William Lynn
Founder and PresidentBiography
Bill specializes in animal and sustainability ethics as they interface with public policy. Exploring why and how we ought to care for people, animals and nature, this is practical research translating insights from his interdisciplinary training in ethics, geography and political theory into public dialogues over moral problems.
Graduating from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities with a bachelors in political science and a doctorate in geography, he is a research scientist in the Marsh Institute at Clark University, a research fellow at the social science think-tank Knology, and adjunct graduate professor in the Anthrozoology program at Canisius University.
He is also the founder of PAN Works, an independent non-partisan centre for ethics, science and policy dedicated to the wellbeing of animals. Alongside leading the think-tank, he is the host of its podcast, PAN Thinks, and editor of its Medium column, Perspectives.
Animals are not simply resources for people or functional units of ecosystem services. They range from sentient to sapient and social beings who have an intrinsic moral value akin to our own. They deserve our ethical consideration and as human beings we owe them direct duties of care. This includes both wild and domesticated animals whether they are individuals or in ecological and social communities. Similarly, sustainability is not properly focused on preserving a global elite’s lifestyle or ensuring humanity’s mere survival. Rather it is helping people, animals and nature to thrive across the planet into perpetuity – deep sustainability.
When it comes to public policy, Bill has long held it must be both scientifically and ethically sound. Its facts and values need to be transparent and accountable, while its goals must serve the good of the entire community of life. Good policy integrates social justice, animal protection, and ecological integrity to truly respect the community of life in all its cultural and natural diversity.
Drawing on the interpretive tradition of ethics exemplified by Mary Midgley, Bill seeks to unearth the moral values and worldviews that are often latent in social and environmental issues. This involves helping us recognize and dialogue about our ethical points of view. Whether facilitating a class or public meeting, this is not a search for absolute truth or deciding who is ‘right’ per se. Rather, it is an effort to help individuals and communities generate moral insights to help solve real-world problems. This ‘ethical capacity building’ attends to concrete cases, integrates theory with practice, and infuses public policy with ethical insights.
Bill has innovated or helped develop an extensive set of conceptual tools for translating ethics into public policy:
Animal trustees — a mechanism for directly representing animals in deliberative democracy
Co-values — the intermixing of intrinsic, extrinsic, and relational values across all life
Compassionate conservation — an alternative to traditional, new, and “critical” approaches to conservation
Deep sustainability / deep rewilding — the underlying values that justify and ought to guide these practices
Geocentrism — locating moral value in individuals and communities, ecological and social, human and non-human
Hermeneutics (interpretivism) — a non-reductive means of understanding the meaning and moral values of human-animal interactions
Intrinsic value — a moral feature of the properties and capacities of beings and systems, not a non-material spiritual substance
Moral panic / moral orthodoxy — a characteristic approach of traditional conservation
People, animals, and nature — three interrelated spheres of ethical, scientific, and practical concern that dispute the anthropocentric dualism of society and nature
Precaution — a moral principle of public policy, not merely a response to scientific uncertainty
Sentience, sapience and sociality — a specification of Midgley’s theory of animal values
Strict scrutiny — requiring public policy to be both ethically and scientifically justified
Tangible and intangible empirics — qualitative and quantitative phenomena simultaneously present in empirical reality
Wellbeing — an ethical goal centred on flourishing and thriving
Wild lives — recognising wildlife as both individual beings and relational members of social and ecological communities, to whom we have direct moral duties
These are not abstract constructs but working tools, applied in practice to wolf recovery, outdoor cats and biodiversity, barred and northern spotted owls, the Canadian seal hunt, and urban ecology.
Bill was a professor at Green Mountain College, Tufts University and Williams College where he taught courses in animal studies, environmental studies, ethics, human geography, qualitative research, and public policy. He helped found the journal Ethics, Policy and Environment (formerly Ethics, Place and Environment), and was lead editor for the Political Animals section of the journal Society and Animals. He was the first chair of the Ethics Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and conducted the first ethics review under the National Environmental Policy Act as originally intended by its authors. He founded the first undergraduate animal studies program at Green Mountain College, revived the Masters of Animals and Public Policy program at Tufts University, and served as Senior Fellow for Ethics and Public Policy at the Center for Urban Resilience at Loyola-Marymount University.
Bill also serves as an ethics advisor and facilitator, helping the nonprofit and public sectors make better policy decisions by using ethics. This work includes ethics-based facilitation and training, expert opinions and research briefs, ethics framing and strategic planning, and keynote presentations.