Tatjana Višak

After completing her PhD, Višak lectured in the Institute for Philosophy at Leiden University for a year, and became temporarily affiliated with the International School of Philosophy in the Netherlands. From 2011 to 2012, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Utrecht University's Ethics Institute, and then, from 2012 to 2013, she worked as a lecturer at the Monash University Centre for Human Bioethics. From 2013 to 2015, she was a research fellow at Saarland University, working with the philosophers Christoph Fehige and Ulla Wessels in Practical Philosophy. In 2013, she took up a research fellowship at the Department of Philosophy and Business Ethics at the University of Mannheim, working with Bernward Gesang. In 2016, The Ethics of Killing Animals, a book coedited by Višak and the political theorist Robert Garner, was published by Oxford University Press. The book contains essays from a variety of philosophers and other academics (including contributions from the editors) on the axiological, moral and political issues surrounding the killing of nonhuman animals, with an afterword by Peter Singer. Reviewing The Ethics of Killing Animals in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, the philosopher Jeff Sebo said he could "highly recommend this book for research as well as teaching", calling it "essential for people working on animal ethics". In 2018, Višak moved from Mannheim to the Department of International Political Theory and Philosophy at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, before moving to the Department of Philosophy and Economics at the University of Bayreuth.

Višak is married with two children, who were born in 2004 and 2006. She is a native speaker of German and a German citizen, and is also fluent in English and Dutch, with conversational French.

Tatjana Višak (born 12 December 1974), often credited as Tatjana Visak, is a German philosopher specialising in ethics and political philosophy who is currently based in the Department of Philosophy and Economics at the University of Bayreuth. She is the author of Killing Happy Animals (2013, Palgrave Macmillan) and the editor, with the political theorist Robert Garner, of The Ethics of Killing Animals (2016, Oxford University Press), an edited collection. She is known for arguing that utilitarians should not accept that nonhuman animals can be replaced by other, equally happy, beings, meaning that utilitarians can oppose the routine killing of animals in agriculture.

Višak was born on 12 December 1974 in Gießen, West Germany. She was educated at the Theo-Koch Schule in Grünberg, and then the Institut Parisien, France, where she studied the French language and Philosophy and Art. She next studied at Leiden University in the Netherlands, graduating in 2000 with a MSc in Political Sciences (having focussed on political philosophy). She went on to work as a junior researcher/lecturer in the Ethics Institute at Utrecht University (spending some time as a researcher in the Ethics Department of the Erasmus Medical Center at Erasmus University) from 2000 to 2010. She read for a doctorate at Utrecht University, where she was supervised by Marcus Duwell and Marcellinus Verweij. Her PhD thesis was entitled Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics, and was submitted in 2011. This formed the basis of her 2013 monograph Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics, published with Palgrave Macmillan as part of The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, edited by the theologian Andrew Linzey and the philosopher Priscilla Cohn and published in conjunction with the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. The philosopher and animal studies scholar Anna Peterson, reviewing the book for the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, characterised Killing Happy Animals as "carefully argued, well-organized, and clearly written", but somewhat repetitive. Though she considered it worth reading, she felt that the book's scope was limited by Višak's focus on utilitarianism.