Region: | Western philosophy |
Era: | Contemporary philosophy |
Alastair Norcross | |
Alma Mater: | Syracuse University, Oxford University |
School Tradition: | Analytic philosophy |
Main Interests: | normative ethics, applied ethics |
Alastair Norcross is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, specializing in normative ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy. He is a defender of utilitarianism.
Norcross graduated from Oxford University in 1983 and earned his Ph.D. at Syracuse University in 1991 under the supervision of Jonathan Bennett. While finishing his degree, he also taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY from 1990 to 1992. He then taught for ten years at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, before moving to Rice University in 2002. He joined the Colorado faculty in 2007.[1]
In ethics, Norcross defends a version of act utilitarianism known as scalar utilitarianism, which is the theory that there are no right or wrong actions, only better or worse actions ranked along a continuum from the action (or actions) that contributes most to overall utility to the action (or actions) that contributes the least.
In his 2004 paper, Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases, Norcross invoked a thought experiment termed "Fred’s Basement" which argued that consuming factory farmed meat is morally equivalent to torturing and killing puppies because both knowingly cause unnecessary harm to sentient creatures just for trivial pleasures.[2]
Norcross left open the possibility that consuming humanely-raised meat is permissible, whilst some of his readers have contended that his argumentative approach rules it out.[2]