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Casual observation suggests that among scientists researching geoengineering technologies there is a marked difference in attitude between Americans and continental Europeans. The United Sates is the home of the idea of the technofix, so American researchers tend to have more faith in the possibilities for technological intervention to control the global climate. There is a… Read More »European versus US attitudes to geoengineering

Professor Tony Coady is Professorial Fellow in Applied Philosophy and Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at Melbourne University. He is currently visiting the University of Oxford as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Applied Ethics. He is a Catholic.

In the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, the famous Protestant historian Thomas Macaulay wrote admiringly of the Church of Rome and the Papacy commending their ancient lineage and current vitality. He saw no signs of decline and speculated that the Church “may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” 

Today, Macauley’s assessment seems unduly optimistic. Scandals about clerical sexual abuse of children and the associated official evasion of responsibility as well as inflexible attitudes to so many of the values and dilemmas of the contemporary world have combined to undermine to a large extent the confident self-image and apparent cohesion that helped sustain the durability and vigour that enchanted Macaulay. Following a series of alarming revelations about the extent of clerical sex abuse in Ireland and the gross inadequacy of the hierarchy’s responses to it, coupled with the Irish Prime Ministers strong denunciation of the official Church’s record on the matter, the recent BBC program “The Shame of the Catholic Church” (broadcast 2/5/12) added further fuel to the blaze. Although the broadcast was primarily concerned with the abuse and evasion of church authority it also indicated the depth of the wider crisis in the Church.

 Read More »Crisis in the Catholic Church

Philosophy is often impractical. That’s an understatement. It might therefore be surprising to think of a career as a philosopher as a potentially high impact ethical career – the sort of career that enables one to do a huge amount of good in the world. But I don’t think that philosophy’s impracticality is in the nature of the subject-matter. In fact, I think that research within certain areas of philosophy is among some of the most important and practical research that one can do. This shouldn’t be surprising when one considers that philosophy is the only subject that addresses directly the fundamental practical question: what ought I to do?

In this post I’ll focus in on normative ethics, practical ethics, and decision theory. Within these areas, I’m going to give a recipe for choosing research topics, if one wants to maximise the practical importance of one’s work as a philosopher. Here it goes:

Read More »How to be a High Impact Philosopher

I guess I should say, firstly, that I don’t.  Or at least, not directly.  I am a research fellow looking at the ethics and governance issues: the moral and political implications of geoengineering research and eventual deployment, should there be any.  I have a long-standing interest in global justice and climate change.  Climate change raises enough moral and political questions and I never thought any subject could be more complex until I heard about geoengineering.  Information about geoengineering can be found on the Oxford Geoengineering Programme’s new website:  http://www.geoengineering.ox.ac.uk/   Read More »Why I study geoengineering