 | This biographical article is written like a résumé .(August 2022) |
Kathleen Dean Moore (born 1947, Berea, Ohio) is a philosopher, writer, and environmental activist from Oregon State University. Her early creative nonfiction writing focused on the cultural and spiritual values of the natural world, especially shorelines and islands. Her more recent work is about the moral issues of climate change.
Moore was raised in Berea, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. In 1969, she graduated with a B.A. in philosophy and French from Wooster College in Wooster, Ohio. From the University of Colorado Boulder, she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy and studied in the Fleming School of Law. In 1992, she joined the faculty of the Department of Philosophy at Oregon State University, where she taught philosophy of law, critical thinking, and environmental philosophy. There, she served as department chair, Master Teacher, and Distinguished Professor, developing field courses such as the Philosophy of Nature, which she taught in the lake country of the Pacific Cascades. [1] During that time, Moore co-founded, with poet and philanthropist Franz Dolp, the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, which she directed for 10 years. [2] As director, she co-founded an ancillary program, the Long-Term Ecological Reflections Project at the H.J. Andrews Forest, in the Oregon Cascades. [3] Long interested in interdisciplinary environmental education, Moore designed Oregon State's Master of Arts in Environmental Arts and Humanities. [4] But her growing concern for the perils of global warming led her to leave the university in 2013 to devote all her time to writing and speaking about the moral urgency of climate action.
Moore's first books were academic. Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest began with her dissertation work and continued through a sabbatical leave spent in the Harvard Law Library. From a framework of retributive justice, she asks what justifies the pardoning power, what determines who should be pardoned, and what constitutes an unforgivable crime. [5] She wrote two textbooks, Reasoning and Writing and Patterns of Inductive Reasoning, based on her experience as a teacher of critical thinking. Thereafter, her love of nature writing and the natural world soon led her to the nature essay, and her next four books were collections of essays about the cultural and spiritual meaning of wild places at the edge of water: Riverwalking, [6] Holdfast, Pine Island Paradox, and Wild Comfort. She co-edited the papers of her late friend and colleague, Viola Cordova, a Jicarilla-Apache philosopher (How It Is) and co-edited a number of other anthologies, including one about Rachel Carson.
In 2011, Moore and her colleague Michael P. Nelson published Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, which gathered the testimony of dozens of the world's moral leaders about our obligation to future generations. [7] This was the first of many of Moore's articles, blogs, op-eds, and public talks in which she speaks out against those who would "wreck the world" through fossil fuel extraction and other acts that lead to global extinction. Her most recent climate ethics book is Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change. Moore now travels and speaks widely about the moral urgency of climate action. Her forthcoming book, Piano Tide, is her first novel, telling the story of an Alaskan tidewater town's defense of their freshwater. Her most recent work is a collaboration with the concert pianist, Rachelle McCabe, to bring music to her messages about global extinction. Moore has served on the board of directors of the Orion Society and the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska.
Moore is best known in environmental literature for her seamless integration of philosophical reflection and personal experience. To writers, she describes this metaphorically as the "art of the osprey," a fish-hawk that repeatedly dives from the world of sunshine and color into the murkier shadows below the surface of experience. [8] To philosophers, she describes her work as narrative philosophy or environmental phenomenology, where the reader does not just understand the issues, but experiences them through sight, smell, and taste.
Moore lives in Corvallis, Oregon and, in the summers, writes from "a small cabin where two creeks and a bear trail meet a tidal cove" in the southeast Alaska islands. Her husband, Frank, is a biologist, and their children are environmentalists and professors – Erin E. Moore, School of Arts and Architecture, University of Oregon, and Jonathan W. Moore, Liber Eros Chair of Coastal Studies, Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. [9]
Applied ethics refers to the practical aspect of moral considerations. It is ethics with respect to real-world actions and their moral considerations in the areas of private and public life, the professions, health, technology, law, and leadership. For example, the bioethics community is concerned with identifying the correct approach to moral issues in the life sciences, such as euthanasia, the allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in research. Environmental ethics is concerned with ecological issues such as the responsibility of government and corporations to clean up pollution. Business ethics includes questions regarding the duties or duty of 'whistleblowers' to the general public or their loyalty to their employers.
In environmental philosophy, environmental ethics is an established field of practical philosophy "which reconstructs the essential types of argumentation that can be made for protecting natural entities and the sustainable use of natural resources." The main competing paradigms are anthropocentrism, physiocentrism, and theocentrism. Environmental ethics exerts influence on a large range of disciplines including environmental law, environmental sociology, ecotheology, ecological economics, ecology and environmental geography.
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski is an American philosopher. She is the Emerita George Lynn Cross Research Professor, as well as Emerita Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, at the University of Oklahoma. She writes in the areas of epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory.
Tom Regan was an American philosopher who specialized in animal rights theory. He was professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University, where he had taught from 1967 until his retirement in 2001.
The ethics of care is a normative ethical theory that holds that moral action centers on interpersonal relationships and care or benevolence as a virtue. EoC is one of a cluster of normative ethical theories that were developed by some feminists and environmentalists since the 1980s. While consequentialist and deontological ethical theories emphasize generalizable standards and impartiality, ethics of care emphasize the importance of response to the individual. The distinction between the general and the individual is reflected in their different moral questions: "what is just?" versus "how to respond?". Carol Gilligan, who is considered the originator of the ethics of care, criticized the application of generalized standards as "morally problematic, since it breeds moral blindness or indifference".
Kathleen Marie Higgins is an American Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin where she has been teaching for over thirty years. She specializes in aesthetics, philosophy of music, nineteenth and twentieth-century continental philosophy, and philosophy of emotion.
Janet McCracken is the Chair of Classical Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Lake Forest College. She specializes in aesthetics.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is an American poet, essayist and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and currently Regents Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Michael Paul Nelson is an environmental scholar, writer, teacher, speaker, and consultant who holds the Ruth H. Spaniol Chair in Renewable Resources and is a Professor of environmental philosophy and ethics at Oregon State University. Nelson is also the philosopher in residence of the Isle Royale Wolf-Moose Project, a senior fellow with the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written word, and the co-founder and co-director of the Conservation Ethics Group. From 2012 to 2022 he served as the Lead Principal Investigator for the H.J. Andrews Long-Term Ecological Research Program at Oregon State.
Adrian Parr is an Australian-born philosopher and cultural critic. She specializes in environmental philosophy and activism. In addition, she published on the sustainability movement, climate change politics, activist culture, and creative practice.
Thomas English Hill Jr. is Emeritus Kenan Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a specialist in ethics, political philosophy, history of ethics and the work of Immanuel Kant. He has also a Past-President of the American Philosophical Association.
Marilyn Ann Friedman is an American philosopher. She holds the W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
Andrea Nye is a feminist philosopher and writer. Nye is a Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater for the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department and an active member of the Women's Studies Department. In 1992, Nye received the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater Award for Outstanding Research.
Judith Reesa Baskin is a religious studies scholar at the University of Oregon in the United States. She is Associate Dean for Humanities, Director of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies, and the Philip H. Knight Professor of Humanities. She held positions at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Yale University, and State University of New York at Albany, prior to accepting a faculty position at the University of Oregon in 2000. She was appointed Associate Dean for Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences in July, 2009.
Oregon State University's College of Liberal Arts is a liberal arts college at Oregon State University, a public research university in Corvallis, Oregon. It is the second largest of the 12 colleges at the university and offers 66 academic programs.
Nancy Tuana is an American philosopher who specializes in feminist philosophy. She holds the DuPont/Class of 1949 Professorship in Philosophy and Women's Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She came to Penn State from the University of Oregon in 2001 to serve as the founding director of the Rock Ethics Institute. She won the 2022 Victoria Davion Award.
Viola Cordova, a philosopher, artist, and author, member of the Jicarilla Apache tribe, was one of the first Native American women to earn a PhD in philosophy.
Charles Russell Magel was an American philosopher, animal rights activist and bibliographer. He was professor emeritus of Philosophy and Ethics at Moorhead State University.
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Catia Faria is a Portuguese moral philosopher and activist for animal rights and feminism. She is assistant professor in Applied Ethics at the Complutense University of Madrid, and is a board member of the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics. Faria specialises in normative and applied ethics, especially focusing on how they apply to the moral consideration of non-human animals. In 2022, she is published her first book Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature.