Founding Member
Leonie N. Bossert
Ethicist and Political Philosopher
Leonie N. Bossert is an ethicist and political philosopher working on the intersection of animal, environmental, and technology ethics and philosophy, with a focus on theories of interspecies justice, AI’s
impact on nonhuman animals, and the normativity of non-anthropocentric technology development and deployment. She works as a post-doctoral university assistant at the Philosophy Institute at the University of Vienna, and she is a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at University of Bielefeld, the Young
Academy of the Heidelberger Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and an associate member of the Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics Prague. Detailed information, including a complete list of publications, can be found on Leonie’s website. (Photo Copyright: Lena Schlegel).
Projects
Select Publications
Bossert, L.N., and Palmer, C. 2026. Geoengineering and animal ethics: The case of stratospheric aerosol injection. Ethics, Policy & Environment. https://doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2026.2643139
Rizk, A., Jones, E., Saab, A., Strobeyko, A., Soininen, N., Burci, G.L., Höll, D., Bossert, L.N., Larose, C., Brown, K., Keck, F., Lorimer, J., and Haraoui, L.-P. 2026. Microbial rights for a planetary age. Earth System Governance, 28:100331. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2026.10033
Ryan, M., and Bossert, L.N. 2026. Facing the pain: Ethical considerations of AI-based pain detection of farmed animals. AI Ethics 6:110. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-025-00905-3
Bossert, L.N. 2025. Opium for the Earth at the expense of nonhuman animals? Geoengineering and interspecies justice. Climatic Change, 178-186.
Bossert, L.N. 2025. Künstliche Intelligenz in der Veterinärmedizin – Ethische Risiken und Nebenwirkungen. TierETHIK, 1(30): 216-231. https://doi.org/10.58848/tierethik.2025.1.216
Bossert, L.N., and Wulf, L. 2025. Why the carbon footprint of generative large language models alone will not help us assess their sustainability. Nature Machine Intelligence, 7: 164-165 (Comment).
Bossert, L.N. and Höll, D. 2025. On the values of microbes: An ethical investigation of relational values associated with the microbial world, People and Nature, 1-11.
Blatter, C. E., Bossert, L.N. 2024: Das Kontinuum tierlicher Arbeit und dessen Bedeutung für gerechte Interspezies-Gesellschaften. In: Tierstudien 26, 21-30.
Bossert, L. N. and Potthast, T. 2024. Genetic engineering, nature conservation, and animal ethics: Why genetically modifying wild sentient animals is not a good option. Environmental Ethics, online first.
Bossert, L.N.; Coeckelbergh, M. 2024. From MilkingBots to RoboDolphins: How AI changes human-animal relations and enables alienation towards animals. Nature – Humanities and Social Science Communications 11, 920: 1-7.
Bossert, L.N. 2024. Interspecies Justice within a normative Sustainable Development framework – Animal-friendly energy systems as a test case. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 37: 14.