Kyle Johannsen

I'm currently Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University, and I'm an Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics (APPLE) fellow at Queen's University. I'm also a podcast host on the New Books Network's Animal Studies Channel. I have a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Queen’s, and an M.A. and a B.A., from York. My research is in social and political philosophy, and in animal and environmental ethics.

Though my doctoral research was about a series of issues concerning distributive justice, most of my current work concerns a largely neglected topic in applied ethics: wild animal suffering. Of particular interest to me are the extremely high infant mortality rates found among animals conventionally referred to as ‘r-Strategists’, i.e., animals that protect their genes by producing large numbers of offspring, most of whom die during infancy via predation, exposure, starvation, disease, etc. Though many ethicists and political philosophers have the intuition that we should leave nature alone, I argue that we have a collective duty to research safe ways of providing large-scale assistance to wild animals. I claim that with enough research, genetic editing may one day give us the power to safely intervene without perpetually interfering with wild animals’ liberties. Some questions of interest to me include: whether intervention is best understood as a matter of beneficence or as a matter of justice, whether an appreciation for the extent of wild animal suffering is compatible with a commitment to conserving the environment, and the implications of wild animal suffering for animal rights advocacy. 

For my Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyle_Johannsen

For my curriculum vitae: https://trentu.academia.edu/KyleJohannsen/CurriculumVitae

For interviews (and a talk) where I discuss my views about wild animal suffering:

• “Wild and Farmed Animal Welfare: Connections, Conflicts, and Comparisons.” EAGxToronto (August 18, 2024).

• “A Chat with Kyle Johannsen, Author of Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering.” Effective Altruism Forum (June 18, 2022).

• “That’s Moral Progress – You Have to Interfere in Things.” Sentientist Conversations (June 12, 2021). 

• “Reducing Wild Animal Suffering with Kyle Johannsen.” Knowing Animals (March 22, 2021).

• An interview about my book Wild Animal Ethics. New Books in Philosophy (January 11, 2021). In addition to interviewing me, the New Books Network made my book their January 11 ‘Book of the Day’.