Gesellschaftswissenschaften
Faculty 03

I am a political theorist and an environmental, moral, and political philosopher. I also have interests in the philosophy of economics and political economy.

As a graduate student I focused as much as possible on contemporary continental Philosophy, and I wrote a dissertation on Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit. After that I gravitated towards contemporary Anglo-American moral and political philosophy. I see value in both traditions, and I am not fond of using the distinction between traditions to close off areas of Philosophy for serious consideration, as is sometimes done.

I have written papers and chapters on a variety of topics, including most recently climate justice, global justice, hope, and just war theory. Some of my recent publications are available below. I have published two books on global justice, Cosmopolitan Justice (Westview 2000) and Global Inequality Matters (Palgrave 2009), and one on climate justice The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change; Values, Poverty, and Policy (Cambridge 2014). I have another book on climate justice forthcoming, Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty (Oxford).

The sort of philosophical research I do is driven by problems in our lives and the world in which we live. These matters are more important to me than problems in the literature.

Student supervision

I supervise students working in areas in which I can offer help. I give priority to students who have taken classes with me. I can supervise bachelor work in German and English, but masters and doctoral work only in English. At the masters and doctoral level, I supervise only works in normative theory.

CV

Professional Bio

How I Got Here

“[I] tried to ask myself, when writing: precisely what does this sentence contribute to the developing exposition or argument, and is it true? You become analytical when you practise that sort of (frequently painful) self-criticism.” –G.A. Cohen

“Only an expressed thought is succinct, rendered succinct by its presentation in language; what is vaguely put is poorly thought.” –Theodor W. Adorno

Kürzlich veröffentlichte Artikel und Kapitel

“Three Interpretations of the Anthropocene: Hope and Anxiety at the End of Nature” Ethics, Politics, and Society, 3, 2020.

“Responsibility for Increasing Mitigation Ambition in Light of the Right to Sustainable Development” Fudan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 13, 2020, 181-192.

“Hope in Political Philosophy” Philosophy Compass, April 2020. Co-authors: Jakob Huber and Claudia Blöser.

“Hope for Material Progress in the Age of the Anthropocene” in Claudia Blöser and Titus Stahl, eds. The Moral Psychology of Hope (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).

“Considerations of distributive justice principles in economic modelling of climate change, ” Zeitschrift für Umweltpolitik und Umweltforschung, 2020. Heft 1. Co-author Axel Schaffer and Sebastian Brun.

“Economic Contagion and Pro-Poor Social Epidemiology” Journal of Social Philosophy (on line early)

 “The Cry of the Earth and The Cry of the Poor,” in Robert McKim ed. Laudato Si' and The Environment: Pope Francis' Green Encyclical (London: Routledge, 2019).

“Real World Global Egalitarianism” in Robin Eckersley and Chris Brown ed. Oxford Handbook of International Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

“Progress, Destruction, and the Anthropocene,” Social Philosophy and Policy, 34:2, 2017, 66-88.

“Ending Wars” in Helen Frowe and Seth Lazar eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Ethics of War, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Sophia Halamoda has illustrated Prof Moellendorf's approach to climate justice: