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 CV.

Here’s my Philpapers page.

Here’s my email address: david.j.killoren@gmail.com

At left: Me at MadMeta in September 2024.

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.