About Us
We provide academic leadership for research and policy related to nonhuman consciousness, sentience, agency, moral status, legal status, and political status—with special focus on animals and AI.
Our Approach
We advance understanding of the nature and intrinsic value of nonhuman minds in three key ways:
- Research: We conduct and support foundational research about the nature and value of nonhuman minds.
- Outreach: We engage with decision-makers through direct consultation and public communication.
- Field-building: We engage with other researchers through events, awards, and sponsored projects.
Featured Research
Everything and Nothing Is Conscious: Default Assumptions in Science and Ethics
Frontiers in Psychology (2025)
Experts have often assumed animals lack consciousness until proven otherwise, but some now suggest changing this presumption. Options include assuming consciousness in all animals, all living beings, all with neurons, all with complex cognition, or even all beings. I assess these options scientifically and ethically, arguing that different defaults make sense in different contexts. For example, a broad assumption of consciousness may be better for ethical theory and scientific practice, since it supports precaution and innovation. However, a narrower assumption may be better for scientific theory and ethical practice, since it works with existing evidence and institutions. By adopting multiple context-specific defaults, we can better serve both science and ethics.
Insects, AI Systems, and the Future of Legal Personhood
Animal Law Review (2025)
This paper makes a case for insect and AI legal personhood. Humans share the world not only with large animals like chimpanzees and elephants but also with small animals like ants and bees. In the future, we might also share the world with sentient or otherwise morally significant AI systems. These realities raise questions about what kind of legal status insects, AI systems, and other nonhumans should have in the future. At present, debates about legal personhood mostly exclude these kinds of individuals. However, this paper argues that our current framework for assessing legal personhood, coupled with our current framework for assessing risk, imply that we should treat these kinds of individuals as legal persons. It also argues that we have reason to accept this conclusion rather than alter these frameworks.
What Will Society Think about AI Consciousness? Lessons from the Animal Case
Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2025)
We examine how society might respond to the possibility of AI consciousness by drawing parallels with human attitudes toward animal consciousness. Our analysis reveals that perceptions of AI consciousness will likely be influenced by appearance and behavior, social and economic roles, and moral biases. However, AI systems may benefit from their advanced cognitive capacities while facing challenges due to their non-biological origins. We argue that attitudes toward AI consciousness remain malleable, making this a critical moment for research and policy development. We call for urgent interdisciplinary research on the science of AI consciousness, public attitudes about this issue, and ethical frameworks for navigating potential societal disagreement and ensuring thoughtful preparation.
Is There a Tension between AI Safety and AI Welfare?
Philosophical Studies (2025)
The field of AI safety considers whether and how AI development can be safe and beneficial for humans and other animals, and the field of AI welfare considers whether and how it can be safe and beneficial for AI systems. There is a prima facie tension between these projects, since some measures in AI safety, if deployed against humans and other animals, would raise questions about the ethics of constraint, deception, surveillance, alteration, suffering, death, disenfranchisement, and more. Is there in fact a tension between these projects? It depends in part on what potentially conscious, robustly agentic, or otherwise morally significant AI systems might need and what we might owe them. This paper argues that, all things considered, there is indeed a moderately strong tension—and it deserves more examination.
Overlapping Minds and the Hedonic Calculus
Philosophical Studies (2024)
How should we update our moral thinking if it turns out to be possible for a single token mental state — a feeling of pleasure, pain, satisfaction, frustration, or another welfare state — to belong to two or more subjects at once? Some philosophers think that such sharing of mental states might already occur, whereas others foresee it as a potential consequence of advances in neurotechnology and AI. Yet different types of case generate opposite intuitions: if two mostly-distinct people share a few mental states, it seems we should count the value of those states twice, but if two physically-distinct beings share their whole mental lives, it seems we should count the value of that life once. This paper suggests that these intuitions can be reconciled if the mental states that matter for welfare have a holistic character.
Moral Consideration for AI Systems by 2030
AI and Ethics (2023)
This paper makes a case for extending moral consideration to some AI systems by 2030. It involves a normative premise and a descriptive premise. The normative premise is that humans morally ought to extend moral consideration to beings that have a non-negligible chance, given the evidence, of being sentient or otherwise morally significant. The descriptive premise is that some AI systems do in fact have a non-negligible chance, given the evidence, of being sentient or otherwise morally significant by 2030. The upshot is that humans have a moral duty to extend moral consideration to some AI systems by 2030. And if we have a duty to do that, then we plausibly also have a duty to start preparing to discharge that duty now, so that we can be ready to treat AI systems with respect and compassion when the time comes.
Featured Events
A Bill of Rights for Animals
Cass Sunstein
Rosenthal Pavilion | Kimmel Center, 10th Floor | 60 Washington Square South
Are Large Language Models Sentient?
David Chalmers
Animals and the Constitution
John Adenitire and Raffael Fasel
Evaluating AI Welfare and Moral Status: Findings from the Claude 4 Model Welfare Assessments
Robert Long, Rosie Campbell, and Kyle Fish
Could an AI System Be a Moral Patient? Conceptual Foundations for AI Welfare
Winnie Street and Geoff Keeling
The Edge of Sentience Book Launch and Panel Discussion
Jonathan Birch, L Syd M Johnson, John Olusegun Adenitire, and Claudia Passos Ferreira
Featured Media
Elephants Have Feelings and Should Have Rights
What Should We Do if a Chatbot Has Thoughts and Feelings?
Debate: To Shrimp or Not to Shrimp
What Do We Owe AI?
Can Machines Suffer?
Can AIs Suffer? Big Tech and Users Grapple with One of Most Unsettling Questions of Our Times
The Secret to Studying Animal Consciousness May Be Joy
Plans Must Be Made for the Welfare of Sentient AI, Animal Consciousness Researchers Argue
What Should We Do If AI Becomes Conscious? These Scientists Say It’s Time for a Plan
Featured Opportunities
Call for Expressions of Interest: 2026 Mind, Ethics, and Policy Summit
The NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy is hosting a two-day summit on April 10-11, 2026. Discussion topics will center on the consciousness, sentience, agency, moral status, legal status, and political status of nonhumans, with special focus on invertebrates and AI systems. The aim of this event is to connect researchers and other experts with an interest in these issues across a variety of topics, fields, and career stages.
The summit will include lightning talks, group discussions, breakout sessions, and plenty of open space for networking and relaxing. Both days will also include vegan breakfast and lunch, along with a reception. The summit will be preceded by a public event on Thursday, April 9, 2026 (date subject to change).
We welcome expressions of interest from researchers and other experts. Please note that limited travel support is available for some early-career scholars, that is, scholars within five years of their terminal degree.
If you have interest in attending this summit, please send the below materials to Audrey Becker at audrey.lynn.becker@nyu.edu. We will give full consideration to all applications received by January 26, 2026 and consider subsequent submissions on a rolling basis.
Please include in your email:
A CV or resume.
A statement of interest with three elements:
A summary of your current research, your expected future research, and how your research relates to nonhuman minds, ethics, and policy. (500 words max.)
(Optional) If you have ideas for collaborative research projects that you might like to discuss at this summit, please describe them. (250 words max.)
(Optional) If you might like to give a lightning talk about your current or future research, please suggest a topic or set of topics. (250 words max.)
Please note that if you answer these optional questions, your answers can range from general (e.g., “Frameworks for collecting public input about insect welfare”) to specific (e.g., “Organizing a citizens’ assembly to collect public input about insect welfare.”)
Additional notes:
Please also note that we might not be able to accommodate all presentation and discussion topics, and that suggesting a presentation or discussion topic does not commit you to giving that presentation or facilitating that discussion at this stage.
Finally, please note that we might not be able to accommodate all early-career travel support requests (it will depend on the volume of requests, among other factors), and that this support will likely take the form of a modest stipend, not a full reimbursement.
Topics that we see as within scope for this summit include but are not limited to:
Which beings matter? What is the evidence regarding sentience, agency, and other morally significant capacities in particular insects, AI systems, or other nonhumans?
How much do particular beings matter? How, if at all, can we make interspecies or intersubstrate welfare and moral weight comparisons?
What benefits or harms particular beings? How does, say, insect farming or reinforcement learning affect the welfare of the relevant nonhumans?
What do we owe particular beings? Which moral, legal, and political frameworks should we use to assess our interactions with particular nonhumans?
What follows for our actions and policies? How, for instance, should we set priorities in a multispecies and multisubstrate moral, legal, and political community?
If you are interested in these or related topics, we would love to hear from you! If you have any questions, feel free to contact Audrey Becker at audrey.lynn.becker@nyu.edu.
Call for Expressions of Interest: Brooks Animal Law Student Summit at NYU
The NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy — with support from the Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy, & Land Use Law and the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program at NYU Law — is thrilled to be hosting the fourth annual Brooks Animal Law Student Summit on November 15, 2025. The aim of this event is to bring together students and faculty in animal law and animal studies for a full day of group discussions and open networking, with a vegan breakfast, lunch, and reception for all. This summit will be preceded by a public event hosted by the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program on Friday, November 14, 2025.
We welcome expressions of interest from faculty, students, and other researchers in the humanities, sciences, and law and policy, with special emphasis on law students (JD, LLM, JSD) with a clear interest in animal law. If you have interest in attending this summit, please send the below materials to Audrey Becker at audrey.lynn.becker@nyu.edu. We guarantee full consideration of all submissions received by August 1, 2025. We will also consider submissions received after that date on a rolling basis until all spots at the summit are full.
Please include in your email:
A CV or resume.
A short statement of interest (<250 words) with two elements:
A short description of your background and interest in animal law;
A short description of what you hope to get out of the summit
Thank you to the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy for your generous support of this event.
Call for Expressions of Interest: 2025 Mind, Ethics, and Policy Summit
The NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy is hosting a two-day summit on March 8-9, 2025. Discussion topics will center on the consciousness, sentience, agency, moral status, legal status, and political status of nonhumans, with special focus on invertebrates and AI systems. The aim of this event is to connect researchers and other experts with an interest in these issues across a variety of topics, fields, and career stages.
The summit will include lightning talks, group discussions, breakout sessions, and plenty of open space for talking and relaxing. Both days will also include vegan breakfast and lunch, along with a reception.
We welcome expressions of interest from researchers and other experts. Please note that limited funding for travel and hotel is available for early-career scholars, that is, scholars within five years of their terminal degree.
If you have interest in attending this summit, please send the below materials to Audrey Becker at audrey.lynn.becker@nyu.edu. We will consider submissions on a rolling basis.
Please include in your email:
A CV or resume.
A statement of interest with three elements:
A summary of your current research, your expected future research, and how your research relates to nonhuman minds, ethics, and policy. (500 words max.)
(Optional) If you have ideas for collaborative research projects that you might like to discuss at this summit, please describe them. (250 words max.)
(Optional) If you might like to give a lightning talk about your current or future research, please suggest a topic or set of topics. (250 words max.)
Please note that if you answer these optional questions, your answers can range from general (e.g., “Frameworks for collecting public input about insect welfare”) to specific (e.g., “Organizing a citizens’ assembly to collect public input about insect welfare.”)
Please also note that we might not be able to accommodate all presentation and discussion topics, and that suggesting a presentation or discussion topic does not commit you to giving that presentation or facilitating that discussion at this stage.
Topics that we see as within scope for this summit include but are not limited to:
Which beings matter? What is the evidence regarding sentience, agency, and other morally significant capacities in particular insects, AI systems, or other nonhumans?
How much do particular beings matter? How, if at all, can we make interspecies or intersubstrate welfare and moral weight comparisons?
What benefits or harms particular beings? How does, say, insect farming or reinforcement learning affect the welfare of the relevant nonhumans?
What do we owe particular beings? Which moral, legal, and political frameworks should we use to assess our interactions with particular nonhumans?
What follows for our actions and policies? How, for instance, should we set priorities in a multispecies and multisubstrate moral, legal, and political community?
If you are interested in these or related topics, we would love to hear from you! If you have any questions, feel free to contact Audrey Becker at audrey.lynn.becker@nyu.edu.
Call for Abstracts: Animals and Equality Conference
About the event
A vast literature now exists on the ethical status of non-human animals (for short, “animals”). Much of this scholarship is utilitarian, going back to Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and much earlier, of course, to Bentham. Another substantial portion is rights-based, as in Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983). Relatively less work addresses the status of animals for purposes of broadly egalitarian ethical views. “Broadly egalitarian,” here, includes telic welfare-egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and sufficientism; these views modified to incorporate considerations of desert, responsibility, or opportunity; deontic versions of these views; relational egalitarianism; and accounts of distributive justice framed in terms of resources rather than welfare or desert/responsibility/opportunity-adjusted welfare.
How animals figure in such views is, to be sure, a topic that some scholarship has taken up. Shelly Kagan’s How to Count Animals, more or less (2019) is a prominent recent example. But the question of animals and equality has been less central to the literature on animal ethics than other topics.
This conference, “Animals and Equality,” will focus on the role of animals in broadly egalitarian ethical views. Both philosophical scholarship and scholarship in welfare economics/social choice theory is invited. On a different axis, we invite contributions arguing that animals have full status within a broadly egalitarian view; alternatively, arguing that animals have diminished status or fall outside the scope of such view; and scholarship exploring the details of how to incorporate animals into a broadly egalitarian account. Other work on animals and broad egalitarianism also falls within the scope of the conference (for example, analyzing the questions that animal well-being poses for egalitarianism among humans).
Those interested in presenting at the conference should email an abstract not to exceed 300 words to leanna.doty@law.duke.edu. Please include a current CV. Due date for abstracts: May 1, 2024. Presentations should be based on work-in-progress, rather than already published work. (Working papers available at the conference date will be circulated to participants, but are not required for a presentation.) The conference will be an in-person conference. Zoom presentations are possible, but preference will be given to in-person presentations. The conference sponsors will cover accommodation (up to 3 nights) for those presenting at the conference, and vegan food will be served during the conference. We have limited budget to cover travel by early career scholars (within five years of their degree).
This event is organized by Matthew Adler at the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy. It is co-sponsored by The Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy and the NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy. The program committee consists of Matthew Adler (Duke), Heather Browning (Southampton), and Jeff Sebo (NYU).
