Alastair Norcross is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, specializing in normative ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy.
While finishing his degree, he also taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY from 1990 to 1992.
He then taught for ten years at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, before moving to Rice University in 2002.
In his 2004 paper, Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases, Norcross invoked a thought experiment termed "Fred’s Basement" which argued that consuming factory farmed meat is morally equivalent to torturing and killing puppies because both knowingly cause unnecessary harm to sentient creatures just for trivial pleasures.
[2] Norcross left open the possibility that consuming humanely-raised meat is permissible, whilst some of his readers have contended that his argumentative approach rules it out.