Welcome to my website! Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m David Killoren and I’m a moral philosopher by trade. My primary interests are in metaethics (esp. non-naturalist moral realism), normative ethics (esp. the moral significance of relationships), and applied ethics (esp. animal ethics). Since fall 2024, I’ve been a VAP at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, USA. Before that, I was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Koç University in Istanbul. I’ve also worked at Texas State University; Australian Catholic University’s Dianoia Institute (now defunct); Northwestern University; and Coastal Carolina University. And when a grad student, I taught undergraduate courses at both the University of Wisconsin and Madison Area Technical College. I completed my PhD in 2012 at UW-Madison with Russ Shafer-Landau as my advisor.
Here’s my email address: david.j.killoren@gmail.com
At left: Me at MadMeta in September 2024.
I try to write a blog post every Sunday. My blog is here, and you can find a list of all my recent posts on my Bluesky page.
Rob Streiffer and I are currently working on a book under contract with OUP due in August 2025. Part I of the book contributes to normative ethics and meta-ethics: We present and develop a new comprehensive moral theory about the moral significance of relationships. Part II of the book contributes to applied ethics: We show how the theory developed in Part I might help to advance contentious debates in animal ethics, including but not limited to animal population ethics. The title of the book is Our Relationships with Animals: A New Comprehensive Moral Theory and a New Approach in Animal Ethics. Part I of the book is now shareable, so please get in touch if you’d like to check it out.
In connection with the book, Rob and I also are preparing an invited contribution to Sarah Stroud’s upcoming Oxford handbook on personal relationships.
In addition to the book with Rob, I’m also working on a number of other, smaller projects on animal ethics, social movements, and activism:
With sociologist Onur Alptekin I’m working on a dialogue on leftist critiques of ethical veganism. We’re hoping that the dialogue will be of interest to the general public as well as academics.
With Dilara Diegelmann and activist Joanne Lee, I’m preparing a chapter on animal and human political speech.
With Rach Cosker-Rowland, I’m preparing an entry on the philosophy of activism for an encyclopedia of ethics edited by Hugh LaFollette.
With Jeff Behrends and Jacob Sparks, I’m in the midst of organizing a workshop and associated edited volume on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau’s agenda-setting new book, The Moral Universe. The workshop will occur at Harvard University in fall 2025.
I’m currently interested in investigating a metaethical view that I and others have called moral occasionalism. The view aspires to solve some of the serious epistemological problems faced by some of the more ontologically committal versions of non-naturalist moral realism. Jacob Sparks and I try to develop the view in this paper; I’ve also written about the view in this paper; and Jacob and I are currently preparing a new piece that further develops the view and tries to deal with some of the challenges for the view that have been brought to our attention.
I have interests in a number of theoretical and applied issues concerning social ontology and collective action. I believe my most-cited paper thus far is this one, co-authored with Bekka Williams, in which we present a moral argument for the existence of group agents; and I’m fond of the piece that Bekka, Jonathan Lang, and I wrote on a demarcation problem for political discourse for this volume. I’ve recently co-organized a couple of Istanbul workshops (details here and here) on topics in social ontology. As an outgrowth of my interests in these areas, I’m currently working on a new paper in which I argue that a distinguishing feature of social movements is that they fail to be group agents yet manage to be capable of collective speech.