David is a moral philosopher specializing in bioethics and animal ethics. He is Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University, where he has taught since 1989, and the author or editor of several books on ethics, including Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status, Human Identity and Bioethics, and Creation Ethics: Reproduction, Genetics, and Quality of Life.
He seems to have a naturalistic, sentiocentric worldview. He has written extensively on taking a sentiocentric approach to animal ethics and extends the same approach to potentially sentient artificial intelligences. He has written: “So do ethicists have a greater obligation than other people to maintain ethical diets? No, they have the same obligation as everyone else. But unlike a lot of people, ethicists have no excuses for failing to understand dietary ethics and living accordingly.”