Book Launch: Jeff Sebo, The Moral Circle (Norton 2025)
When: Wednesday, April 2, 2025, 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Where: Online
Join us in the book launch of Jeff Sebo's 'The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why'.
Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we prioritise humanity, often neglecting the welfare of a vast number of beings. As a result, we use hundreds of billions of vertebrates and trillions of invertebrates every year for a variety of purposes, often unnecessarily. We also plan to use animals, AI systems and other non-humans at even higher levels in the future. Yet as the dominant species, humanity has a responsibility to ask: Which non-humans matter, how much do they matter and what do we owe them in a world reshaped by human activity and technology?
In The Moral Circle, philosopher Jeff Sebo challenges us to include all potentially significant beings in our moral community, with transformative implications for our lives and societies.
This book explores provocative case studies such as lawsuits over captive elephants and debates over factory-farmed insects, and compels us to consider future ethical quandaries, such as whether to send microbes to new planets and whether to create virtual worlds filled with digital minds. Taking an expansive view of human responsibility, Sebo argues that building a positive future requires the shedding of human exceptionalism and radically rethinking our place in the world.
Speakers:
Dr Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at New York University. There he is also Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law. He directs the Animal Studies MA Program, and the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program. He also co-directs the Wild Animal Welfare Program. He researches in moral philosophy, legal philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. He is the author of The Moral Circle (WW Norton 2025) and Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves (Oxford 2022).
Dr Kimberly Dill is an environmental ethicist and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University. Through her research and teaching, Dr Dill articulates a series of arguments in favour of biodiversity, wildness, forest, and dark sky conservation. She contributes to the literature in a distinctive way by critically evaluating empirical research conducted in environmental science and psychology, which demonstrates that there are a variety of worrisome psychophysiological harms associated with the loss of biodiversity, wildness, and natural darkness.
Dr John Olusegun Adenitire is a Senior Lecturer in the Law Department at Queen Mary University of London. He is an associate Fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences and he co-directs the Forum on Decentering the Human. He writes on animals in constitutional theory, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech. He is the author of A General Right to Conscientious Exemption (Cambridge 2020) and Animals and the Constitution (Oxford 2025).