By: Alexis Jimenez Maldonado
May 22, 2023
This conversation happened on May 22, 2023. The transcript of the interview has been edited for clarity.
Lena Ashooh is a rising junior in Kirkland House pursuing a Special Concentration in Animal Studies. She's interested in the obligations we have to other animals and non-human beings, the nature of those obligations, and their extent. Lena is co-president of Harvard College Animal Advocates and, with her interest in fulfilling duties to animals, hopes to better understand what makes some social movements effective where others fail. These interests lead her to be involved with Effective Altruism and the animal rights movement more broadly. Lena works in Dr. Irene Pepperberg's lab with two genius and highly opinionated parrots and loves to run.
Alexis Jimenez Maldonado: You joined the Center in 2022 as an Undergraduate Fellow. What drew you towards pursuing a fellowship with the Center?
Lena Ashooh: It was in my freshman year that I learned about the program. The very first draw was actually the rave reviews of two students who were formally undergraduate fellows. And there were two underlying links between these students that, together, ended up being the initial impetus to apply to the program. I noticed that they both were 1) involved in different student groups on campus that were thinking seriously about questions of what we should do, how to live an ethical life, and questions of that sort. And 2) I admired the students’ ability to talk about complicated philosophical issues in a way that was clear and productive. They engaged in philosophical debates to answer difficult or bemusing questions and put aside concerns about posturing or sounding a certain way. They were just trying to answer these questions about how we should live our lives in a good way. I really admired their style of discourse, the way they spoke about, or engaged in, philosophy.
The other thing that solidified my desire to apply was an article on the Center’s website by Dennis Thompson—the founding director of the Center—where he explained why practical ethics is a separate discipline, distinct from applied ethics. He emphasized ethics not only as applied or, as we understand applied ethics—as just applying moral theory to certain situations—but as involving practice, one of taking a certain disposition to day-to-day life. I thought the idea of ethics as a practice was really appealing. I thought it made ethics less sterile and something I could just see myself thinking about, and being excited to think about, throughout my day.
Lastly, I've seen mentioned in many Community Profiles the interdisciplinary nature of the Center. It really is fantastic to get to talk about ethical issues with people who are working across such disparate disciplines. I think the nature of ethics, figuring out what we should do and how we should live, requires interdisciplinary input. And the Center fellowship provides this. In fact, the Center intentionally puts together all these disciplines for us so that we can interact with one another, and that pushes ethical inquiry forward one major step. It is a privilege to experience this.
Alexis: You are interested in the moral and political duties we have to animals and how we can enact those duties through law and policy. To better understand obligations to other animals, you study animal cognition and behavior and moral philosophy. Can you tell me more about this area of study and how you came to be interested in this work?
Lena: I spent about 10 years of my life showing dairy cows as a member of the 4-H, a very old professional development program with a long history of introducing young Americans to a variety of professions, the most famous of which being farming.
I was a member of the dairy 4-H, which meant that I worked on a dairy farm and, every summer, would “choose” a baby cow that I would then train and show at county fairs in the summer. I would exhibit the calf just as farmers would exhibit members of their milking herd to be purchased.
I think one of the most defining parts of my experience in the 4-H was spending a lot of time with cows, almost as a semi-tolerated imposter in their herd. I got to see and spend lots of time with the cows, learning their personalities, and watching them interact with one another in their heavily constrained society. This experience is where I first became interested in what it would mean for animals to live in political communities.
I came to college with the interest of studying animal behavior and animal cognition, and our relationships to animals both descriptively (how are humans alike and different from animals) and from a normative perspective. Seeing animals relate with each other, being interested in how humans can relate to animals, and then seeing the dairy industry and its inherent violence firsthand led me to enter college with the interests of studying animal behavior, moral philosophy, and government.
Right before I came to Harvard, I read Professor Christine Korsgaard Fellow Creatures. I found what she wrote was incredibly compelling –compelling in a way that other philosophical accounts of duties to animals were not. Korsgaard articulated and clarified the things that I found really profound in my relationships with the cows. I felt like the depth of what I felt towards the cows stemmed from recognizing in these animals the things that I recognized and valued in human experience. I saw that these animals had things that were good and bad and important, that were specific just to them, as individuals, just like I had things that were good and bad and important and things that I valued that were specific just to me. And I didn't feel like the depth of or the importance of sharing that with animals was encapsulated in other animal liberation treatises like Singers Animal Liberation. Reading Korsgaard and seeing a robust moral theory dedicated to animals led me to want to study moral philosophy at Harvard and be in the Philosophy Department.
Alexis Maldonado How has the fellowship and Center community influenced or impacted your academic interests?
Lena: I think the fellowship and the Center community have completely set the trajectory of rest of my academic career and academic interests.
As a rising junior in this fellowship, I will spend a large part of the rest of my time at Harvard writing a thesis. I plan to write my thesis about topics similar to what I wrote my Safra term paper on. My studies are going to be centered, in large part, around filling gaps in my knowledge and understanding that were highlighted in writing this term paper. They will be heavily influenced by the feedback I received in this course.
More specifically, I entered the seminar with very little background in political philosophy. I had taken a few courses in the philosophy department, and I'd taken a few animal cognition and behavior courses. But I didn’t have any understanding of the political implications of the moral philosophy and discoveries in animal behavior and cognition that I was studying. I'd been thinking about animal behavior and animal cognition and animals’ capacities generally. I'd been thinking about what sorts of capacities animals have that might be morally relevant. But I didn't think about which capacities, in which moral frameworks, might give rise to political duties.
I plan to write my thesis about political obligations to animals or, what it means to live in a political community with animals. The fellowship has given me resources and tools to think about these questions, which I had felt ill-equipped to approach before entering the seminar.
Alexis Maldonado: How do you think your work and interests connect to the mission of the Center?
Lena: I think ethics as a practice has something very appealing to it that applied ethics doesn't have. I'm very specifically interested in duties to animals. I think working out what obligations we have to animals is a practice instead of just applying moral theory to specific situations where we have to figure out how we want to treat animals. The Center has shown me different ways that I can work out how to live with other animals as a practice. For example, the Center shows to us undergraduates the importance of working across disciplines to answer the empirical, theoretical, and moral questions that need to be answered to answer the ethical question. The Center has led me to speak to faculty and students in other departments about how we ought to live with other animals or what just relations with other animals looks like. Not only do these conversations highlight what research has been done, and what needs to be done, to answer the animal ethics question, but it also encourages me and the people I talk to to continually re-evaluate and update our views and behaviors towards other animals. It leads us to be constantly confronted with the question of what we believe is ethical and how we ought to behave to achieve that. And I think this is what the aim of the Center is, is to provoke conversations whose outcomes have direct bearing on our lives and how we conduct ourselves.
Alexis Maldonado: This spring you wrote your ELSCE Seminar term paper on animals' moral agency. Could you share any insight into what you learned as you reflect on this project?
Lena: I had a fantastic time working on this project. I plan to continue working on it in the form of a senior thesis, and I hope to take advantage of the minds that are in the Center as I continue working on it. Their insight has a lasting influence.
I thought to write this paper after I noticed that a lot of the discourse about duties to animals or animal suffering rested on this premise that animals aren't capable of being moral agents, and are best understood, instead, as moral patients. Philosophers think that animals are better understood as moral patients, instead of moral agents, because moral agents must be held responsible in addition to being subjects of moral concern. It is assumed that animals can’t be held responsible; it would be absurd to think that we could blame rabbits for eating our vegetables or coyotes for making raucous noise late in the night. But so much rode on this premise, and I realized that I didn't think this has been adequately examined empirically. That seemed dangerous to me.
I've mentioned my background with animals. What has motivated my interest in animals is, in large part, the recognition that there is much about animals that we don’t yet understand. And so, I had this worry, that this premise about moral agency has really profound implications, both moral and political, and it hasn't really been empirically determined. So, I thought it would be interesting to step back and think about what we should do if we find that the question of animals’ moral agency is underdetermined. What should we do if we are not in the epistemic position to evaluate whether or not animals are capable of moral agency? I thought that it would be interesting to think about what the fallout would be if we decided that we don't really know if animals can be moral agents. What do we do if, for example, the conditions that animals live in are so unjust that they aren't capable of realizing their capacity to be moral agents?
This is what I ended up writing my term paper on. The insight that I gained when working on this project is related to the mission of the Center: that ethical inquiry can be a really great opportunity to engage people from across disciplines who probably are thinking about ethics but might not have the opportunity to write about ethics explicitly in their scholarship. People are excited to talk about political duties to animals, and moral duties to animals, and don’t feel like they get to in the bounds of their field. I think this is an exciting field of research that has a place at Harvard and hasn't been fully carved out yet.
Alexis Maldonado: Part of writing your term paper involves some level of workshopping with faculty and your seminar at large—can you talk about that process and the feedback you received? How has the paper been received by different audiences?
Lena: I've been thinking a lot about how the Center had us go about writing our term papers, and what a great structure the Center provided to be inquisitive and in conversation.
I recognized when I wrote this paper that I was going to be proposing a fairly controversial position and make (probably) too strong of a claim. I had a bit of an ulterior motive in proposing this claim, which was I knew it was probably going to be received as much too strong. I wanted to see how people responded to it. In my claim, I was arguing that we live in such unjust and violent relations to animals that we just can't conceive of what it would be like to live in political relations animals, or to live in a political community where animals could be moral agents just as we are. I wanted to push this narrative as an opportunity to open up general discussions about what should we do when recognizing these background circumstances where animals live in such marginalized, subjugated conditions. How should we make decisions having to do with how we relate to them, given these background conditions? And so, when I proposed my thesis, part of my goal was to just see how people reacted to a fairly controversial claim about animals and our relations to them.
The process involved writing a proposal and a propositional outline which was then sent to Professor Arthur Applbaum and Jan-Paul Sandmann, who was our fantastic teaching fellow, who provided comments and feedback. We then wrote an initial draft based on the comments we received, received another round of feedback, and eventually submitted final drafts. Before we submitted our final drafts, we presented our papers in-person to the rest of the class and were able to receive real-time feedback from our peers, Arthur, and JP.
We were able to choose whatever ethical question we wanted for our papers. I think for a lot of us the question that we chose was one that we had been thinking about for a long time but didn't know really how to think about in any clear way until being in the seminar. So, I think for a lot of us the question was something we were really invested in and had direct bearing to our lives. It was very exciting to see people working out something that was so deeply important to them.
Alexis Maldonado: You have some exciting plans this summer, could you talk about what you will be doing and why?
Lena: I will be working starting June 1st for my state’s Congressperson in DC—Representative Becca Balint—as a legislative intern. I'll be providing help wherever I can in her office. I really admire Representative Balint. My interest is in seeing how the legislative process works, and, maybe it comes as no surprise, but I'm interested in seeing if there's a place for animal policy in DC.
Then I'll be coming back for the end of the summer to continue doing research with Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s Avian Cognition Lab studying the African grey parrots that she has in her lab, Athena and Griffin. I'll also be working as a research assistant in Dr. Erin Hecht’s Dog Brains lab where I'll be studying lateralization in the dog brain.
I'm very excited for the summer.
Alexis Maldonado: Being relatively new to our community, I'd like to give you an opportunity to share anything I have not covered!
Lena: I want to emphasize how lucky I feel that I was able to be in this seminar with Arthur, JP, and my peers.
I want to emphasize my deep admiration and respect for the students, in particular. I was trying to explain just today how amazing I find the other students in the seminar to be. This struck me from the first day of classes—they are just some of the most thoughtful, interesting, kind, and innovative students I have had the chance to be in a class with. During the last two classes of the seminar, we had a chance, as I mentioned, to present our term papers. I'm very impressed by people, students in particular, who have the daring and the ability to think in a completely novel and innovative way. Each student in the seminar presented on a topic that they had thought deeply about, and in a completely idiosyncratic way. Seeing their brains work was fascinating.
I’ll add that Arthur and JP were two of my favorite teaching staff at the University. Their charisma and excitement are unparalleled. I'm deeply thankful to all of these people.
Alexis Maldonado: How do you unwind when you’re not working, do you have any hobbies or things you do for fun? Are there animals in your life outside of the lab?
Lena: I love to make music. Very generally, I love music and art. I like to make a little art and music (I play the harp and paint), but I also really love enjoying art and music, and enjoying these things with other people. And I'll add in there, I really love to run. I see that as connected in some way with how much I love music. There's something really fascinating about human enjoyment of the arts, music in particular. I love to dance, for example. And I think there's something animalistic about enjoying dance and enjoying music through dancing. I’ve always felt the same way about listening to music when I run. For all animals that can detect and synchronize to a beat, there seems to be this irresistible urge to synchronize physically to music and to derive much pleasure from it. I love that it's a social experience. I think there's something really wonderful about all of us feeling this deep, innate urge to synchronize to music and to enjoy it together. It’s a celebratory experience. I've noticed that people seem to be going out and enjoying music and dancing more and more as the pandemic is slowly winding down. I hope that as we come out of the pandemic, the arts go wild. I could see this even having a really democratizing effect in restoring some of the optimism and vigor that I think are much needed to address the real crises that we face.
While I really miss my pets from home, I will say the two animals that got me through the semester were Griffin and Athena, which are the parrots that I work with in the parrot lab. They have some of the strongest personalities that I know. They're also just very funny. Griffin, for example, likes to be tickled with a spoon. Supposedly, Dr. Pepperberg has never heard of another bird that likes to do this. I'll spend hours tickling him with a spoon as he naps.
I'm currently back home, so I’ve had a dramatic reunion with the animals here. We have two dogs here at home and two cats. I love to see them when I'm here. And I do love seeing the animals that are around Cambridge, especially the turkeys. I think they're very powerful and autonomous creatures.
Alexis Maldonado: Do you have a podcast or show that you are currently listening to/watching?
Lena: I love Sean Carroll's MindScape Podcast. I just listened to an older episode with a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, Adam Bulley, on mental time travel. He was arguing that mental time travel is what makes us human and distinct from other animals. I was skeptical about this and asked Dr. Pepperberg about mental time travel in parrots. But one of the reasons why I love Sean Carroll's podcast is because I think he does philosophy how philosophy should be done. (I use should as kind of a soft normative “should”—philosophy can be done in so many different ways.) But I think there's something really nice to the way that he does philosophy, which is by opening up questions, being inquisitive, and having conversations about philosophical matters that are widely accessible and invite curiosity.
Alexis Maldonado: What are you most excited about in the coming academic year?
Lena: Right before the school year ended, I had my special concentration in Animal Studies approved. I’m very excited to formally study Animal Studies in the coming year. Now I have a university-recognized reason to spend lots of time at the Center, soliciting members from departments across the university for their thinking!