Beginning in August 2016, I will hold a two-year Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Ethics of Sustainable Development in the Center for Ethics and Human Values at Ohio State University. I will continue the on-campus conversation on the topic begun this year as part of OSU’s COMPAS Program. Thanks to OSU’s Office of Energy and Environment for contributing funding to the Fellowship.
My research focuses on climate change and human rights. Some theorists and even legal claimants have recently argued that climate change violates human rights because it threatens basic interests in life, health and subsistence, especially of the poor. While I am in general agreement, I explore the way the global and intergenerational scope of climate change presents difficulties for theories of human rights and for this sort of argument.
For example, it’s common for individual agents to think they have a moral duty to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, say by driving or flying less, so that they don’t harm or violate the human rights of others. I argue this common response is mistaken because in fact no individual agent’s emissions cause rights-violations. Instead of duties against harm, I argue that such agents have duties to engage in the social and political change needed to reduce aggregate emissions.
I was invited to workshop a paper and present at a public panel “Justice and Climate Change” at Stanford University in April 2015. Watch my public presentation here. I presented at the International Society for Environmental Ethics meetings at the 2016 Central and Pacific APA conferences.
In Fall 2015 I taught an Ethics and Climate Change course. I am currently teaching Introduction to Ethics.
Center for Ethics and Human Values, Department of Philosophy The Ohio State University 350 University Hall, 230 North Oval Mall Columbus, OH 43210-1365, USA