Animals as Pranksters:  A Multispecies Political Ethics. Lecture by Dr. Cynthia Willett, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University

Horses, apes, and dogs use mockery to create their own politics.  These animals pranksters play deceptive tricks on their superiors bringing down the alphas.  Their high stakes games of status and power do not show evidence of abstract moral thought, but they do enact an ancient political ethics that predates human exceptionalism and is common across species human and nonhuman.

Cynthia Willett is an American philosopher who is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, where she is also affiliated faculty with Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and with the Psychoanalytic Studies Program. She has written influential books on intersectional feminism and founded Emory's Institute for the History of Philosophy. Willett was on the American Philosophical Association's Executive Board between 2008 and 2010, and has served as co-director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.