Latest news

Dr Rainer Ebert, PhD

22nd June 2012

is a Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Before coming to Dar es Salaam, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He graduated from Rice University in Texas with a PhD in Philosophy in 2016. In his doctoral dissertation, he defends a novel account of the wrongness of killing, according to which it is no less seriously wrong to kill a non-human conscious animal than it is to kill a human being. He further holds Masters degrees in Philosophy (Rice University, 2014) and Physics (Heidelberg University, 2009). When he was an undergraduate student in Heidelberg, he organized Germany’s first interdisciplinary lecture series on animal rights. He edited the papers from the series in a book entitled Tierrechte – Eine interdisziplinäre Herausforderung, published by Harald Fischer Verlag in 2007. Another edited book, Africa and Her Animals – Philosophical and Practical Perspectives, was published by the University of South Africa Press in 2018. It investigates the moral, social, cultural, religious, and legal status of non-human animals in Africa. His other relevant publications include “Innocent Threats and the Moral Problem of Carnivorous Animals”, Journal of Applied Philosophy 29 (2012), 146-159, which addresses the issue of predation and what it may imply morally, and “Mental-Threshold Egalitarianism: How Not to Ground Full Moral Status”, Social Theory and Practice 44 (2018), 75-93, which offers a defence of equality for all conscious animals.