What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

In this interview, Heather Browning, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Southhampton, talks about growing up in Australia, working at the Auckland Zoo, becoming vegetarian, netball, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Scully and the X-Files, studying animal behavior at Australian National University, The Blind Watchmaker and Philosophy of Biology, bass clarinet, love, eliminativism, consequentialism, creating the ultimate sugar drink, Guitar Hero, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, working with Sterenly at Australian National University, the Global Priorities Institute, measuring well-being, the relationship between pleasure and health, the Foundations of Animal Sentience Project and the Animal Welfare Act, spending the pandemic at Notting Hill, Untitled Goose Game, Better Call Saul, Bentham, Chalmers, and pizza...

[1/24/2023]

So, where did you grow up?

I was born and grew up in Canberra, on the east coast of Australia, and lived there until I was 24. A lot of people don’t like Canberra, I often hear it described as ‘boring’, but for me I liked the slightly small-town feel, and it had everything I wanted, plus plenty of kangaroos in the fields around town!

What was your family like?

My family was big! I have four sisters, so our house was always busy and there was always someone to play with. I’m the eldest and was lucky because that meant I got to have my own room to retreat to, while the others shared. I also have a very large extended family – my mother is one of six and my father one of four, and I had over 20 first cousins. Almost all lived in Canberra, so we had frequent large family gatherings. I’m very comfortable in that sort of quiet chaos.

We’d take a lot of big family trips – every two years my parents would pick a part of the country we’d never visited and plan a month-long holiday. We’d pack up the station wagon and the trailer with the camping gear and all the accessories you need for seven people over multiple weeks, and drive. Many of my childhood memories are of car rides with my family, the usual squabbling with my sisters, but also playing car games, and lots of singing. I always found it disappointing that I was too carsick to ever read though, it would have been a perfect time to get through extra books.

Sounds great. As a little kid, what were you interested in?

Books, more than anything else. I was an early reader, and took a book with me everywhere so I could usually be found hiding out in a corner reading. Because I went through so many books, we had to visit the local library every week to stock up, and since any car trip with a huge family is an ordeal, as soon as my mum thought I was old enough (around 10) I got my own bus ticket so I could head to the library each Friday and fill my bag with books for the week. I’d come home and stay up late reading, often getting through more than one book in that first night. I also loved the local second-hand bookstore and my dad would take me occasionally, trading in his old books and letting me use the credit to pick out some for myself. My whole bedroom was dominated by shelves of books, and I have still kept some of my favourites.

I also loved animals. Hippos were always my special favourite, which is still true today, and one of my biggest regrets is that I never really got to work with them as a zookeeper. We didn’t have any pets until I was older, so I was simultaneously fascinated by and scared of most the animals I did meet. My next-door neighbour had a gorgeous little sheltie, which is basically just a miniature Lassie, and I was obsessed with him but didn’t know how to deal with the usual canine excitement and jumping, so I’d end up hiding behind her. We also had several neighbourhood cats who would visit our yard, who were very tolerant of us carrying and patting them, and served as de facto pets.

How were you similar to, and different from, the rest of your friends and family?

My family are similar in many ways, particularly our intellectual leanings. We had a huge bookshelf next to the dining table, and many family dinners ended with one of the big reference books coming down so we could check some fact we were unsure about. We love trivia nights – highly competitive and with a range of different expertise, we do well as a family team. I was probably different in being more introverted, preferring to spend most of my time reading and writing on my own.

What did your parents do for a living?

When I was young, my father worked for the public service and my mother was a stay-at-home parent. Around the time I went to high school they switched roles, so my dad stayed home and my mum went to work as a teaching assistant, helping kids with additional needs integrate into the classroom. I think raising so many of us gave her the perfect patience and understanding to work with other children.

As a teenager, did you enjoy school?

I did, largely because it was time I got to spend with friends, and I was often noisy in class, focused more on the social aspects. But I had quite an academically-minded friendship group, so the competition between us would keep me at my homework and my grades stayed up. I took it pretty seriously, and was quite frustrated when I ended up losing the top student award to someone else – it was because the physical education grades also counted and that was not one of my strengths.

Not into sports and whatnot?

I have always been absolutely terrible at sport – no hand-eye coordination. I couldn’t enjoy team sports because I always felt like I was letting the team down and I preferred the forms of exercise that can be done alone, like swimming. The one time in my adult life I tried joining a team ended fairly disastrously. I was working at the Auckland Zoo, and when a group of staff started up a netball team I decided to give it a go as it seemed like a good way to keep fit and be social. I didn’t have any sports shoes so for the first game, a friend lent me her spare pair and as it turned out, they were slightly too big. About 15 minutes into the first game I tripped on them and fell, breaking my wrist, requiring surgery and 3 months off work. At that point I decided to stay away from those types of sport for good. More recently, I’ve started aerial sports - which are a form of gymnastics, or acrobatics, on suspended apparatus such as hoops or silks – and absolutely love it. I can build strength and challenge myself, without the stress of competition.

What was on your mind in general?

Nothing exceptional – all the usual concerns of high school and teenage life. I was very focused on doing well at school and getting the grades I thought I needed to make sure I could get where I needed to go after school (which, as it turned out, were far less important than I had thought they would be).

What sort of things were you passionate about, if anything?

I think there were two main things – writing, and animals. I wrote often (always fiction), and was absolutely convinced that I would be a writer. I had a friend who had the same goal and we would talk about our novels, set up writing time, send stories off to literary magazines.

In high school I became very interested in animal rights, becoming a vegetarian, and I was lucky that my family was supportive of this. My mother sent me to spend a weekend with my grandparents, who were mostly vegetarian, so they could teach me some recipes, as there weren’t so many of the easy vegetarian food options available as there are now. Two of my sisters became vegetarian after I did, so we’d just end up with two versions of each meal on the table, and it was never made into a big deal, for which I am very grateful. A friend who’d wanted to become vegetarian at the same time had to stop as her parents refused to cook for her.

What did you do to amuse yourself?

Lots of time with friends. As well as the usual sorts of things – walking around in the nearby forests, talking, watching TV - we’d mess around with creative projects, mostly humorous, such as writing short stories, or filming skits. I think I still have some of the video cassettes somewhere, though of course no VCR to watch them. Of course this was all pre-internet, so at least I’m spared the embarrassment of knowing it was all public.

Noteworthy formative experiences?

When I was 15, one of the boys in my grade died – he collapsed in class and it turned out he’d had a congenital heart problem that had never been picked up. I think that changed things for all of us – it helped a lot in just shaking off a lot of the drama of high school, and in connecting us all through this shared grief. Everyone was nicer because I think we were just so acutely aware of the possibility for regretting the way you have treated someone.

Jesus. So, any early signs you'd end up being a philosopher? Like, were you a reflective teenager?

I wrote a lot of diaries, so maybe that’s one sign! I was constantly reflecting on myself and my place in the world, though perhaps less so on the ‘bigger’ questions philosophy typically aims at. It’s slightly embarrassing to admit now, but one of the key moments for me, looking back, was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Here was a book that didn’t just have a story, but also just discussed abstract ideas and that blew me away. I hadn’t realised it was possible, but I found it fascinating. It was many years though before I was introduced to philosophy and realised this was exactly what had sparked my interest back then.

Did you start thinking about what you wanted to do in college, if college was even on the table?

I don’t remember ever thinking anything other than I would go to university when I finished school – though in Australia that’s easier to achieve, as the tuition costs are covered by low-interest government loans that you eventually pay back through your taxes. I knew I wanted to study science, but the specifics of that changed over time. For a while I was very keen on forensic science because I wanted to be like Scully from the X-Files, who was a forensic medical examiner, but I quickly decided I was too squeamish for that. Veterinary science was rejected for the same reason – I loved animals but couldn’t face blood and the like.

Where did you apply?

I was only really interested in attending my local university (the Australian National University) – both because it allowed me to stay living at home to save money, but also because I was lucky enough to have an excellent university nearby and so there wasn’t anywhere else I thought would be better for my studies.

What was the plan?

Throughout high school the plan was really just to be an author, to write and publish books. I’m not sure I thought about it in any more specific terms than that. I had several partially-finished manuscripts by the time I finished school but ended up distracted by other things and not finishing them. By the time I was applying to uni, the plan was to study biochemistry, as I was interested in both chemistry and biology; though after my first year I shifted this to zoology as I started thinking more about my interest in animals.

Any major world events--political, technological, cultural changes or trends, etc.--that had a significant impact on your life and worldview before college?

When I was in high school, there was a newly growing awareness of animal testing in cosmetics. A friend introduced me to the campaigns and we would collect articles on animal testing, particularly to identify the ‘cruelty free’ brands we could buy. I think this was the first time I really thought about the way my actions could affect the lives of animals, and I became vegetarian later that same year. This focus on animal welfare was definitely something I’ve carried with me since.

If the person you were when before you started college met the person you are now, what would he recognize, and what would shock her?

I think she would definitely recognise the academic in me – that same desire to read a lot, write a lot, and learn about the world. She would be surprised that the writing was all philosophical though; my high school self definitely thought she’d be an author of fiction books.

Most embarrassing belief from back then?

I was a Christian for a while as a teenager. I joined a church group largely because all my friends were in it, and I felt like I wanted to be a part of it. I loved the singing and the community, but often struggled with the worldview itself – I had so many questions that no-one seemed to be able to answer, about the reasons behind the different rules we were expected to follow. Eventually I left, because I just couldn’t reconcile the belief system with the way I saw the world, and I fairly quickly gave up the belief in God too. It just didn’t sit well with my scientifically-inclined mind.

So, you went to ANU. Favorite classes and inspirational teachers at university?

My favourite classes were the ones on animal behaviour and ecology. I started out studying a mix of introductory biology and chemistry classes, and though I really enjoyed them all, I decided that I wanted to focus more on biology and the animal sciences in particular. I was admitted into the university’s ‘distinguished scholar’ program, which essentially meant I got an academic mentor for additional support to develop my studies and participate in research projects. I found someone working in animal behaviour, and started looking more into the sciences of animal behaviour. Unfortunately, my mentor ended up being quite disengaged and I didn’t have much opportunity to participate in the kinds of projects I was hoping for, but it made me realise how interested I was in this sort of animal behaviour research.

One of the first books I was assigned to read in my first year evolutionary biology course was Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, which to me was a revelation. Not because there was anything in there I didn’t already endorse, but just because of the way it was written – this was my first introduction to something that could be considered philosophy of biology, and it was many years later that I realised that this was an entire subdiscipline in itself.

How did your understanding of animal consciousness evolve?

I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly sceptical about animal consciousness, in the general sense. I spent a lot of time working closely with animals, and to me it was as obvious that they were conscious beings as it was for other humans. The ways they interact with and respond to the world, and to me or other people and animals, seemed to clearly reflect that there was an experiencing, feeling, subject there. It wasn’t until I was starting my PhD research that I really had the chance to develop the more theoretical understanding of animal consciousness and its measurement that I have now. This has given me the resources to back up those original intuitions with a more scientific evidential basis, to think about what consciousness is and how it can be measured objectively.

In your mind, what's the relationship between philosophy and zoology, or science in general?

I don’t see there as being a clear distinction between philosophy and science, in that there is definitely an intermediate space of research in theory and methodology that is practiced by both philosophers and scientists. My work is deeply interdisciplinary, and I probably read more research coming from scientists than I do from philosophers. However, philosophy provides a skill set that I think can be complementary to the sciences, in helping to provide conceptual clarity on some of the key concepts, methodological rigour, and unpacking and looking for the justification for some of the background assumptions that underlie the methods and inferences used in different sciences. For me, my interest is very much about philosophy in science, and in my case the animal sciences, especially animal welfare science and animal sentience research. I was worried when I started out that welfare scientists wouldn’t be interested in my work, or take it seriously, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by just how much enthusiastic engagement I have had from the welfare scientists I’ve worked with or talked with. I think philosophy can be most productive when embedded within the sciences like this.

How did your ethical views develop?

As I’ve mentioned, my ethical views developed quite early in terms of becoming a vegetarian at thirteen. I don’t think they’ve really changed a whole lot in the years since then, except perhaps in gaining more theoretical understanding of why I was against harms to animals, and more nuance in considering which situations may or may not really be harmful. But that general underlying view that animals matter morally and this requires a radical shift in current practice, that has stayed with me.

What did you do for fun?

Throughout my undergraduate studies, I volunteered at the local zoo, which I absolutely loved. The physical, outdoor work provided a welcome contrast to the desk-based studies, and I loved the contact with the animals. Although I’m usually quite squeamish (the main reason I never considered pursuing veterinary science!), when at the zoo I found I could adopt a tougher persona that could overcome all my usual discomforts or squeamishness, because it was for my animals. Once I graduated, this became my career for many years.

I also played in a community orchestra. I’d played clarinet throughout high school and one of the local high school music teachers had started this group as a way of providing an opportunity for people to continue playing together after school. There I was given the chance to play the bass clarinet, which I loved even more – something about the deep tones very much appealed to me. I’ve always wanted to play contrabass clarinet for that reason, but unfortunately have not yet had that chance.

Love?

Throughout my undergraduate and PhD studies I had two serious long-term relationships, that both ended amicably. My husband Walter Veit is also a philosopher, which is great for talking through our current ideas, and working on projects together, but perhaps less so for creating work-life separation!

It seems like for you, they are very much intertwined, and that doesn’t strike me as a bad thing?

It’s definitely true that so much of myself and what I value is also tied up with my work – both my love of animals, and my interest in investigating the world. I think that even if I didn’t have to for my job, I’d continue my research because it’s my way of trying to make sense of some quite complex ideas I’m passionate about, and trying to improve the world for animals. So perhaps not a bad thing overall, but I do also have to make a conscious effort to set aside time for relaxation and recreation so I don’t burn myself out.

How did you meet Walter? What do y'all disagree most deeply about, philosophically? What do you talk about besides philosophy?

Walter and I met at a philosophy of biology conference, in Oslo. We had a long-distance relationship for a while, but he came to Australia for his PhD studies and so we were able to be together then. Over time, I think many of our philosophical disagreements have narrowed, as we talk through our views and convince the other of our positions. For instance, when we met he was an eliminativist/illusionist about qualia, telling me that he’d have no interest on working on something as speculative as consciousness, but now it is a core part of his research! Where I am a hedonic utilitarian, he was a preference utilitarian, and I managed to influence him over to my side. On the other side, I used to reject a strongly gradualist view of consciousness where conscious experience could come in degrees, as it seemed unintuitive to me, but he has convinced me that it’s the most plausible way to view the evolution of consciousness. There are other philosophical positions we disagree about – I’m an evolutionary moral realist where he endorses evolutionary debunking of morality. And perhaps the most perilous divide you can see in a philosophical couple: I’m a one-boxer while he’s a two-boxer! We do talk a lot about philosophy, science, world events, but also animals (we are constantly pointing out cute dogs to one another in the street!), travel, movies we watch – I think all the usual things.

Why consequentialism?

To me, the only thing that makes sense as a natural source of value is welfare, our positive and negative experiences of the world. The best possible worlds are ones with a higher balance of pleasure over suffering. Particularly in the case of animals, this helps us to focus on seeing the world from their perspective, what is good or bad for them, rather than imposing some of our more anthropocentric sources of value. This gives us ways of making decisions then, based on the trade-offs of positive and negative experience that will be created. However, I do think there will be differential weightings on our duties or reasons for action, relative to particular thresholds determining when lives are going badly, when they are going sufficiently well, and when they are going very well. One of my current research interests is in working this out in more detail, particularly regarding what these thresholds mean conceptually and how we would identify them in practice.

Politics?

I wasn’t especially politically active, though I was a diligent voter from the time I turned 18, making sure I carefully researched all my local candidates. Generally, my politics are quite left-leaning, focusing on concern for animals and the environment, as well as provision of adequate public social institutions, such as education and health.

Drugs?

My university years were fairly tame in this regard, and I didn’t even drink alcohol very often. It wasn’t really because of any specific objections against alcohol or recreational drugs, but more because it wasn’t common within my social circle, we were more the junk food and computer game types than the epic partying types.

Computer games? Junk food? Please, say more!

Through most of my late teens and early 20s, my main friendship group would meet every week or so for social gaming. The specific games shifted over time: sometimes it was PC games, mostly first-person shooters (which required everyone to lug their large PCs to someone’s house to set up a LAN), other times it was PlayStation – we were particularly fond of Guitar Hero for quite a while and even though I’ve never been any good at playing actual drums, I got pretty good at the Guitar Hero drum kit. We’d load up on caffeine and sugar and I remember one experiment in trying to create the ultimate sugar drink by heating Coke and dissolving dextrose into it to try and create a supersaturated solution. As you might expect, it tasted absolutely terrible, but it did its job.

What shooters did you play?  

Mostly a lot of Call of Duty in various iterations!

Best TV show of all time and why?

My all-time favourite TV show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In part this is probably because of when I watched it – I was a young adult and they say these are the most formative years for our cultural tastes! But to me it has everything – nuanced and endearing characters, and some pretty deep themes – love, death, responsibility, sacrifice - addressed with the perfect balance of drama and humour.

Obstacles?

I can’t think of any real obstacles I encountered on this path. When I graduated, I wanted very much to work as a zookeeper and it took some time to make that a reality, because it’s a highly competitive field with far more applicants than jobs (not unlike academia!), but I managed to turn my volunteer work into paid casual work and after applying widely, a full-time fixed-term contract in Adelaide. They always say that the first job is the hardest to get, and that was the case for me – once I’d finished that contract I found it relatively easy to get jobs in other zoos and I spent time in Auckland and in Dubbo (rural Australia) before returning to my hometown of Canberra.

PhD high points?

A high point during my PhD studies was having the chance to spend two months in Oxford, on a summer research program at the Global Priorities Institute. It was my first time in the UK, and I loved living in Oxford – the culture, the architecture. The people I was working with were great too - the other early career researchers visiting for the program - they were all passionate and very clever, and helped me a lot to clarify my thinking on some of the questions I was working on regarding how we should assess animal welfare, and how to make comparisons between the welfare of humans and other animals. I‘m still closely connected with the research institute and some of the people I met while I was there.

Disappointments?

When I was nearing the end of my PhD, I was quite keen on the idea of moving on to work as an animal welfare specialist researching and advising on welfare within a zoo, but in the end I didn’t have quite enough experience in empirical animal behaviour research. I’m glad now for where I’ve ended up – I enjoy the freedom academia gives me to pursue the research I choose - but at the time it was definitely disappointing.

When did you decide to go to grad school?

It was many years after my first degree that I decided to go to grad school. When I was studying science I had originally thought I’d go on to PhD research in animal behaviour, but when I got to that point I decided instead to focus on zookeeping. Eventually, though, the study bug bit again and I decided to go back to uni to study something new. I wasn’t sure what exactly, so I took my first year to try several different courses – philosophy, sociology, English – and was quickly drawn to philosophy. In my second year I took a course in philosophy of biology and I think that was when everything really changed for me. Here was where I realised that everything I loved most about studying biology – the theory, the ideas – could be integrated with philosophy. At that point I decided I wanted to go on to study this further and was focussed on continuing on into a PhD.

Where did you want to go and why?

I wanted to stay where I was at the Australian National University, because it has an excellent philosophy department and for philosophy of biology in particular. For my Honours year, I was supervised by Kim Sterelny, and it seemed like an obvious choice to continue on to do my graduate research with him as well. I was lucky to end up where I wanted. It was the only place I applied, and I’m not really sure what my plan would have been if I hadn’t been accepted there.

What's Sterelny like?

My PhD experience was probably a bit unusual, because I changed topics quite early on from the evolution of orangutan cognition and learning, right in the areas of Kim’s core ongoing research, to animal welfare science, which he didn’t have a background in. Despite this, Kim is an extremely clever philosopher, with a lot of expertise in the philosophy of biological and cognitive sciences that was still immensely helpful. He has the ability to look at a piece of work even on a subject he’s not familiar with and pick out the key points worth focussing on. This meant he was always good at providing valuable feedback on my work, even if it often frustratingly consisted of circling a single paragraph on a page with an instruction to cut the rest and develop this argument. He is a paradigmatic Australian – laid-back, with little concern for social conventions, and could often be seen in summer barefoot around the department. He has a hands-off supervisory style, which is probably necessary with the number of concurrent PhD students he had (around 10). This was difficult for me at first while I was still finding my feet as a researcher, but in the long run has helped me to be comfortable working independently. He’s definitely influenced my philosophical style – similarly to how he sees his work as trying to build bridges between different disciplines and subdisciplines of science and philosophy, my work is also interdisciplinary, at the intersection of philosophy, animal welfare science, sentience research, and even psychology and economics. Kim also has little patience for philosophical speculations lacking grounding in scientific theory or empirical data, and in my work I have criticized movements in animal ethics that are grounded in anthropomorphic intuitions about what is good for animals, without considering the biology of the animals they’re discussing.

Surprises? Why the switch to animal welfare?

I’ve had a special fascination with orangutans that came from working with them in the zoo – they have this unique mind that works carefully and quietly, observant and insightful, and I’ve heard other people describe them as great lateral thinkers. I was interested in how this type of cognition contrasts with the quicker, more logical thinking of chimpanzees, and how it is in some ways perhaps more similar to humans. My hypothesis was that this similarity could be a result of a special type of social learning and I was hoping to adapt Sterelny’s ‘apprentice learning’ model to orangutans. Unfortunately, I very quickly realised that there just wasn’t enough empirical research on orangutans that I could draw on to support this. So I shifted my project instead to philosophy of animal welfare science, something else I was very interested in and which still forms the basis of most of my research. I still keep an eye on the orangutan research though, and maybe one day I’ll get a chance to write what I wanted about them!

Scariest animal you have worked with?

It probably sounds surprising, but the scariest animal I worked with was actually a parrot – a Black-Capped Lory. Most of the really dangerous animals are worked ‘protected contact’, where the keeper never enters the space with the animal, so it’s often the smaller animals that are more of a threat. This Lory was so aggressive – he would wait by the door of the aviary for me to come in, ready to bite my fingers, and he bit hard! He would make this low whistle as he was waiting for me and every time I heard it my stomach would drop. In the end, they installed little feeding flaps, so you could put the food tray in without going into the aviary and he’d still wait there to try and bite my fingers as I slid it in.

Grossest thing you had to do at the zoo?

I suppose most people would assume it’s dealing with animal waste, but although that was definitely unappealing, I never found it too worrying. For me, the challenge was food preparation involving meat. I’m a vegan, so I really wasn’t prepared for handling meat of any kind. My very first day as a zoo volunteer, I walked in the door and the first thing they had me do was take a large bucket of fish that was intended to feed the Little Penguins and – as the fish were too large – carefully cut the tails off each of them. I’d never touched a fish in my life and suddenly I was dipping my hand into a whole bucket of them. I got used to that pretty quickly though, and feeding the penguins became one of my favourite jobs, even if the smell of fish would stick to my hands for days afterwards.

Sometimes, people think of consciousness as a non-physical, or unmeasurable, thing. Why is this false?

I see consciousness as a complex evolved feature of some living organisms. For it to have evolved, it must have provided some fitness advantage to those animals who had it and this means that there must be some change to their physiology or behaviour that is ‘visible’ to selection. These changes are part of what we can look for when we want to detect or measure consciousness. For instance, one of the theories I like on the evolution of consciousness (focusing particularly on the valenced mental states or ‘affects’) posits that it functions to provide a ‘common currency’ for animals to compare competing motivations and make flexible decisions about which behaviours to prioritise at any given time. So we could look for which animals have the ability to make flexible trade-offs in the face of complex competing motivations, which then serves as good evidence that they are sentient.

I dig it. How do you determine what is good for a non-human animal?

Through a lot of research or observation! By giving them a variety of different environments or living conditions and seeing how their welfare improves or decreases. There are lots of heuristics we can use though, to speed up the process. For instance, in general it is reasonable to assume that animals have evolved to find many things pleasurable that would be fitness-enhancing in the wild, and want to avoid those things associated with harms to fitness. So what is good for an animal will be closely linked to what kind of animal it is. We can then look at their wild lifestyles – the environments they inhabit, their behavioural repertoires – and use these features as a basis for testing what they do and don’t like. But while this is a good starting point, I don’t think we should be limited by this. Plenty of animals in captivity seem to enjoy a range of activities that they wouldn’t usually encounter in the wild – animals from warmer regions often enjoy playing with snow, for example. So in zoos we often get creative, testing the animals with all sorts of things to see what works for them. You also don’t want to get too caught up with what is going on at the species level – animals are individuals, and their personalities will differ, including what they want or like.

Suspiciously simple answer! I don't even know what, if anything, is good for me?

I actually think humans are usually terrible judges of what is good for them, possibly more so than most other non-human animals. We live in such a complex environment, and have the capacity for such a large amount of conceptualising and reflection, that I think it’s easy to get tangled up and lose sight of what we really feel. I don’t really trust self-report, I think that there are a range of ways this can misrepresent what is actually going on, and particularly that people can tell themselves many things that aren’t true about their current situation. I’d love to see more of the external measures used in animal welfare science applied to human wellbeing, to test how well we really do at judging our own levels of wellbeing.

Is it possible to assess animal welfare without anthropomorphizing animals?

I think it absolutely is. At its most basic, all we need to assess animal welfare is to assume that animals have the capacity to feel good or bad in different situations, which I don’t think is at all anthropomorphic. We can then take measures that represent the positive or negative experience, and look at which situations elicit them.

How do you assess the welfare of animals that are radically different from ourselves (or aliens or robots)?

I think all welfare assessment relies in some part on starting assumptions of similarity to ourselves. Even if that is just the most basic assumption that things that are bad for us will feel bad, and will result in similar patterns of behaviour (such as approaching things we like and avoiding things we don’t). I think this can apply to animals quite different from ourselves, such as invertebrates. But I find it difficult to think about how we would approach the study of welfare in artificial agents, for example. The usual way we do this research is through inferences based in biological analogy, or theoretical evolutionary considerations. With creatures that don’t share any of this biological basis, I don’t have a good way of grounding the necessary reasoning to link observed physiology or behaviour to welfare experience.

Why is it easier to assess the well-being of systems 'designed' by nature than systems designed by homo sapiens?

I think it’s because assessment of well-being relies on inference – we can’t take direct measures but instead find indicators that we link to welfare using our best theory and background assumptions about the function and mechanisms. These all rely on theory and understanding of the biology of the animals involved, such as through drawing analogies with our own case, or through our best theories about the evolutionary role of affective states. When we come to artificially designed systems, we lose all this theoretical underpinning and it’s very difficult for me to see what can reasonably replace it.

You talk about justifying your pre-theoretical intuitions philosophically, but do you think our theories inform our intuitions?

I definitely think it can work both ways, but it seems to me that far more often people aim at justifying their intuitions with theory than shifting their intuitions based on theory. Most of the time, it seems that we come loaded with concepts and values picked up throughout our lives, and by the time we’re thinking about philosophical theories we’re pretty reluctant to change these more deeply held beliefs. Even though we’re aiming at reflective equilibrium, it appears to be quite rare in practice. A good example would be arguments for veganism – I find that most people agree with the theoretical case for reducing or eliminating consumption of animal products, but won’t change their behaviour. It still just doesn’t feel compelling to them.

Do things other than the welfare of animals play a role in how they should be treated?

It depends on who you ask! From my point of view no, not really. For me, the most important thing is welfare because it represents what matters to the animal about its own life. Often I think we can get side-tracked by abstract human concerns or values, and then project them onto animals in a way that doesn’t seem helpful. I want our treatment of animals to reflect what is good for them, from their own point of view. Ideally, the science of animal welfare helps us to explore that point of view, to find out what animals want or like. There may also be some instrumental arguments for treating animals well, because it helps instill values or create patterns of behaviour that are beneficial for running a society overall, with greater respect for everyone, but to me this is a separate issue.

Can pleasurable things--things that feel good--be bad, or not recommendable, for non-human animals? Can things that are not pleasurable--things that feel bad--be good, or recommendable? Like, if you can give a non-human animal a long life that isn't painful, but isn't very pleasurable either, or a moderate length life that isn't painful and somewhat pleasurable, which is better for an animal?

Things that feel good will only be bad for animals when they have longer-term negative effects that offset the positives. For most of the things animals experience in the course of their normal lives in the wild, this won’t be the case. Conversely, some things that feel bad at the time can be good for animals in the long run – certain types of challenges will help build strength and resilience for instance. There’s also a lot of evidence that a change in state from negative to positive itself feels good, so without any negative experiences, animals miss out on that additional source of pleasure. The question about length of life versus intensity of pleasure is a difficult one, and one I don’t think anyone really has a good answer for at this stage – either for humans or for other animals. For myself, I don’t think I’d be willing to sacrifice the ‘peaks’ of positive experience just to have a longer life at a lower welfare level, but of course there will always be some tipping point at which that will cease to be true. It’s something that’s important to figure out if we want to make the best decisions about improving animal lives and I think this will be a focus of philosophical and empirical research into animal welfare over the coming years.

Are pleasure and health ever incompatible with each other?

Definitely (and unfortunately)! There are a lot of things that feel really good but aren’t good for health. Especially for humans – we’ve designed so many junk food items for instance that play perfectly into our food reward systems but are actively bad for our health. Drugs and alcohol are another example. In many cases the conflict balances out – after all, health problems lead to feeling bad in the long run, which offsets the momentary pleasure. The problem is, our short-term states are so much more motivating than the long term ones so it can be difficult to act in our own overall best interest.

What was your first time teaching like? How have you evolved as a teacher?

My first time teaching was as a PhD student, running some tutorials for a first-year undergraduate course in introductory philosophy. I was quite nervous about classroom management, and didn’t yet have a good grasp on how to encourage the students to speak up in the discussions. So I tended to ask questions, and very rapidly fill in the silence myself if no one spoke. One of the biggest changes since then has been my confidence in sitting with those silences; sometimes it takes the students some time to come up with what they want to say and I now give them the space to get there (or to become uncomfortable enough themselves with the silence that they try to fill it!). I’ve also developed a range of other methods for encouraging participation – all the usual: small group work, talk in pairs, write down a thought and read it to the class etc. What hasn’t changed is how draining the experience can still be. Lecturing is easy, but the more interactive seminars and tutorials always require active engagement with the students, and response to the specific dynamics of each group. As I’ve gained experience and confidence, I’ve come to really enjoy teaching. Philosophy is a great subject to teach, as it allows for so much engagement with students – I love leading discussions and debates, and seeing the range of ideas and perspectives they bring to the classroom. This year I have the chance to design and teach a module on animal ethics and animal minds, and I’m very much looking forward to putting together material on these topics I’m passionate about. I think the only issue will be figuring out how to narrow it down to a single semester’s worth!

Where did you land your first full time academic gig?

My first full-time academic job was a postdoc in animal sentience and welfare, at the London School of Economics. This was on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project, which came out of an ERC grant awarded to Jonathan Birch. It was a dream job for me – I’d just finished my PhD on this weird topic that wasn’t really done anywhere, and suddenly this postdoc was advertised, on the exact things I’d worked on (and was keen to continue working on). I got to spend my time working on questions that I really cared about on animal sentience and welfare, and with a team who were all interested in the same things. I started at a bad time in terms of COVID, as I moved to the UK in the deepest of their lockdowns, so all our meetings were online for quite a while but I loved the chance to work with and get to know so many clever and passionate people. Probably the most significant piece of work we did was a project for the UK government, putting together a report on the sentience of cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans, that led to both groups being included in the recently passed Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act. I was sad to leave the team, but it was only ever a temporary position and I left when I picked up permanent work as a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Southampton.

Best and worst parts of the lockdown, for you?

I think I’m lucky that I don’t mind having time to myself, so for me the best part of lockdown was the excuse to spend a lot of time at home in my own space, with the freedom to do whatever I liked. I had a lovely little flat in Notting Hill, surrounded by big trees, and I found it a really cosy space for working, reading and the like. The worst part was the travel restrictions. Australia had its borders locked which meant that Walter couldn’t come visit for over 6 months, and I wasn’t able to get back home to Australia to see my family for over a year after I left. I’d also just moved across the world, suddenly located right by a lot of countries I’d always wanted to visit, and they were still out of reach, which was disappointing (though I’ve had a bit more chance to see some of them now, which has been great).

Describe Southampton. How is Southampton different from other philosophy departments?

Southampton is actually a bigger university than either ANU or LSE, but keeps more of a small-town university feel. It has a really strong philosophy department and one with a strong focus on student experience. There’s no-one else here who really works on what I do, but the field of philosophy of animal minds is so small that’s not really a surprise. It’s an incredibly supportive department that makes an effort to recognise and celebrate everyone’s achievements. It’s hard for me to judge against other departments, as my only real comparison is the ANU where I did my PhD (as a postdoc at the LSE during a pandemic, I don’t really feel like I got a proper sense of what the department there was like). It’s a different sort of social world than I was used to, but that’s probably not a fair comparison as ANU’s famous for its strong social culture, like the daily communal tea breaks. I think that level of regular group interaction is rare.

Exciting projects in the works?

There are a few projects I’m excited about at the moment. The first is a book I’m writing with Walter on the role of zoos, bringing together philosophy with my zoo experience and current zoo science to try and find a perhaps more balanced perspective than is often seen in this literature. Another is a big review I’m doing with a team of researchers on the best ways of measuring welfare in wild animals, trying to evaluate the current available methods and make some recommendations for anyone interested in studying wild animal welfare. Finally, I’m trying to dig deeper into the question of how we can make interspecies welfare comparisons, thinking more about the necessary theoretical underpinnings and guidance for the empirical research that could help make progress on the problem.

Hobbies? Philosophical hobbies? Do you still game?

I like to read a lot, play the clarinet (though unfortunately at the moment that’s just solo at home rather than with a group), and go swimming when I can. I’m not sure what counts as ‘philosophical hobbies’ but I do like to read some more ‘pop philosophy’ books outside my research area and occasionally for fun I’ll venture into pop-culture philosophy - Walter and I have written pieces on the book Life of Pi and the TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion. These days I only game a little, and usually when I’m on breaks from work! Walter and I enjoy playing strategy games against one another, and alone I tend to prefer smaller indie exploration and puzzle games – I had a lot of fun with the Untitled Goose Game which also satisfied the animal-loving side of me.

See any good movies, tv shows, lately? Read any good books? What are you listening to?

The movie I most enjoyed recently was Everything Everywhere All at Once; it was genuinely thoughtful, funny, and moving. I’ve been rewatching a lot of old favourites on TV (most recently Firefly, which is in my all-time hall of fame) but probably the best new show I’ve watched (semi-) recently was Better Call Saul, which for me was a rare example of a spin-off being better than the original. I read so widely – mostly fiction, as I get enough non-fiction for work! – that it’s hard to pick out anything specific but some of my recent favourites have been Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, which are a beautiful exploration of lifetime growth and friendship, and Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle which is perfect fantasy with a sort of academic spin. On the non-fiction side, I loved Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, which was just a fascinating and very funny look at some of the more bizarre aspects of travelling to and living in space – how to eat, sleep, dispose of waste, keep safe.

Favourite philosopher of all time? Most impressive living philosopher, in your estimation?

My favourite philosopher is probably Jeremy Bentham, in part for his work on the hedonic calculus, but mostly for recognising the moral status of animals as sentient beings. I use his quote: “The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” all the time in my presentations and teaching! In a similar vein, my favourite living philosopher would be Peter Singer. He has provided what I see as the most convincing argument for giving equal weight to the interests of animals, and his work has formed the basis for so much modern work in animal ethics and welfare, including my own work.

Living philosopher you most deeply disagree with yet still deeply respect? Why the respect?

I think perhaps David Chalmers might fit this for me. His views about consciousness – especially the more recent turn towards panpsychism – are deeply different from my own, where I strongly lean toward an evolutionarily-grounded materialism. However, Dave is without a doubt one of the cleverest people I have ever met. When he was at ANU what impressed me was his ability to sit in any talk, on any subject, and open the Q&A with a question that cuts straight to the heart of the topic – either raising the toughest objection or, in many cases, the strongest reformulation of the view the speaker was trying to argue for.

Good or bad for philosophy? Facebook. Twitter.

I find it really hard to judge. I’ve seen both used in good and bad ways. I’m in some Facebook groups that are great for sharing and discussing new work, but Facebook overall seems increasingly for me to be mostly ads and ‘suggested content’ and I think people aren’t using it that much anymore. Twitter stimulates much more discussion, but that goes both ways – sometimes great, sometimes awful. And of course the algorithms work by trying to stir controversy so it’s easy to see the worst of it. What I’ve seen of the animal science community seems to me to be more positive and productive than some of what seems to happen in philosophy. With all the recent changes to the platform I suspect it will disappear soon, and I’m keeping an eye out to see what’s going to be the main replacement.

If you want to change the world, or minds, is philosophy the way to do it?

I think philosophy is part of the picture. Philosophy helps us figure out how the world is, and/or how it should be. There’s then an additional step that comes from motivating change, and I think that’s going to come from the behavioural and social sciences.

What is philosophy for?

Hmm, I’m not sure I have a broad scale answer for this! For me, philosophy is part of a toolkit for understanding the world. I started life as a scientist and so that’s still probably how I first approach understanding – empirical work, testing, figuring out mechanisms. But I think philosophy has an important contribution in providing methods for clarifying concepts, setting out clear frameworks, identifying background assumptions, and synthesising work across disciplines. I think philosophy is at its strongest in interdisciplinary work, and in my ideal world every project would have a philosopher on it!

Last meal?

Pizza, no question about it haha. With garlic bread on the side, and caramel cupcakes for after.

You can ask an omniscient one question, and you will get an honest, direct answer. What is the question?

Which animals are sentient? (Knowing the answer to this would help immensely in deciding where and how to protect animal welfare).

Thanks Heather!

[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]