We build ethical capacity.
We help individuals, communities and organizations build the capacity to explore and communicate their values. We also generate ethically informed and scientifically rigorous research articles, popular essays, courses, seminars, and workshops.
Intentionally heterodox, our approach is interdisciplinary in spirit and pluralist in approach. We are thereby able to establish shared moral ground to help individuals and groups identify and address the moral issues at stake in an issue or controversy.
This in turn improves deliberative decision making by directly address the value-laden issues that drive social disputes and policy debates.
What Do We Want?
We strive for a global community that cares for animals as a distinct sphere of ethical and practical concern. This calls for humanity to sharpen our individual and collective capacity for ethical thought and behavior, and fulfill our moral and political responsibilities to people, animals and nature.
How Does it Work?
We have four program areas – research, education, training and creative. Each area has projects organized around collaborative teams of experts. The teams generate research articles, popular essays and educational courses, as well as ethics training, meeting facilitation and expert testimony. Led by one or more “team leads” who take on oversight and organizational roles, we otherwise, minimize hierarchy to foster creativity and the flow of ideas. To minimize overhead costs, all operations are online.
What Animals Do We Consider?
All animals merit our moral concern, both as individuals and as active members of their broader ecological and social communities. Much of our work takes place at the interface of animals and their interactions with humans. This is only natural as we all live in ‘mixed communities’ involving a diversity of people and animals inhabiting a shared landscape. Examples include outdoor ‘house’ cats and their impact on biodiversity, and Asian elephant’s interacting with Karen people and mahouts in SE Asia.