Thomas I. White is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, a Scientific Advisor to the Wild Dolphin Project, and a member of the Advisory Committee, The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy. He served as U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations’ Year of the Dolphin Program in 2007-8. He was one of authors of the “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins,” and a member of panels at the 2010 and 2012 meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that discussed the scientific evidence for the idea that dolphins are ‘nonhuman persons.’ He has also spoken against cetacean captivity at meetings of the American Cetacean Society.
Professor White is the Conrad N. Hilton Professor Emeritus in Business Ethics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. He received his doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University and taught at Upsala College and Rider University in New Jersey before moving to California in 1994. His publications include six books (Right and Wrong, Discovering Philosophy, Business Ethics, Men and Women at Work, In Defense of Dolphins and Socrates Comes to Wall Street) and numerous articles on topics ranging from sixteenth-century Renaissance humanism to business ethics. His most recent project is a utopian novel: Prospero’s Staff. He is currently the Founder and Executive Director of IBECC: The International Business Ethics Case Competition and lives in Amherst, MA.
His primary research continues to be on the philosophical implications–especially the ethical implications–of the scientific research on dolphins. His book on this topic (In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier [Blackwell Publishing, 2007]) addresses the ethical issues connected with human/dolphin interaction—for example, the deaths and injuries of dolphins in connection with the human fishing industry and the captivity of dolphins in the entertainment industry. See elsewhere on this website for links to his more recent writings.
