In 2025 two APPLE fellows, Carlo Salzani and Serrin Rutledge-Prior, published books related to animal ethics.
Carlo Salzani, a corresponding fellow with APPLE and a visiting researcher at the Messerli Research Institute of Vienna, recently published Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism: The Limits of Imagination with Palgrave Macmillan. The open access book gives an overview of debates about the role of imagination in animal ethics by exploring the links between imagination, empathy/sympathy, and anthropomorphism. In an interview about the book on the Vienna Animal Studies website, Carlo said he was motivated to write the book, in part, by a nagging set of questions raised in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals regarding the limits of imagination.
Serrin Rutledge-Prior, the current postdoctoral fellow at APPLE, published a monograph with Cambridge University Press titled Multispecies Legality: Animals and the Foundation of Legal Inclusion which examines how legal institutions might be reshaped in a way that considers animal interests alongside existing legal subjects. Serrin develops a new principle of “multispecies legality” to ground her arguments and believes this could be used to extend legal subjecthood to anyone with interests.
These two books approach questions of animal ethics from different, but interconnected, places. Both works question the ways in which discourse functions and its range of material and imaginative effects and argue that more expansive considerations of animals – as subjects of research and of the law – are required. However, where Carlo offers an open-ended consideration of the debates regarding empathy and anthropomorphism, choosing to focus on the (perceived) epistemic limits of how we can know animals, Serrin develops a new concept – multispecies legality – that could build some of the legal infrastructure required to push those limits and take animals seriously as subjects.
The books offer exciting examples of the work currently being developed in moral and political philosophy about animals.