Alasdair Cochrane
| Alasdair Cochrane | |
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Cochrane in 2013 at the MANCEPT Workshops, University of Manchester
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| Born |
31 March 1978 United Kingdom |
| Alma mater | London School of Economics (PhD) |
| Awards | BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker |
| Institutions | London School of Economics; University of Sheffield |
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Main interests
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Animal ethics; political theory; bioethics; human rights; environmental ethics |
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Notable ideas
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Interest-based account of animal rights; liberty thesis; cosmozoopolis |
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Influences
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 Labour Rights for Animals with Alasdair CochraneCochrane discusses labour rights for animals with Siobhan O'Sullivan for the Knowing Animals podcast. |
 "Human Rights: Animal Rights"Cochrane discusses the relationship between human rights and animal rights. |
Alasdair Cochrane (born 31 March 1978) is a British political theorist and ethicist who is currently a senior lecturer in political theory in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on animal rights from the perspective of political theory, which is the subject of his two books: An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory (2010, Palgrave Macmillan) and Animal Rights Without Liberation (2012, Columbia University Press). He is currently working on a third book. He is a founding member of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a UK-based think tank focussed on furthering the social and political status of nonhuman animals. He joined the Department at Sheffield in 2012, having previously been a faculty member at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics.
Cochrane's work forms part of the political turn in animal ethics—that is, the emergence of academic literature exploring the normative aspects of human/nonhuman animal relationships from a political perspective. He is known for his interest-based account of animal rights, a theory of justice according to which animals have rights based on their possession of normatively-significant interests. The account is a two-tiered one, with individuals' strong interests grounding prima facie rights, and some prima facie rights becoming concrete, or all-things-considered, rights. In this picture, the violation of concrete rights, but not necessarily prima facie rights, represents an injustice. In particular, Cochrane argues that sentient animals' interests against suffering and death ground prima facie rights against the infliction of suffering and death. These prima facie rights convert to concrete rights in, for example, animal agriculture and animal testing, meaning that killing nonhuman animals or making them suffer for these purposes is unjust.
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