Trained as a philosopher and economist, I am a sustainability scholar whose interdisciplinary research focuses on the relation between sustainability and human well-being. In general, I approach this topic as a philosophically informed social scientist. My research consists of an independent project on sustainability and well-being and several collaborative projects on cognate topics, such as health & well-being, energy & well-being, food & well-being, environmental philosophy, and the nature of interdisciplinary science during the Anthropocene. My collaborators - at ASU and beyond - come from a wide range of disciplines, including ecology, engineering, mathematics, environmental history, history and philosophy of science, and environmental philosophy.
Currently, I am writing a monograph entitled, Sustainability without Sacrifice: A Philosophical Analysis of Human Well-Being and Consumption. The received view among philosophers and economists is to construe sustainability as a problem of justice or ethics. In both cases, a commitment to sustainability entails that some people must make a sacrifice by reducing their welfare-enhancing consumption. My book casts sustainability as a problem of prudence, which is a person’s concern for his or her own well-being. With the help of empirical evidence from positive psychology and happiness economics, my book will show that there is no necessary and positive connection between consumption and well-being. And, because sustainability requires a reduction in consumption, and some reductions in consumption have no adverse welfare effects, significant advances towards sustainability can be achieved without sacrifice. The major claim of my book is that, when properly understood, prudence in the sphere of consumption is far more consistent with sustainability than is ordinarily recognized.
In 2019, we published a book entitled, Canadian Environmental Philosophy. This project began when a group of us founded the Canadian Society for Environmental Philosophy in October, 2015. Canadian Environmental Philosophy is the first collection of essays to take up theoretical and practical issues in environmental philosophy today, from a Canadian perspective. The essays cover various subjects, including ecological nationalism, the legacy of Grey Owl, the meaning of “outside” to Canadians, the paradigm shift from mechanism to ecology in our understanding of nature, the meaning and significance of the Anthropocene, the challenges of biodiversity protection in Canada, the conservation status of crossbred species in the age of climate change, and the moral status of ecosystems. This wide range of topics is as diverse and challenging as the Canadian landscape itself. Given the extent of humanity's current impact on the biosphere - especially evident with anthropogenic climate change and the ongoing mass extinction - it has never been more urgent for us to confront these environmental challenges as Canadian citizens and citizens of the world. Canadian Environmental Philosophy galvanizes this conversation from the perspective of this place.
Another exciting project that I am working on these days is with my co-author, Paul Bartha (UBC). We are using non-standard decision theory to develop a new lexical model of the Precautionary Principle. This work builds-off our previous article published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, which showed that a relative (rather than absolute) concept of infinite value can be meaningfully defined, and provides a good model for securing the priority of conserving the natural environment while avoiding the failures noted by skeptics of infinite value. Our main claim in this article is not that our relative infinity utility model gets every detail correct, but that it provides a new and rigorous philosophical framework for thinking about decisions affecting the environment.
Currently, I am writing a monograph entitled, Sustainability without Sacrifice: A Philosophical Analysis of Human Well-Being and Consumption. The received view among philosophers and economists is to construe sustainability as a problem of justice or ethics. In both cases, a commitment to sustainability entails that some people must make a sacrifice by reducing their welfare-enhancing consumption. My book casts sustainability as a problem of prudence, which is a person’s concern for his or her own well-being. With the help of empirical evidence from positive psychology and happiness economics, my book will show that there is no necessary and positive connection between consumption and well-being. And, because sustainability requires a reduction in consumption, and some reductions in consumption have no adverse welfare effects, significant advances towards sustainability can be achieved without sacrifice. The major claim of my book is that, when properly understood, prudence in the sphere of consumption is far more consistent with sustainability than is ordinarily recognized.
In 2019, we published a book entitled, Canadian Environmental Philosophy. This project began when a group of us founded the Canadian Society for Environmental Philosophy in October, 2015. Canadian Environmental Philosophy is the first collection of essays to take up theoretical and practical issues in environmental philosophy today, from a Canadian perspective. The essays cover various subjects, including ecological nationalism, the legacy of Grey Owl, the meaning of “outside” to Canadians, the paradigm shift from mechanism to ecology in our understanding of nature, the meaning and significance of the Anthropocene, the challenges of biodiversity protection in Canada, the conservation status of crossbred species in the age of climate change, and the moral status of ecosystems. This wide range of topics is as diverse and challenging as the Canadian landscape itself. Given the extent of humanity's current impact on the biosphere - especially evident with anthropogenic climate change and the ongoing mass extinction - it has never been more urgent for us to confront these environmental challenges as Canadian citizens and citizens of the world. Canadian Environmental Philosophy galvanizes this conversation from the perspective of this place.
Another exciting project that I am working on these days is with my co-author, Paul Bartha (UBC). We are using non-standard decision theory to develop a new lexical model of the Precautionary Principle. This work builds-off our previous article published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, which showed that a relative (rather than absolute) concept of infinite value can be meaningfully defined, and provides a good model for securing the priority of conserving the natural environment while avoiding the failures noted by skeptics of infinite value. Our main claim in this article is not that our relative infinity utility model gets every detail correct, but that it provides a new and rigorous philosophical framework for thinking about decisions affecting the environment.