By bringing together questions concerning the environment, democracy, and ethical values, your research addresses with extraordinary timeliness some of the greatest challenges for humanity today. What led you on this path? Can you recall a circumstance that triggered you to study these topics?
My earliest memories of politics were seeing events surrounding the first Gulf War, and then the LA rebellion a year later, on television, and being horrified. Like some others in my generation I’m probably an environmentalist in part because of the animated film FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992). By the time I was a teenager I saw myself as a committed leftist and environmentalist, and I marched against the second Iraq War in high school. I was fortunate to be able to study environmental issues, including climate change, as an undergraduate taking an interdisciplinary course with Gus Speth. His lectures, along with his combination of scholarship and political engagement, captivated me.
Assisting my dissertation advisor Sahotra Sarkar’s course in environmental philosophy, as well as working in his conservation biology laboratory, solidified my interests in the field in graduate school. The conceptualization of problems like climate change and biodiversity loss involves weaving science, ethics, and politics, which seemed at the time like something a philosopher with some interdisciplinary training could do well, so I tried to do this in my dissertation on philosophy of conservation biology. My interest in environmental health justice issues came a bit later, in collaborating on teaching with the environmental health researcher Michael Weitzman and teaching courses on environmental health and justice at NYU.
I see my work as attempting to engage both philosophical discussions and issues of public concern by analyzing values in environmental sciences that bear on policy. I try to aim at clarity without sacrificing complexity, synthesizing insights across disciplines along with ethical and political commitments.
How do you see the relationship between ethical values and scientific practice today?
The traditional “value-free ideal” of science has become increasingly untenable. On the one hand, many empirical studies from science studies scholars have demonstrated how social values and other so-called “external factors” have in fact deeply affected the construction and development of scientific knowledge. On the other hand, philosophers like Helen Longino and Heather Douglas argue that, as an ethical matter, we ought to take values as central to scientific practice.
The simplest way in which the value-free ideal is untenable at a normative level is in the area of research with human or more-than-human participants. But beyond restricting what we can permissibly do to people (or rats, or monkeys, etc.) in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, I would argue that ethical values ought to be recognized as central throughout the research process, from problem selection, concept formation, and operationalization/measurement, to the interpretation of data, statistical analysis, and the communication of results. At the very least, as Douglas and others argue, many of these methodological and interpretive decisions have ethically important downstream consequences, most obviously in fields like economics, biomedicine, and public health, or conservation biology.