Catia Faria

Education Faria earned a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Porto, an M.A. in cognitive sciences from the University of Barcelona, and a PhD in moral philosophy from Pompeu Fabra University. Her doctoral thesis, Animal Ethics Goes Wild: The Problem of Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature, defended human assistance to non-human animals in the wild as a response to wild animal suffering. It was examined by Genoveva Martí, Alasdair Cochrane, and Jeff McMahan, and supervised by Paula Casal, Oscar Horta, and Joao Cardoso Rosas.

Career Faria is assistant professor in applied ethics at the Complutense University of Madrid. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher for the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology at the University of Minho, a lecturer in ethics and sustainability at Pompeu Fabra University, and a visiting researcher at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.

In 2015, Faria and Eze Paez co-edited a double volume of the journal Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism on wild animal suffering and intervention in nature. She has written for the University of Oxford's Practical Ethics blog; Nietzsche's Horse, the animal issues blog of the Spanish online newspaper elDiario.es; and Pikara Magazine. In 2020, Faria and Oscar Horta co-authored a chapter on welfare biology in The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics. Her first book, Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature, was published in 2022. She argues that rejection of speciesism requires moral consideration for the interests and well-being of sentient non-human animals in the wild, and supports efforts to reduce harms that they experience from natural causes. She has also argued that a feminist approach to antispeciesism entails a commitment to veganism.

Faria has criticised ecofeminism for treating patriarchal culture as the main source of harm to non-human animals in the wild and conservation as the main way to help them. She argues that this view depends on an inaccurate account of nature as beneficial for non-human animals, and that suffering is common among such animals. She rejects forms of intervention in nature such as hunting, but argues that non-intervention does not follow from that rejection and that humans should work to help non-human animals in the wild.

Selected publications