Brooke Burns, PhD candidate, Philosophy and 2024–25 OHC Dissertation Fellow.  

My dissertation clarifies how dignity, as an ethical principle, has historically animated anti-cruelty reform movements in prisons and zoos. To do so, I deploy a politically realist genealogy, which is a historical-philosophical method based on the premise that ethical principles are more likely to gain traction in the world when it responds to present-day problems and also becomes more realistic about the broad range of motivations that lead agents to act (or fail to act) according to certain ethical principles that may meliorate those problems.