. Three... more This chapter introduces the central themes, and outlines the central argument, of the book. Three dominant environmental threats are identified: climate change, mass extinction, and pestilence. The warming of the planet is accelerating. At the same time, species are becoming extinct at a startling rate. Newly emerging infectious diseases—COVID-19 being the latest off the production line—are becoming more pronounced and problematic. It is argued that our habit of eating animals—and the massive reallocation of biomass that it involves—lies at the heart of all of all three problems, and if we abandon this habit, we can make substantial progress in tackling them. This proposal should be taken seriously on the grounds that it is easier to implement, more effective once implemented, and ultimately more palatable than other options.

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Animals as Persons: The Very Idea

Can Animals be Persons?, 2019

This is the penultimate version of the opening chapter of my book Can Animals Be Persons? (New Yo... more

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The Moral Animal (Penultimate Version)

The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics ed., Bob Fischer (Forthcoming 2019)

There are no insuperable logical or conceptual obstacles to regarding animals as capable of moral... more There are no insuperable logical or conceptual obstacles to regarding animals as capable of moral behavior. It is true, there are accounts of moral action that would preclude animals acting on the basis of moral motivations. But, equally, there are other accounts that are entirely compatible with this possibility. I shall first identify each type of account, and then present some arguments in favor of the latter.

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Self-Awareness and Korsgaard's Naturalistic Explanation of the Good (Penultimate Version)

Proceedings of The Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 2018

This paper explores certain facets of Christine Korsgaard’s paper, ‘Prospects for a Naturalistic ... more This paper explores certain facets of Christine Korsgaard’s paper, ‘Prospects for a Naturalistic Explanation of the Good’ (2018). Korsgaard’s account requires that an animal be able to experience ‘herself trying to get or avoid something’. The claim that animals possess such self-awareness is regarded by many as problematic and, if this is correct, it would jeopardize Korsgaard’s account. This paper argues that animals can, in fact, be aware of themselves in the way required by Korsgaard’s account.

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Sartre on Intentionality and Pre-Reflective Consciousness

Penultimate Draft. To appear in Matthew Eshleman, Christophe Perrin and Constance Mui eds., The Sartrean Mind (New York: Routledge)

This paper examines the ideas of consciousness, intentionality and pre-reflective awareness as th... more This paper examines the ideas of consciousness, intentionality and pre-reflective awareness as they feature in Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Consciousness is nothingness in the sense that no intentional object of awareness can ever be part of consciousness. Intentional directedness towards an object is a form of revealing activity in which an object is presented as being a certain way. This activity is underwritten by a mastery of the relations between environmental and bodily contingencies and the resulting consequences for appearance of the intentional object. Pre-reflective awareness is built in to intentional directedness towards the world in virtue of the fact that many, perhaps all, of the contingencies that underwrite such directedness are ones in which the conscious subject is implicated. All three of these ideas are offered both as interpretations Sartre’s view, and also as claims in their own right which, I suspect, stand a very good chance of being true.

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Embodied Consciousness

Penultimate Draft. To appear in Uriah Kriegel ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness (OUP, forthcoming)

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The Remembered

Theories of mental content have been dominated by a model supplied by the propositional attitudes... more Theories of mental content have been dominated by a model supplied by the propositional attitudes. This paper explores what our conception of such content would look like of we began, instead, with episodic memory. The content of episodic memory is essentially autonoetic. Remembered episodes must be amended to the extent required to safeguard the modal status of this autonoeticity. This entails that the identity of the person who entertains content is stamped all over that content.

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Beyond the Looking Glass: Self-Awareness in Animals

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What is Moral Enhancement?

Moral Enhancement: Critical Perspectives

The idea of moral enhancement has no clear meaning. This is because the idea of being moral has n... more The idea of moral enhancement has no clear meaning. This is because the idea of being moral has no clear meaning. There are numerous ways in which one might go astray, morally speaking, and each of these ways, in turn, fragments on further analysis. The concept of moral enhancement is as broad, messy and mottled as the reasons why people behave badly. This mottled character of moral failure calls into question the feasibility of (non-traditional) programs of moral enhancement.

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Memory and the Self: A Précis

This is a series of short pieces I did for the Brains Blog in November 2016. Collectively, they p... more

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Consciousness and the Unity of Mind: Responses to Responses to 'Are Animals Persons?'

I am enormously grateful to all those who took the time to respond to my target article Are anima... more I am enormously grateful to all those who took the time to respond to my target article Are animals persons? These responses of mine are offered in this spirit of gratitude. While I find myself in agreement with many of the commentators, various areas of disagreement undoubtedly exist, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to clarify or reinforce my position. I have organized my comments by way of certain prevailing themes that emerged in the respondents' comments rather than on a respondent-by-respondent basis. To begin, let me recap some of the central ideas of the paper. First, there are three common assumptions – one of which I accept, the other two I challenge. 1. A person, I accept for the sake of argument, is a unified mental life. This assumption is contestable. On the one hand, there are those who think a person is not an essentially psychological entity at all, but a physical entity. Such a person, however, is far less likely to be hostile to the idea that animals are persons. On the other hand, there are those (e.g. Parfit 1984) who think that having unified mental life is not sufficient for being a person. This latter position is beyond the scope of the paper, and I merely note this and move on. The core of the paper concerns self-awareness rather than personhood as such. 2. It is common to assume that unity is something added to a mental life. On the one hand there is a mental life – a succession of thoughts, feelings, emotions and the like. On the other, there is the question of whether this succession of thoughts, feelings and emotions forms a unified whole. There could be a mental life that was merely a jumble of disassociated mental states. For a mental life to be unified, something extra must be added, over and above the mere presence of mental states and processes. 3. The additional element, it is equally common to assume, is provided by reflective self-awareness. When someone is reflectively self-aware, she has a mental state that is either about (1) herself, (2) a bodily state of hers, or (3) another mental state of hers. Herself, the bodily state or the mental state is the intentional object of her mental state. For example, if I think I'm getting old, that my knees are not what they used to be, or that I am in pain, I am reflectively self-aware. Crucial to reflective self-awareness is the existence of an intentional state that is directed towards the person, or some or other facet of the person, who has it. When Locke says that a person is able to consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing from one time to another, it is tempting (and common) to understand Locke's claim as one of reflective self-awareness: a person is able to think of itself as itself, etc.

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The Animal Turn

This paper advances two methodological rules of thumb. First, whenever there is a capacity that a... more This paper advances two methodological rules of thumb. First, whenever there is a capacity that animals seem to have, and also a philosophical account that entails they cannot have it, the latter should be treated with considerable suspicion. The philosophical account may ultimately turn out to be correct, but the initial, operative, assumption should be that it is not. Much work will have to be done if the philosophical account is to prove ultimately acceptable. This is compatible with the capacity in question taking a somewhat different form in humans – that is a matter for further investigation. But our initial, basic account of this capacity should be guided by its presence in animals. Second, since controversial philosophical doctrines have a habit of evolving into common sense, I also advance a second, methodological rule: when empirical evidence suggests that animals have a capacity that common sense thinks they cannot, we are obliged to take this evidence seriously, to examine why common sense arrived at this conclusion, and whether it was right to do so.

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Are Animals Persons?

It is orthodox to suppose that very few, if any, nonhuman animals are persons. The category of th... more It is orthodox to suppose that very few, if any, nonhuman animals are persons. The category of the person is restricted to self-aware creatures: in effect humans (above a certain age) and possibly some of the great apes and cetaceans. I shall argue that this orthodoxy should be rejected, because it rests on a mistaken conception of the kind of self-awareness relevant to personhood. Replacing this with a sense of self-awareness that is relevant requires us to accept that personhood is much more widely distributed through the animal kingdom.

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Making Light of the Ethical? The Ethics and Politics of Animal Rights

This paper examines the claim that our moral commitments to non-human animals (henceforth, “anima... more This paper examines the claim that our moral commitments to non-human animals (henceforth, “animals”) are best captured in terms of a framework of political, rather than ethical, theory – or, at the very least, that the former provides an essential antidote to the failings of the latter. In particular, I shall focus on what I take to be a canonical statement of this view: Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s book, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. In this book, Donaldson and Kymlicka (henceforth, D&K) argue that standard ethical animal rights theory (henceforth, following them, ART) is importantly incomplete, and requires supplementation with a political theory of animal rights (henceforth, PTAR). I going to argue that while ART, as it has standardly perceived, has shortcomings, these are more perception than reality, and are certainly not intrinsic or essential features of ART. Consequently, the supplementation of ART with PTAR is not necessary. The distinction between ART and PTAR is a disguised, and somewhat misleading way, of talking about another distinction: the distinction between animals as objects of moral concern and animals as subjects of motivation and action.

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Disclosing the World: Intentionality and 4E Cognition

The Oxford Handbook of Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive and Extended eds., A. Newen, L. de Bruin, and S. Gallagher, 2017

Intentional directedness towards an object is best understood as a form of revealing or disclosin... more Intentional directedness towards an object is best understood as a form of revealing or disclosing activity. Cognition extends beyond the brain because disclosing activity typically - not always, not necessarily - straddles operations occurring in the brain, the body, and ones performed on the environment of the organism. There is nothing special about revealing activity that occurs in the brain that requires us to restrict labels such as 'cognitive' or 'mental' to it alone.

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Moral Subjects

Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Animal Minds, ed., Kristin Andrews and Jacob Beck (forthcoming)

This paper defends the idea that (some) animals can be moral subjects. A moral subject is an indi... more This paper defends the idea that (some) animals can be moral subjects. A moral subject is an individual that acts on the basis of moral motivations but is not, necessarily, responsible for it does. Both the desirability of the category of the moral subject and the irreducibility of the category to that of the moral agent will be defended. 'Ought' does not imply 'can'. There are no insuperable conceptual obstacles to regarding (some) animals as capable of moral behavior.

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The Immortal, The Intrinsic and the Quasi-Meaning of Life

Through the examination of the lives (or afterlives) of several immortal beings, this paper defen... more Through the examination of the lives (or afterlives) of several immortal beings, this paper defends a version of Moritz Schlick’s claim that the meaning of life is play. More precisely: a person’s life has meaning to the extent it there are things in it that the person values (i) intrinsically rather than merely instrumentally and (ii) above a certain threshold of intensity. This is a subjectivist account of meaning in life. I defend subjectivism about meaning in life from common objections by understanding statements about life’s meaning in quasi-realist terms.

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