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298Climate, Collective Action and Individual Ethical ObligationsEnvironmental Values 19 (4). 2010.Both Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Baylor Johnson hold that under current circumstances, individuals lack obligations to reduce their personal contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Johnson argues that climate change has the structure of a tragedy of the commons, and that there is no unilateral obligation to reduce emissions in a commons. Against Johnson, I articulate two rationales for an individual obligation to reduce one's greenhouse gas emissions. I first discuss moral integrity, which r…Read more
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178Empathy, Shared Intentionality, and Motivation by Moral ReasonsEthical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (3). 2012.Internalists about reasons generally insist that if a putative reason, R, is to count as a genuine normative reason for a particular agent to do something, then R must make a rational connection to some desire or interest of the agent in question. If internalism is true, but moral reasons purport to apply to agents independently of the particular desires, interests, and commitments they have, then we may be forced to conclude that moral reasons are incoherent. Richard Joyce (2001) develops an ar…Read more
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118Climate Change and Individual Responsibility: A Reply to JohnsonEnvironmental Values 20 (2). 2011.Can unilateral action be an effective response to global climate change? Baylor Johnson worries that a focus on unilateral action by individuals will detract from efforts to secure collective agreements to address the problem. Although Johnson and I agree that individuals have some obligation to reduce their personal emissions, we differ in the degree to which we see personal reductions as effective in spurring broader change. I argue that 'unilateral reductions' can have communicative value and…Read more
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88Doing, Allowing, and PrecautionEnvironmental Ethics 29 (4): 339-358. 2007.Many environmental policies seem to rest on an implicit distinction between doing and allowing. For example, it is generally thought worse to drive a speciesto extinction than to fail to save a species that is declining through no fault of our own, and worse to pollute the air with chemicals that trigger asthma attacks thanto fail to remove naturally occurring allergens such as pollen and mold. The distinction between doing and allowing seems to underlie certain versions of the precautionary pri…Read more
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63Restoration and History in a Changing World: A Case Study in Ethics for the AnthropoceneEthics and the Environment 18 (2): 115-134. 2013.The widely-heralded arrival of the “Anthropocene” era seems to call the existence and value of the natural world into question. Is the world prior to human alteration of it something worth preserving? Can and should we attempt to restore ecological conditions prior to human disturbance? Ecological restoration has traditionally used the past as a reference point in establishing standards and assessing the value of restored landscapes. In many landscapes, however, the traditional notion of histori…Read more
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61Climate Change, Climate Engineering, and the ‘Global Poor’: What Does Justice Require?Ethics, Policy and Environment 21 (3): 270-288. 2018.ABSTRACTIn recent work, Joshua Horton and David Keith argue on distributive and consequentialist grounds that research into solar radiation management geoengineering is justified because the resulting knowledge has the potential to benefit everyone, particularly the ‘global poor.’ I argue that this view overlooks procedural and recognitional justice, and thus relegates to the background questions of how SRM research should be governed. In response to Horton and Keith, I argue for a multidimensio…Read more
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59Geoengineering Justice: The Role of RecognitionScience, Technology, and Human Values 44 (3): 448-477. 2019.Global-scale solar geoengineering raises critical ethical questions, including questions of distributive, procedural, and intergenerational justice. Although geoengineering is sometimes framed as a response to injustice, insofar as it might benefit those most vulnerable to climate-related harms, geoengineering also has the potential to exacerbate climate injustice, especially if control of research, governance, and potential plans for deployment remains concentrated in the hands of a few. The sc…Read more
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53Ecological Restoration in Context: Ethics and the Naturalization of Former Military LandsEthics, Policy and Environment 14 (1): 69-89. 2011.The philosophy of ecological restoration has focused primarily on three issues: the question of what to restore, whether and why restoration “fakes” nature, and how restoration shapes human-nature relationships. Using “M2W conversion sites” – former military lands recently redesignated as U.S. national wildlife refuges – as a case study, we examine how the restoration of these lands challenges existing philosophical frameworks for restoration. We argue that a contextual, case-based analysis best…Read more
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52Theories as tools: a pluralistic approach to ecological modelingStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (3): 594-601. 2005.
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47Restoration and Authenticity RevisitedEnvironmental Ethics 35 (1): 79-93. 2013.One of the central worries raised in relation to ecological restoration concerns the problem of authenticity. Robert Elliot, for example, has argued that restoration “fakes nature.” On this view, restoration is like art forgery: it deceptively suggests that its product was produced in a certain way, when in fact, it was not. Restored landscapes present themselves as the product of “natural processes,” when in actuality, they have been significantly shaped by human intervention. For Elliott, ther…Read more
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44Environmental Ethics: The State of the QuestionSouthern Journal of Philosophy 59 (3): 270-308. 2021.The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 59, Issue 3, Page 270-308, September 2021.
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41Engagement, withdrawal, and social reform: Confucian and contemporary perspectivesPhilosophy East and West 60 (3): 369-390. 2010.Confucius lived in a society he found morally wanting. The rituals were distorted, the government was corrupt, and the rulers lacked a Heavenly mandate. Our limited historical knowledge makes it difficult today to imagine Confucius' situation in all its rich context and detail; however, we may be able to imagine something like it, at least something like it in certain ways. We can probably imagine living in a state led by officials of questionable integrity, and many of us may feel that we in fa…Read more
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39Intergenerational Ethics, Moral Ambivalence, and Climate ChangeThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 29 69-88. 2022.Global climate change raises critical issues of intergenerational ethics. One of these issues involves what Stephen Gardiner calls intergenerational buck-passing (IGBP)—a pattern through which each generation does little to address climate change and instead passes the problem along to the next, progressively amplifying the climate crisis over time. My goal in this paper to explore two key questions: (1) What is at the root of intergenerational buck-passing? and (2) What changes might help to …Read more
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37Intergenerational Ethics, Climate Change, and Moral AmbivalenceThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 29 69-88. 2022.Global climate change raises critical issues of intergenerational ethics. One of these issues involves what Stephen Gardiner calls intergenerational buck-passing (IGBP)—a pattern through which each generation does little to address climate change and instead passes the problem along to the next, progressively amplifying the climate crisis over time. My goal in this paper to explore two key questions: (1) What is at the root of intergenerational buck-passing? and (2) What changes might help to …Read more
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31Addressing the Harms of Climate Change: Making Sense of Loss and DamageEthics, 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...
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30Tradition and morality in the analects: A reply to HansenJournal of Chinese Philosophy 31 (4). 2004.
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27Reclaiming the Mundane: Comments on Albert Borgmann’s Real American EthicsJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 21 (1): 65-73. 2008.Like much of his work, Albert Borgmann’s Real American Ethics defies easy categorization. Neither analytic nor Continental in style, it bridges these traditions while remaining firmly connected to the issues and concerns facing real people in contemporary life. In particular, the book is of deep relevance to the development of an ethics that attends to the material conditions of human existence. In its attention to the physical, social, and technological dimensions of moral life, the book emphas…Read more
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27Stephen Skrimshire, ed., Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination (review)Environmental Ethics 34 (3): 317-320. 2012.
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26Adapting Environmental Ethics to Rapid, Anthropogenic, and Global Ecological ChangeEnvironmental Ethics 42 (2): 99-101. 2020.
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25Ethics, Adaptation, and the AnthropoceneEthics, Policy and Environment 24 (1): 60-74. 2021.Some proponents of the Anthropocene argue that it is time adopt a future-oriented outlook: natural baselines no longer matter, and humans should remake the planet for the better. This raises questions about whose vision should guide such remaking, and whether the past deserves any consideration in adapting for the future. I argue that the past remains relevant, because the natural, cultural, and social worlds people enter into – shaped by those who came before us – matter. On this view, there ar…Read more
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22Varieties of Non-Anthropocentricism: Duty, Beauty, Knowledge and RealityEnvironmental Values 27 (2): 113-118. 2018.
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21Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management (edited book)Lexington Books. 2012.Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management is a wide-ranging and expert analysis of the ethics of the intentional management of solar radiation. This book will be a useful tool for policy-makers, a provocation for ethicists, and an eye-opening analysis for both the scientist and the general reader with interest in climate change
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21Practical wisdom in environmental educationEthics, Place and Environment 8 (3). 2005.To create an ecologically literate, motivated, and engaged citizenry, environmental education must help students develop practical wisdom. We discuss three elements of teaching central to this task: first, greater emphasis on contextualized knowledge, grounded in particular places and cases; second, multi-modal learning that engages students as whole persons both cognitively and affectively; and third, stronger connections between knowing and doing, or between knowledge and responsibility. We il…Read more
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20Revising Responsibility in a Proposal for Greenhouse Development RightsEthics, Place and Environment 12 (3): 291-295. 2009.The Greenhouse Development Rights developed by Paul Baer, Sivan Kartha, Tom Athanasiou, and Eric Kemp-Benedict are grounded in two fundamental ethical considerations: caus...
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191. Hiding the World in the World: A Case for Cosmopolitanism Based in the ZhuangziIn Peter D. Hershock & Roger T. Ames (eds.), Philosophies of Place: An Intercultural Conversation, University of Hawaii Press. pp. 15-33. 2019.
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19Gillian Barker. Beyond Biofatalism: Human Nature for An Evolving World (review)Environmental Philosophy 14 (1): 143-146. 2017.
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19Beyond the Anthropocene: Perspectives on Human-Nature Relations, Old and NewEnvironmental Values 26 (3): 263-267. 2017.
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16Ian James Kidd and Liz McKinnell (eds.), Science and the Self: Animals, Evolution, and Ethics: Essays in Honour of Mary MidgleyEnvironmental Values 26 (1): 114-116. 2017.
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15Restoring Layered Landscapes: History, Ecology, and Culture (edited book)Oup Usa. 2015.Restoring Layered Landscapes explores ecological restoration in complex landscapes, where ecosystems intertwine with important sociopolitical meanings.
Areas of Specialization
Environmental Ethics |
Philosophy of Biology |
Classical Chinese Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |
Philosophy of Biology |
Environmental Ethics |
Classical Chinese Philosophy |