| Jeff Sebo | |
| Birth Name: | Jeffrey Raymond Sebo |
| Birth Date: | 24 February 1983[1] |
| Education: |
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| Era: | Contemporary philosophy |
| Institutions: | New York University |
| Thesis Title: | The Personal Is Political |
| Thesis Url: | https://jeffsebodotnet.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/the-personal-is-political.pdf |
| Thesis Year: | 2011 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | J. David Velleman |
| Notable Ideas: | Moral circle expansion
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Jeffrey Raymond Sebo (born February 24, 1983) is an American philosopher and animal rights activist. He works at New York University, where he is an associate professor of environmental studies and an affiliated professor of bioethics, medical ethics, philosophy, and law. He is the director of the university's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection; director of the university's Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy; and co-director of the university's Wild Animal Welfare Program.
Sebo specializes in animal ethics, bioethics, and environmental ethics; agency, well-being, and moral status; moral, legal, and political philosophy; and the ethics of activism, advocacy, and philanthropy.
In 2022, he published his first sole-authored book, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves. This was followed by in 2025.
Sebo is the son of Sheryl L. Sebo, an organist, and Eric J. Sebo, a systems special operations manager, of Plano, Texas.
He studied philosophy and sociology at Texas Christian University, graduating summa cum laude with a BA in 2005. During his studies, he founded two animal rights groups in Fort Worth, Texas, one that hosted movie nights and ran leafletting campaigns and another that facilitated care for feral cats.[2]
Sebo completed his PhD at New York University in 2011. His dissertation, The Personal Is Political, was supervised by Derek Parfit, John Richardson, Sharon Street, and J. David Velleman (chair of the committee).[3]
In 2005, Sebo published his first academic article, "A Critique of the Kantian Theory of Indirect Duties to Animals," in Animal Liberation Philosophy & Policy.[4]
After completing his PhD at New York University (NYU), he held a postdoctoral fellowship there in animal and environmental studies until 2014, when he moved to the National Institutes of Health for a one-year postdoctoral position in bioethics. From 2015 to 2017, Sebo worked as a research assistant professor of philosophy at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was the associate director of the Parr Center for Ethics at the university. He returned to NYU in 2017 as a clinical assistant professor in environmental studies, with affiliate roles in bioethics, medical ethics, and philosophy. From 2018, he was the founding director of NYU's MA in animal studies; this was integrated in the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, also founded in 2018, which was directed by Dale Jamieson.[5]
Sebo's first book was 2018's Food, Animals and the Environment: An Ethical Approach, a book devoted to food ethics, co-authored with Christopher Schlottmann.[6] In the same year, Sebo was among those filing an amicus brief in support of granting legal personhood to chimpanzees.[7] Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosopher's Brief was published by Routledge in 2018; Sebo was one of 13 authors, along with Kristin Andrews, Gary L. Comstock, G. K. D. Crozier, Sue Donaldson, Andrew Fenton, Tyler M. John, L. Syd M. Johnson, Robert C. Jones, Will Kymlicka, Letitia Meynell, Nathan Nobis, and David Pena-Guzman.[8]
Sebo was promoted to clinical associate professor in 2020. His first sole-authored book, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.[9] [10] NYU launched its Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program (directed by Sebo)[11] and its Wild Animal Welfare Program (co-directed by Sebo and Becca Franks) in the same year.[12] The following year, he became an associate professor and the deputy director of the Centre for Environmental and Animal Protection. The Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy, of which Sebo was the founding director, was launched in 2024, funded by endowments from The Navigation Fund and Macroscopic Ventures.[13] Sebo became the director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection in 2024, Jamieson having retired from the NYU faculty in 2022, with Franks taking over as director of the animal studies MA programme.[5]
In 2024, Sebo, along with Jonathan Birch and Kristin Andrews, launched the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness.[14] In the same year, Sebo was included in Vox's "Future Perfect 50", a list of people working on solutions to present and future problems.[15]
His second sole-authored book, , was published in 2025 by W. W. Norton,[16] and appeared on The New Yorker year-end best books list.[17] In the same year, Sebo became the principle investigator of NYU's new Wildlife Inclusive Local Development (WILD) Lab.[18]
As of 2025, Sebo is an associate professor of environmental studies and an affiliated professor of bioethics, medical ethics, philosophy, and law. He is the director of the university's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection; director of the university's Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy; and co-director of the university's Wild Animal Welfare Program.[19]
Sebo has been a board member of Minding Animals International since 2014, a mentor and contributing writer at Sentient Media from 2020, and a senior research affiliate at the Legal Priorities Project since 2021. He was an executive committee member of the Animals & Society Institute from 2012 to 2020, board member of Animal Charity Evaluators from 2015 to 2021, and an advisory member of the Sentience Institute from 2018 to 2020.
In 2014, Sebo married Maryse Mitchell-Brody, a psychotherapist, in a ceremony officiated by a Universal Life minister.[20] The couple lived together in Brooklyn, New York, with their dog Smoky until their separation and divorce in 2022.[21] [22]
