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Person-Post: Thomas I. White, PhD – Fellow

9th July 2008

is the Conrad N. Hilton Professor in Business Ethics and Director of the Centre for Ethics and Business at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. Professor White received his doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University and taught at Upsala College (1976-89) and Rider University (1989-94) in New Jersey before moving to California in 1994. His publications include five books: Right and Wrong (Prentice Hall, 1988), Discovering Philosophy (Prentice Hall, 1991), Business Ethics (Macmillan, 1993), Men and Women at Work (Career Press, 1994), and In Defense of Dolphins (Blackwell 2007), and numerous articles on topics ranging from sixteenth-century Renaissance humanism to business ethics. For the first twenty years of his career, Professor White specialised in the moral, social and political thought of Sir Thomas More. Since then, he has concentrated on contemporary applied ethics. His most recent research has focused 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) addresses the ethical issues connected with human/dolphin interaction – in particular, the deaths and injuries of dolphins in connection with the human fishing industry and the captivity of dolphins in the entertainment industry. The book argues that dolphins should be considered nonhuman persons and that the current state of dolphin/human interaction is ethically indefensible. He is currently studying the parallels between defences of slavery two hundred years ago and contemporary defences of the deaths, injuries and captivity of dolphins at the hands of humans. Professor White is a Scientific Adviser to the Wild Dolphin Project, a research organisation studying a community of Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas. He is also an Ambassador of the United Nations’ Year of the Dolphin programme. He was the 2007 Verizon Visiting Professor of Business, Ethics and Information Technology at the Centre for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts.