Please join us for the Bernie Rollin Memorial Lecture in Animals Ethics. This year’s distinguished lecturer, Dr. Mark Rowlands (University of Miami), will present “Animals, Empathy, Morality: Two Forms of Emotional Contagion” on Thursday, March 26 at 4:30 p.m. in the LSC Never No Summer Ballroom.

Many people think morality is not unique to humans but is shared by other animals, especially social mammals and perhaps birds. These views often rely on empathy as the basis of moral behavior. But this raises a problem. Empathy can mean either imagining yourself in another’s place or directly responding to another’s situation. The first requires complex thinking that many animals may lack; the second seems too simple to count as moral. This paper argues that one form of this simpler, receptive empathy can still support genuine moral emotions.

Dr. Mark Rowlands is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Miami and an internationally renowned philosopher of mind, memory, and our moral relations with animals. The author of more than twenty books, Rowlands’ recent work includes World on Fire: Humans, Animals, and the Future of the Planet (2021) and The Book of Memory: How We Become Who We Are (2025).