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30Inequality, climate impacts on the future poor, and carbon pricesPnas 112 (52). 2015.Integrated assessment models of climate and the economy provide estimates of the social cost of carbon and inform climate policy. We create a variant of the Regional Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (RICE)—a regionally disaggregated version of the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (DICE)—in which we introduce a more fine-grained representation of economic inequalities within the model’s regions. This allows us to model the common observation that climate change impac…Read more
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21The comparative importance for optimal climate policy of discounting, inequalities and catastrophesClimatic Change 145. 2017.Integrated assessment models (IAMs) of climate and the economy provide estimates of the social cost of carbon and inform climate policy. With the Nested Inequalities Climate Economy model (NICE) (Dennig et al. PNAS 112:15,827–15,832, 2015), which is based on Nordhaus’s Regional Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy (RICE), but also includes inequalities within regions, we investigate the comparative importance of several factors—namely, time preference, inequality aversion, intraregional i…Read more
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51Food, the Environment, and Global JusticeIn Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 67-94. 2017.This chapter identifies and critically examines a standard form of argument for organic and vegan alternatives to industrial agriculture. This argument faces important objections to its empirical premises, to its presumption that there is a single food system that minimizes harm and is best for the environment, and to the presumption that the ethically best food system for us to promote is the one that would be best in ideal theory or the one that would be best from the perspective of our own so…Read more
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16Maximizing the Public Health Benefits from Climate ActionEnvironmental Science and Technology 52 (7). 2018.
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19Human Health and the Social Cost of Carbon: a primer and a call to actionEpidemiology 30 (5). 2019.Over the past few decades, we have improved our understanding of the health impacts of climate change.1 Although many public health researchers have contributed to this knowledge, relatively few are aware of how their work may relate to the social cost of carbon. The social cost of carbon is a core economic concept in climate policy and one that can—and should—benefit directly from research produced by the public health community. The concept’s importance was recently highlighted by this past ye…Read more
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69Optimal Climate Policy and the Future of World Economic DevelopmentThe World Bank Economic Review 33. 2019.How much should the present generations sacrifice to reduce emissions today, in order to reduce the future harms of climate change? Within climate economics, debate on this question has been focused on so-called “ethical parameters” of social time preference and inequality aversion. We show that optimal climate policy similarly importantly depends on the future of the developing world. In particular, although global poverty is falling and the economic lives of the poor are improving worldwide, l…Read more
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86The Hidden Zero Problem: Effective Altruism and Barriers to Marginal ImpactIn Hilary Greaves & Theron Pummer (eds.), Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues, Oxford University Press. 2019.In this chapter, Mark Budolfson and Dean Spears analyse the marginal effect of philanthropic donations. The core of their analysis is the observation that marginal good done per dollar donated is a product (in the mathematical sense) of several factors: change in good done per change in activity level of the charity in question, change in activity per change in the charity’s budget size, and change in budget size per change in the individual’s donation to the charity in question. They then discu…Read more
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55Philosophy and Climate Change (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2021.This volume is guided by two thoughts. First, philosophers have much to contribute to the discussion of climate change. Second, reflection on climate change can contribute to our thinking about a range of general topics that are of independent interest to philosophers. This volume will be of interest both to philosophers working on climate change as well as those working in a range of other fields, ranging from public policy to economics to law to empirical disciplines including psychology, the …Read more
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102Self-Defense, Harm to Others, and Reasons for Action in Collective Action ProblemsEthics, Policy and Environment 17 (1): 31-34. 2014.Baatz’s excellent discussion moves the debate forward in two ways that I will focus on here: first, by articulating an attractive view based on the notion of what can reasonably be demanded of individuals, and second, by providing a helpful overview of much of the existing literature. In what follows I suggest three ways Baatz and others might further clarify and build on these contributions in future research.
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85Why the Standard Interpretation of Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic is MistakenEnvironmental Ethics 36 (4): 443-453. 2014.The standard interpretation of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is that correct land management is whatever tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community, of which we humans are merely a small part. From this interpretation, it is a short step to interpreting Leopold as a sort of deep ecologist or radical environmentalist. However, this interpretation is based on a small number of quotations from Leopold taken out of context. Once these quotations are put into context,…Read more
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202Non-cognitivism and rational inferencePhilosophical Studies 153 (2). 2011.Non-cognitivism might seem to offer a plausible account of evaluative judgments, at least on the assumption that there is a satisfactory solution to the Frege-Geach problem. However, Cian Dorr has argued that non-cognitivism remains implausible even assuming that the Frege-Geach problem can be solved, on the grounds that non-cognitivism still has to classify some paradigmatically rational inferences as irrational. Dorr's argument is ingenious and at first glance seems decisive. However, in this …Read more
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392The inefficacy objection to consequentialism and the problem with the expected consequences responsePhilosophical Studies 176 (7): 1711-1724. 2019.Collective action problems lie behind many core issues in ethics and social philosophy—for example, whether an individual is required to vote, whether it is wrong to consume products that are produced in morally objectionable ways, and many others. In these cases, it matters greatly what we together do, but yet a single individual’s ‘non-cooperative’ choice seems to make no difference to the outcome and also seems to involve no violation of anyone’s rights. Here it is argued that—contrary to inf…Read more
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106Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2016.Like the subtitle says, this is an intro to food ethics that also collects writings on food ethics by others. Topics include: animals, consumption, farming, identity, justice, paternalism, religion, and workers.
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187The Social Cost of Carbon: Valuing Inequality, Risk, and Population for Climate PolicyThe Monist 102 (1): 84-109. 2019.We analyze the role of ethical values in the determination of the social cost of carbon, arguing that the familiar debate about discounting is too narrow. Other ethical issues are equally important to computing the social cost of carbon, and we highlight inequality, risk, and population ethics. Although the usual approach, in the economics of cost-benefit analysis for climate policy, is confined to a utilitarian axiology, the methodology of the social cost of carbon is rather flexible and can be…Read more
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112The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2017.The handbook is a partial survey of multiple areas of food ethics: conventional agriculture and alternatives to it; animals; consumption ethics; food justice; food workers; food politics and policy; gender, body image, and healthy eating; and, food, culture and identity. Food ethics, as an academic pursuit, is vast, incorporating work from philosophy as well as anthropology, economics, environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. This Handbook provides a samp…Read more