Making Our Concern for Non-Human Beings Common Knowledge

The following is an excerpt from my book Reasoned Politics .

Two levels of knowledge are worth distinguishing in the context of human coordination (De Freitas et al., 2019):

Private knowledge: “where each person knows something, but knows nothing about what anyone else knows”Common knowledge: “where everybody knows that everybody else knows it”

Common knowledge is often explained with the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone had private knowledge that the emperor was n...