Before joining King's College London, I worked in Canada as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Research in Ethics and McGill University’s Department of Philosophy (2024-2026). I hold a PhD in philosophy from the University of Warwick (2024), where I worked with Victor Tadros, Kimberley Brownlee, Patrick Tomlin and Steve Cooke. I have a BPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Philosophy, Politics & Economics from Warwick. I am also an Associate Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.

Research interests

• The moral status and rights of humans and animals
• Distributive justice
• Public policy concerning humans and animals

My research concerns the basic value, moral rights, and political claims of humans and animals. It asks: how can we explain the idea that all humans are moral equals? how much do animals matter morally? what is the ethics of killing humans and animals? how should state policy respond to animals? do animals fall within the scope of distributive justice? if so, how would such a theory avoid placing objectionable demands on limited resources? and other questions.

My Leverhulme-funded project, ‘The Imperative of Basic Needs: A New Theory of Interspecies Justice’, seeks to widen the scope of justice in a defensible way and develop a new understanding of distributive justice for humans and animals. It will also develop interdisciplinary theories of rewilding and urban design as they connect to justice. It runs from 2026 until 2029.

Latest publications

Gildea, W. Forthcoming (2027). Animals as Our Equals. Ethics.

Gildea, W. 2026. Review of David Wendler, Life Without Degrees of Moral Status: Implications for Rabbits, Robots and the Rest of Us. Journal of Moral Philosophy.

Gildea, W. 2024. Morality, Modality, and Humans with Deep Cognitive Impairments. The Philosophical Quarterly, 74 (2): 546-568.