• Colorado State University
    Department of Philosophy
    Professor and Holmes Rolston III Endowed Chair In Environmental Ethics and Philosophy
Washington University in St. Louis
Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program
PhD, 2002
Fort Collins, Colorado, United States of America
  •  32
    It seems intuitive that human development and environmental protection should go hand in hand. But some have worried there is no framework within environmental ethics that suitably conjoins them. I...
  •  338
    Living well wherever you are: Radical hope and the good life in the Anthropocene
    Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (1): 59-75. 2020.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 59-75, Spring 2022.
  •  24
    Sustainable Development Goals, which serve as the primary feature of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and Nationally Determined Contributions, which serve as a vital instrumental of the UNFCCC’s Paris Agreement, have clear synergies. Both are focused, in part, on responding to challenges presented to human well-being. There are good practical reasons to integrate development efforts with a comprehensive response to climate change. However, at least in their current form, these two po…Read more
  •  20
    The Great Decoupling: Why Minimizing Humanity’s Dependence on the Environment May Not Be Cause for Celebration
    Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31 (4): 429-442. 2018.
    Characterizations of the Anthropocene often indicate both the challenges that our new epoch poses for human well-being and a sense of loss that comes from a compromised environment. In this paper I explore a deeper problem underpinning both issues, namely, that decoupling humanity from the world with which we are familiar compromises human flourishing. The environmental conditions characteristic of the Anthropocene do so, I claim, by compromising flourishing on two fronts. First, the comparative…Read more
  •  30
    Addressing the Harms of Climate Change: Making Sense of Loss and Damage
    Ethics, Policy and Environment 20 (2): 125-128. 2017.
    In recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans. Impacts are due to observed climate change, irrespective of its cause...
  •  22
    Quine's ethical dilemma
    Dialectica 52 (4). 1998.
    While Quine clearly states his position regarding the difference between the methodology of ethics and that of science, he is less clear on the nature of ethical language. Variously, he treats ethical sentences as cognitive and noncognitive. If ethical “sentences” are noncognitive, they do not admit of truth or falsity and therefore have no claim to be occasion sentences or observation sentences. And moral theory is thereby clearly demarcated from science. If ethical sentences are cognitive, how…Read more
  •  2
    Social Groups and Special Obligations
    Dissertation, Washington University. 2002.
    Members of some social groups hold other members to have special obligations in virtue of their membership. But is this justified? And if so, how? I argue that there is a deep connection between the structure of certain social groups and some special obligations. The issue, then, is to determine how one might have obligations in virtue of one's membership in a particular group. In this dissertation I argue that groups capable of collective action have, as elements of their structure, interperson…Read more
  •  29
    Sourcing Stability in a Time of Climate Change
    Environmental Values 23 (2): 199-217. 2014.
    Anthropogenic climate change poses a direct and imminent threat to the stability of modern society. Recent reports of the probable consequences of climate change paint a grim picture; they describe a world environmentally much less stable than the world to which we have become accustomed. As we begin to adapt to our changing climate, we will need to identify new sources for the stability necessary for a flourishing society. I suggest that this stability should come from the ideals of the good li…Read more
  •  21
    Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 291-295, October 2011
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  •  12
    Preference Aggregation and Individual Development Rights
    Ethics, Place and Environment 12 (3): 301-304. 2009.
    It is both a moral tragedy and a travesty of social justice that responses to present unacceptable levels of Greenhouse Gases often involve constraining development, and that the burden of t...
  •  28
    Centering Value Pluralism in Environmental Ethics
    Southwest Philosophy Review 21 (1): 93-101. 2005.
  •  18
    The Agent Relativity of Directed Reasons
    Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 10 391-400. 2008.
    Directed reasons are reasons that rely for their normative significance on the authority one individual has with respect to another. Acts such as promising seem to generate such reasons. These reasons seem paradigmatically agent relative: they do not hold for all agents. This paper provides a defense of the claim that theform of agent relativism seemingly required by directed reasons is innocuous, and poses no general problem for a practice dependent account of directed reasons, and, therefore, …Read more
  •  42
    NIMBY claims have certainly been vilified. But, as Feldman and Turner point out, one cannot condemn all NIMBY claims without condemning all appeals to partiality. This suggests that any moral problem with NIMBY claims stems not from their status as NIMBY claims but from an underlying illegitimate appeal to partiality. I suggest that if we are to distinguish illegitimate from legitimate appeals to partiality we should look to what might morally justify the sort of agent-relative reasons that can …Read more
  •  21
    Practice dependent respect
    Journal of Value Inquiry 43 (1): 41-54. 2009.
  •  19
    Thinking Through Collectives
    Social Theory and Practice 30 (1): 127-149. 2004.
  •  26
    Editorial: Adapting to a Perilous Planet
    Environmental Values 23 (2): 125-128. 2014.
  •  27
    On participation and membership in discursive practices
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 36 (1): 67-85. 2006.
    For a view which grounds norms in the practices of a particular group, determining who is in that group will determine the scope of those norms. Such a view requires an account of what it is to be a member of the group subject to that practice. In this article, the author presents the beginnings of such an account, limiting his inquiry to discursive practices; we might characterize such practices as those which require, as a condition of participation, participants both to exchange reasons with …Read more
  •  5
    In December 2014, 196 Parties convened in Lima for the 20th session of the Conference of the Parties. The meeting in Lima was, in many respects, a turning point in the history of climate n...
  •  31
    Thinning the Thicket
    Environmental Ethics 34 (3): 227-246. 2012.
    When Aldo Leopold claimed that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” he made a conceptual connection between descriptive features of the biotic community and a normative judgment. In conjoining descriptive and normative elements within a single concept Leopold seemed to have been invoking what are now referred to as thick evaluative concepts. Two interpretations of thick concepts that have received increasing attention in envir…Read more
  •  12
    In response to what has been called the discursive dilemma, Christian List has argued that the nature of the public agenda facing deliberative bodies indicates the appropriate form of decision procedure or deliberative process. In this paper I consider the particular case of environmental policy where we are faced with pressures not only from deliberators and stakeholders, but also in response to dynamic changes in the environment itself. As a consequence of this dilemma I argue that insofar as …Read more
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    Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 247-250, June 2011
  •  105
    On that peculiar practice of promising
    Philosophical Studies 140 (3). 2008.
    T. M. Scanlon has alleged that the social practice of promising fails to capture the sense in which when I break my promise I have wronged the promisee in particular. I suggest the practice of promising requires the promisee to have a normatively significant status, a status with interpersonal authority with respect to the promisor, and so be at risk of a particular harm made possible by the social practice of promising. This formulation of the social practice account avoids Scanlon’s concern wi…Read more