[PHILOS-L] Call for Papers – The Journal of Ethics. AI, Animals, and the Future: Aligning AI Trajectories with Nonhuman Welfare
Catia Faria
Special Issue of the Journal of Ethics: AI, Animals, and the Future: Aligning AI Trajectories with Nonhuman Welfare.
The ethical implications of AI have received increasing attention in recent years, yet a crucial blind spot remains: the impact of AI on nonhuman animals. As AI systems rapidly transform sectors that directly and indirectly affect animals—such as factory farming, animal experimentation, wildlife monitoring, companion-animal technologies, and algorithmic content recommendation—nonhuman interests remain largely absent from mainstream discussions in AI ethics. This omission is especially troubling given the broad scientific and philosophical consensus on animals’ sentience and moral significance.
This Special Issue aims to address this gap. We seek contributions that examine how AI currently affects—and may come to affect—nonhuman animals, assess the risks and opportunities arising from AI-mediated environments, and develop frameworks for ensuring that technological progress is guided by inclusive moral foresight.
We welcome submissions on topics including, but not limited to:
- AI ethics and nonhuman animals: nonhuman moral status in contemporary AI ethics and alignment discussions; criteria for moral considerability and their implications for integrating animal interests into AI design, deployment, and governance; forms of epistemic and representational injustice in data practices and modelling; the influence of cognitive biases on normative and regulatory frameworks shaping human–animal relations.
- The impact of AI on animals: negative impacts (e.g. AI-driven exploitation, surveillance, and precision farming) and positive developments (e.g. non-animal testing methods, welfare assessment in wild and captive populations, mitigation of large-scale wild animal suffering, transitions toward plant-based and cultivated food systems).
- Future-oriented perspectives: longtermism, intergenerational justice, and space-governance ethics as they relate to nonhuman welfare; the implications of transformative AI/AGI; non-anthropocentric benchmarks in AI alignment, safety, and policy; the ethics of expanding human, nonhuman, and AI activity beyond Earth.
We are especially interested in proposals that (i) challenge dominant anthropocentric and future-oriented frameworks from the standpoint of animal welfare; (ii) map and evaluate AI-enabled interventions that are both epistemically credible and ethically robust; and (iii) combine normative theory, AI design, and policy considerations to advance sentient-aligned AI.
Instructions and timeline
Those interested should email an abstract of up to 500 words to the co-editors at catia...@gmail.com and tsey...@gmail.com by 22 December 2025. If the abstract is accepted, the deadline for submission of the full paper will be 22 March 2026. Full papers must be submitted through the normal JOET channel. All papers will be independently peer-reviewed, so acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee acceptance of the final paper in the Special Issue.
Co-editors:
Catia Faria (University of Madrid)
Yip Fai Tse (National University of Singapore)
For the full Call for Papers, please visit: https://link.springer.com/collections/ddhiddbieg
Catia Faria (they/them)
Assistant professor
Philosophy & Society | Complutense University of Madrid | ucm.es/filosoc
Board Member
UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics | upf.edu/cae
Author, Animal Ethics in the Wild. Cambridge University Press (2023).
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