Travis Rieder is a bioethicist and moral philosopher at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, where he directs the Master of Bioethics degree program. His public work falls into two areas: the ethics of pain, opioids, and addiction (the subject of his first book, In Pain), and what he calls catastrophe ethics, or how to live a decent life amid problems too large for any individual to solve. His 2024 book Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices argues that individuals have no strict duty to act perfectly in the face of climate change but still have good moral reasons to act.