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Person-Post: Elisa Aaltola, PhD – Fellow

19th March 2008

completed her doctoral studies in the University of Turku, Finland (after spending a period as a Visiting Doctoral Student in the Institute for Ethics, Environment, and Public Policy at Lancaster University). Her PhD thesis on “Animal Individuality: Moral and Cultural Categorisations” explored the possibility of “animal personhood” from the point of view of moral theory and cultural context. She has published a book titled Eläinten Moraalinen Arvo (“The Moral Value of Animals”) (Vastapaino 2004), which investigates the major theories in animal ethics. She has written “Animal Ethics and Interest Conflicts”, Ethics & the Environment 10:1, 2005, and over 30 papers and articles on animal ethics, both in Finnish and international journals. In 2007, she edited the Finnish translation of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, with the addition of two of her own articles on recent developments concerning the use of animals in Finland and the rest of the European Union. She also holds an MA in Film and Television Studies, and completed her thesis on the cultural depiction of animal monstrosity. Her present research interests include casuistic and Wittgensteinian accounts on animal ethics, the representation of animal suffering, and the various normatively loaded concepts used to exclude non-human animals from the realm of serious moral consideration. Dr Aaltola has frequently promoted veganism in the Finnish media. She currently works as a Visiting Research Fellow in Moral Philosophy in Manchester Metropolitan University.