Ryan Darr

Ryan Darr is Assistant Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Environment. His research interests include environmental ethics, multispecies justice, structural injustice, ethical theory, and the history of religious and philosophical ethics. He is currently writing a book that defends an account of environmental and multispecies justice as a framework for thinking ethically about the crisis of biodiversity loss and mass extinction. He is also developing an ongoing research project exploring the relationship between individual agency and responsibility and structural justice and injustice with a particular focus on environmental and climate issues.

His first book, The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023. The book offers a new, robustly theological story of the origin of consequentialism, one of the most influential views in modern moral theory. It uses the new historical account to intervene in contemporary ethical debates about consequentialism and about how ethicists conceive of goods, ends, agency, and causality.

Prior to joining the YDS faculty, Ryan held postdoctoral fellowships at the Princeton University Center for Human Values (2019-22) and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music (2022-24).