Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellowship Presentation

The Special Collections Research Center invites you to a presentation of the 2025 Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellow, Zachary Ferguson. A Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at UNC–Chapel Hill, Ferguson is currently researching his dissertation on the evolution of philosophical discussions surrounding vegetarianism and veganism, and his presentation is titled "Moral Character and Meat Eating." According to Ferguson:

“It is not hard to show that industrial animal farming is morally wrong. However, it is surprisingly difficult to show that the wrongness of farming practices means that it is wrong for consumers to eat meat. This is something that early advocates overlooked, and some philosophers have recently argued that the same principles that support animal advocacy also give us moral reasons to sometimes eat meat. In this talk, I argue against these views and show that we do have compelling moral reasons not to eat meat. To do so, I focus on elements of moral character, including the ways that we perceive animal products and how we feel towards them.”

We also extend our gratitude to the Culture & Animals Foundation for their support in establishing the Tom Regan Fellowship and for their commitment to advancing the work of scholars like Ferguson.