My work in philosophy of science and environmental ethics identifies and analyses core concepts and values in conservation.

The goal is to increase our understanding of these fields, as well as to inform practice.My environmental ethics work focuses on the often-contending values in conservation. A central question for the field in the 21st century is what kind of manipulations of the “natural” world are acceptable in the name of saving it. From “managing” wilderness until it is no longer wild to genetically altering endangered species, how much human meddling is morally permissible—and how much could be considered obligatory in the face of looming extinctions and the climate crisis?

My published work in this area explores applied ethics problems at the leading edge of scientific discovery and practice. Here, I examine the ethics of cognitive enhancement of animals, de-extinction, and genetic technologies for conservation biology. During my postdoc, I investigated the ethics of cognitive enhancement for humans and animals. Much of the work concerning the ethics of cognitive enhancement has been focused on humans; however, I have published a paper in Environmental Values that argues that we have a moral obligation to cognitively enhance some endangered animals. I have also recently worked on the tension between more traditional conservation biologists, who work to save populations and ecosystems, and compassionate conservationists, who also worry about harming individual animals. With a co-author, I have argued that the intentional eradication of the mosquito Anopheles gambiae using CRISPR gene-drive technology is morally permissible even though it would mean intentionally causing an extinction.

I have also co-written multiple papers with my wife, the environmental writer Emma Marris, on the intersection of genetic technologies and conservation ethics. The first, a target article in Ethics, Policy & Environment, argues that we do not have a duty to keep the American bison’s genome ‘pure’ of cattle genes—a common assumption of conservation biologists with access to genetic information about various herds. We expand the argument to the larger claim that “genetic integrity” is not worth preserving in and of itself. The second, also published in Ethics, Policy & Environment, investigates the moral status of “de-extinction”—revival of long extinct species or, more realistically, the creation of functional proxies. We argue that in this case an anthropocentric justification is the best way to ground the permissibility of the action and we call for empirical research into how the technology could affect our moral character with a focus on moral hazard arguments. We have also written a piece that was published in Restoration Ecology, on whether the field of restoration ecology needs to change its name in an era when return to previous ecological states is declining in prominence (and feasibility) as a restoration goal. By publishing in a journal read by restoration scientists, we hope to bring these questions to the practitioners in the field, with the aim of encouraging them to critically examine the values and goals that inform their work. We are currently working on a paper that questions the value of "ecosystem integrity"--something that conservation biologist and restoration ecologists think is valuable and use to justify conservation interventions. We argue that ecosystems are not the kinds of things that can have integrity. Even if we can make sense of ecosystems having integrity, it is a poor moral guidepost for conservation actions.

My philosophy of science work is concerned with the complex and still disputed concepts of “explanation” and “understanding.” After a period in which it seemed possible to provide universal and definitive definitions for these terms, philosophy of science is currently busy distinguishing between many types of explanations. I have been working on how idealized models, which by their very nature are not true, can provide explanations and lead to understanding. After publishing a paper in Philosophy of Science that argues that there is a kind of idealization that has been overlooked by philosophers of science, my coauthor Collin Rice and I then published a paper in Erkenntnis that argues that some highly idealized models can still be explanations, even though they contain false propositions. I published a paper on the nature of understanding itself in Synthese, which is a building block for this project. With two collaborators, I also have an ongoing project on statistical modeling, which has so far led to a paper in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and a second paper that focuses on Francis Galton’s use of idealized statistical modeling to explain reversion, which is forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. We also have a paper that breathes new life into the debate on explanation by moving away from the project of demarcating certain kinds of explanation (is it causal or statistical or mathematical?) and focusing on the modeling process. We ask what steps are involved and when scientists are justified in using highly idealized models en route to an explanation. Recently Collin Rice and I have published a paper arguing that there may not be any necessary conditions for explanation—put differently, perhaps explanation is a cluster concept.

I have a series of ideas in both of these streams that should carry me forward for many years to come. I am nearly ready to embark on a book-length project in environmental ethics, which will focus on what is and what is not justifiable when trying to save endangered species. It will examine trade-offs between goals like reducing animal suffering, preserving native species in their historical habitats, preventing extinction, conserving biodiversity, and avoiding human intervention in “wild” species and places. After critically assessing conservation goals and explicating how they trade off I will explore how emerging technology can help alleviate some of the tensions between the many goals of conservation.