Social norms and farm animal protection

Social change is slow and difficult. Social change for animals is formidably slow and difficult. Advocates and scholars alike have long tried to change attitudes and convince the public that eating animals is wrong. The topic of norms and social change for animals has been neglected, which explains in part the relative failure of the animal protection movement to secure robust support reflected in social and legal norms. Moreover, animal ethics has suffered from a disproportionate focus on individual attitudes and behavior at the expense of collective behavior, social change, and empirical psychology. If what we want to change is behavior on a large scale, norms are important tools. This article reviews an account of social norms that provides insights into the possibility and limitations of social change for animals, approaching animal protection as a problem of reverse social engineering. It highlights avenues for future work from this neglected perspective

Local matching indicators for transport with concave costs

In this note, we introduce a class of indicators that enable to compute efficiently optimal transport plans associated to arbitrary distributions of $N$ demands and $N$ supplies in $\mathbf{R}$ in the case where the cost function is concave. The computational cost of these indicators is small and independent of $N$. A hierarchical use of them enables to obtain an efficient algorithm

Shear instability of an axisymmetric air-water coaxial jet

We study the destabilization of a round liquid jet by a fast annular gas stream. We measure the frequency of the shear instability waves for several geometries and air/water velocities. We then carry out a linear stability analysis, and show that there are three competing mechanisms for the destabilization: a convective instability, an absolute instability driven by surface tension, and an absolute instability driven by confinement. We compare the predictions of this analysis with experimental results, and propose scaling laws for wave frequency in each regime. We finally introduce criteria to predict the boundaries between these three regimes

Une théorie morale peut-elle être cognitivement trop exigeante?

Starting from the typical case of utilitarianism, I distinguish three ways a moral theory may be deemed (over-)demanding: practical, epistemic, and cognitive. I focus on the latter, whose specific nature has been overlooked. Taking animal ethics as a case study, I argue that knowledge of human cognition is critical to spelling out moral theories (including their implications) that are accessible and acceptable to the greatest number of agents. In a nutshell: knowing more about our cognitive apparatus with a view to play better with it. This meta-theoretical suggestion, however, differs from a classical objection drawn from the intuition that a given theory demands too much. //// A partir du cas typique de l’utilitarisme, je distingue trois façons dont une théorie morale pourrait être jugée (trop) exigeante : pratique, épistémique et cognitive. La spécificité de cette dernière – qui fait l’objet de cet article – a été négligée. Je soutiens, en prenant l’exemple de l’éthique animale, que la connaissance de la cognition humaine est essentielle à la formulation de théories morales (et de leurs implications) qui soient accessibles à, et acceptables par, le plus grand nombre d’agents possible. En d’autres termes : comment mieux connaître notre machine cognitive pour mieux jouer avec elle. Cette recommandation méta-théorique se distingue cependant d’une objection classique tirée de l’intuition selon laquelle une théorie exigerait trop de nous