• Climate Change
    In Ezio Di Nucci, Ji-Young Lee & Isaac A. Wagner (eds.), The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Bioethics, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2022.
  •  4
    Climate Change and Population Ethics
    In Pellegrino Gianfranco & Marcello Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Climate Change, Springer Nature. pp. 647-662. 2023.
    Population ethics is the subfield of philosophy that focuses on the moral aspects of how actions affect who exists in a particular population and what quality of life they have. The choices regarding what policies are adopted in response to climate change will affect the identities of those who exist in the future, the size of future populations, and the quality of life that future people will have. This chapter examines the nonidentity problem, various theoretical outlooks on population ethics,…Read more
  •  6
    The Virtues of Sustainability, edited by Jason Kawall
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 20 (3-4): 362-365. 2023.
  •  23
    Dan Shahar’s Why It’s OK to Eat Meat is an accessible and provocative defense of the claim that one can be morally justified in eating meat even when that meat has been produced via factory farming...
  •  86
    This book examines the link between population growth and environmental impact and explores the implications of this connection for the ethics of procreation. In light of climate change, species extinctions, and other looming environmental crises, Trevor Hedberg argues that we have a collective moral duty to halt population growth to prevent environmental harms from escalating. This book assesses a variety of policies that could help us meet this moral duty, confronts the conflict between prote…Read more
  •  16
    This empirically rigorous textbook serves as an introduction to food ethics and an overview of the major issues currently discussed in this emerging subfield of environmental ethics. While the book may be too dense in places for introductory-level undergraduates, it is nonetheless a welcome addition to the scholarship in this area, since textbooks focusing specifically on food ethics remain relatively rare.
  •  299
    Environmental Ethics and Behavioral Change is a unique text that weaves together subject in ethics, moral psychology, and political philosophy to explore the ways in which people can be motivated to behave in more environmentally sustainable ways. In this review, I offer a short synopsis of the book and appraise its usefulness for teaching courses in environmental ethics and related areas.
  •  101
    Many environmental philosophers have argued that there is an obligation for individuals to reduce their individual carbon footprints. However, few of them have addressed whether this obligation would entail a corresponding duty to limit one’s family size. In this paper, I examine several reasons that one might view procreative acts as an exception to a more general duty to reduce one’s individual greenhouse gas emissions. I conclude that none of these reasons are convincing. Thus, if there is an…Read more
  •  106
    Travis Rieder's Toward a Small Family Ethic confronts the effects of population growth and addresses what individual procreative obligations might follow from it. In this review, I summarize the main arguments that Rieder deploys to defend his position that those with large ecological footprints morally ought to follow a small family ethic. I express sympathy with some of his claims and praise the book's accessibility, but its short length inevitably means that some important issues are omitted …Read more
  •  1862
    Environmental ethicists have not reached a consensus about whether or not individuals who contribute to climate change have a moral obligation to reduce their personal greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, I side with those who think that such individuals do have such an obligation by appealing to the concept of integrity. I argue that adopting a political commitment to work toward a collective solution to climate change—a commitment we all ought to share—requires also adopting a personal com…Read more
  •  366
    One Child: Do We Have a Right to Have More? by Sarah Conly (review)
    Philosophy East and West 67 (3): 934-938. 2017.
    Sarah Conly's One Child is a substantive treatment of the extent to which procreative freedom is curtailed by rising global population and the environmental problems to which it contributes. This review provides an overview of the book's content and closes with a few critical remarks. The book is highly recommended for those interested in the intersection between environmental ethics and the ethics of procreation.
  •  66
    Why Do We Value True Beliefs?
    Syndicate Philosophy 1. 2017.
    In my contribution to this symposium on Miriam McCormick's Believing Against the Evidence, I challenge her claim that true beliefs are not valuable for their own sake. I argue that positing that true beliefs have at least some non-instrumental value better explains our attitudes toward the pursuit of truth than her alternative view. McCormick offers a response in the next segment of the symposium.
  •  570
    Unraveling the Asymmetry in Procreative Ethics
    APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Medicine 15 (2): 18-21. 2016.
    The Asymmetry in procreative ethics consists of two claims. The first is that it is morally wrong to bring into existence a child who will have an abjectly miserable life; the second is that it is permissible not to bring into existence a child who will enjoy a very happy life. In this paper, I distinguish between two variations of the Asymmetry. The first is the Abstract Asymmetry, the idealized variation of the Asymmetry that many philosophers have been trying to solve. The second is the Real-…Read more
  •  412
    Environmental Ethics for the Long Term: An Introduction (review)
    Ethics, Policy and Environment 20 (1): 121-124. 2017.
    In this book review, I assess the merits of John Nolt's Environmental Ethics for the Long Term: An Introduction. Although the book is written as a primary text for an environmental ethics course, some of its later chapters are clearly written more for academic philosophers than undergraduate students. As a textbook, Nolt's book is excellent and an ideal choice for those who want to emphasize the long-term impacts of various environmental problems (e.g., climate change, biodiversity loss) in thei…Read more
  •  1149
    Appraising Objections to Practical Apatheism
    with Jordan Huzarevich
    Philosophia 45 (1): 257-276. 2017.
    This paper addresses the plausibility of practical apatheism: an attitude of apathy or indifference about philosophical questions pertaining to God’s existence grounded in the belief that they lack practical significance. Since apatheism is rarely discussed, we begin by clarifying the position and explaining how it differs from some of the other positions one may take with regard to the existence of God. Afterward, we examine six distinct objections to practical apatheism. Each of these objectio…Read more
  •  612
    Epistemic supererogation and its implications
    Synthese 191 (15): 3621-3637. 2014.
    Supererogatory acts, those which are praiseworthy but not obligatory, have become a significant topic in contemporary moral philosophy, primarily because morally supererogatory acts have proven difficult to reconcile with other important aspects of normative ethics. However, despite the similarities between ethics and epistemology, epistemic supererogation has received very little attention. In this paper, I aim to further the discussion of supererogation by arguing for the existence of epistemi…Read more
  •  366
    Animals, Relations, and the Laissez-Faire Intuition
    Environmental Values 25 (4): 427-442. 2016.
    In Animal Ethics in Context, Clare Palmer tries to harmonise two competing approaches to animal ethics. One focuses on the morally relevant capacities that animals possess. The other is the Laissez-Faire Intuition (LFI): the claim that we have duties to assist domesticated animals but should (at least generally) leave wild animals alone. In this paper, I critique the arguments that Palmer offers in favour of the No-Contact LFI - the view that we have (prima facie) duties not to harm wild animals…Read more
  •  13194
    The Ethics of Marketing to Vulnerable Populations
    Journal of Business Ethics 116 (2): 403-413. 2013.
    An orthodox view in marketing ethics is that it is morally impermissible to market goods to specially vulnerable populations in ways that take advantage of their vulnerabilities. In his signature article “Marketing and the Vulnerable,” Brenkert (Bus Ethics Q Ruffin Ser 1:7–20, 1998) provided the first substantive defense of this position, one which has become a well-established view in marketing ethics. In what follows, we throw new light on marketing to the vulnerable by critically evaluating k…Read more
  •  34
    Optimizing Hope: A Response to Nolt
    In Andrew T. Brei (ed.), Ecology, Ethics and Hope, Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 65-82. 2015.
    John Nolt’s “Hope, Self-Transcendence, and Environmental Ethics” is a unique attempt to defend a partial biocentrism – the view that we should regard a significant portion of non-sentient life (as well as sentient life) as having direct moral standing. After defending a general duty to optimize human hope, Nolt argues that this duty requires us to become self-transcendent toward living things in nature. Self-transcendence refers to an intentional state of valuing the good of some object other th…Read more
  •  522
    Evidentialism and the Will to Believe, by Scott Aikin (review)
    Teaching Philosophy 38 (2): 246-250. 2015.
    This paper is a book review of Scott Aikin's (2014) Evidentialism and the Will to Believe. Beyond a brief summary of the text, the review focuses on the book's pedagogical merits. I conclude that the book would be worth adopting for graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses that cover the ethics of belief in detail, though the hardcover edition of the book is rather pricey.