Wednesday, April 26, 2023
5:20 – 7:00 pm
Classroom Unit 2 (map)
On Wednesday, April 26 at 5:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Benjamin Hale on “Clean Meat and Muddy Markets: Substitution and Indeterminacy in Consumerist Solutions to Animal Agriculture” – a panel discussion will follow.
The hope and promise of synthetic ‘cultured’ meat products is that they will serve as inexpensive substitute proteins that replace meats made by conventional animal agriculture. Where the ethical discussion concerning meat often centers on what is wrong with meat, we instead ask how consumer indifference and producer strategy might influence the uptake of clean meat in the economic market. Rather than approaching the problem in terms of substitution value, we approach the problem of substitution from the standpoint of reasons-for and reasons-against. Doing so, we suggest, exposes complications with “causal indeterminacy” that in turn implicate our thinking both about moral responsibility and the broader nature of technocratic solutions to environmental problems.
Benjamin Hale teaches environmental studies and philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He works primarily in the area of environmental ethics and environmental policy, though his theoretical interests span much larger concerns in applied ethics, normative ethics, and even metaethics. As for applied questions, much of his recent work centers on ethical and environmental concerns presented by emerging technologies.