Simona Capisani
Capisani continued her research on developing a justice-based framework for climate-induced displacement, migration, and immobility. In addition to developing parts of her book manuscript, she published the article, “Livability and a Framework for Climate Mobilities Justice,” in Philosophy and Public Issues, and completed a chapter for the forthcoming Springer Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, which examines normative approaches to the challenges posed by climate change’s impacts on human mobility, sovereignty, and structural inequalities that arise in the context of climate-related displacement. This work benefited from the feedback, support, and advising from a group of political theorists participating in the Climate Pipeline Project (CPP). Capisani presented an accepted paper at a conference hosted by the Project at Brown University and connected with a network of collaborators in the group. The CPP is co-sponsored by Robert Keohane as well as Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Brown University’s Climate Solutions lab under the direction of Jeff Colgan. She also benefited from the feedback and experience of presenting her work at several invited talks and conferences which included the Eastern APA, the Women in Philosophy Speaker Series at the University of Essex, the Earth Systems Governance Conference, Harvard University’s Migration and the Humanities Conference, and an author-meets-critic panel for Alex Sager’s “Against Borders” at the Central APA.
Along with the support of Annie Stilz, Capisani and her colleague Colin Hickey (CFI postdoc) helped co-organize an interdisciplinary working group on climate mobility comprised of 25 scholars including normative theorists, policy experts, social scientists, and modelers focusing on issues related to climate migration, displacement, and immobility. The group plans to continue collaboration and develop the working group beyond this year. She utilized support of the CFI to organize several interdisciplinary events. In the fall, she collaborated with Marion Hourdequin (Colorado College), organizing “Climate Ethics ‘In The Field’: Integrating Philosophy, Science, Law, and Policy.” The event supported engagement between experts and explored how environmental ethics and climate justice can complement other forms of knowledge to inform climate and environmental policy. With Colin Hickey, she also organized an event titled “Taking Stock and Looking Forward: Climate and Policy Experts on COP26” which convened Michael Oppenheimer, Stephen Pacala, Denise Mauzerall, and Karen Florini (Climate Central) to reflect on the outcomes of the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties.
In Fall ’22, Capisani will begin a position as Assistant Professor in Environmental Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University (U.K.).
Colin Hickey
Hickey joined the CFI as a postdoc in 2021. He spent part of the year finishing up a draft of his book manuscript, From the Ground Up: Methodology and Non-Ideal Political Philosophy. The book uses climate change and bioethics as anchoring examples to develop a contextualist, interdisciplinary methodology for doing political philosophy in the real world, messy as it is. Hickey also worked on a number of papers throughout the year. His paper, “Climate Justice and Informal Representation,” was published at Ethics & International Affairs in a special issue alongside contributions from Simon Caney, Stephen Gardiner, and others. The paper draws on lessons from peace and conflict studies to highlight the importance of informal modes of representation for protecting the interests of those vulnerable to climate change. Hickey also was the first author of a co-authored piece, “The Agents of Justice,” which was published in Philosophy Compass and argues for more attention to be paid in our theorizing about justice to the agents who are involved in realizing justice. Another paper, “The Social Cost of Carbon, Abatement Costs, and Individual Climate Duties” has been conditionally accepted at Ethics, Policy & Environment. In the paper, Hickey discusses the relation between various estimates from climate economics and the content of individual climate duties.
Hickey also started working on a paper titled “Capabilities and Conceptualizing “Voluntariness” in Managed Retreat Governance,” which he will present at the Human Development and Capabilities Association’s annual conference in September 2022, in Antwerp. The paper uses the capabilities approach to shed light on how we should interpret the requirement for retreat programs to be meaningfully voluntary. He also started another paper titled, “The Normative Landscape of Climate Disobedience,” which will be featured in a Symposium at the Eastern division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in January 2023. Hickey presented ideas from this project at the CFI Reunion Workshop in April 2022, as well as to HMEI’s CEREAL group. The paper aims to survey a range of different potential justifiers and defeaters for engaging in climate disobedience.
Alongside Simona Capisani and Annie Stilz, Hickey helped co-found the Climate Mobilities Working Group, an interdisciplinary group of scholars working to understand the moral, political, and empirical landscape of the impacts of climate change on human mobility. He also presented a primer for the group on philosophical and methodological ideas for doing normative work on issues regarding climate mobilities.
Hickey accepted a position at the University of Amsterdam, in the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics.
Melissa Lane
While Lane’s main area of research over 2019-2022 (which included a significant period of medical challenges limiting her research capacity) has been dedicated to completing a book in an area of her expertise which is unrelated to CFI, her existing research continues to attract global as well as local attention. In 2021-22, an excerpt from her 2011/2012 book on the ethics of sustainability, Eco-Republic, was solicited for publication in a German high school textbook, anticipated for a print run of 45,000 copies: Standpunkte der Ethik SII” with ISBN 978-3-14-161332-2 (Westermann Bildungsmedien Verlag GmbH, 2022 or 2023). Eco-Republic is also the subject of a featured lecture by Lane for the Princeton Community Action Program launching the 2022-23 school year, being featured for the second year in a row. In 2021-22, Lane served as a senior faculty member and referee for the political theory stream of the Climate Pipeline Project in political science, hosted by colleagues at Harvard University. Internally to Princeton, she served on a C-PREE faculty search committee, and at the invitation of President Eisgruber, on the Faculty Panel on Dissociation Metrics, Principles, and Standards, chairing the sub-panel on disinformation and serving as primary author of that half of the Panel’s report submitted in May 2022 to the Board of Trustees.
Robert Socolow
Socolow’s CFI research focuses on the framing of the public conversation about climate change science and solutions. He is building on two stock-taking essays published in 2020-21: 1) “Witnessing for the Middle to Depolarize the Climate Change Conversation,” which appeared in the fall 2020 issue of Daedalus; and 2) “Contending with Climate Change: The Next 25 Years,” which appeared in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the 75th Anniversary Issue) in December 2020. These essays explore the broadening of the concept of witnessing to include “middle-building” efforts that broaden the conceptualization of a problem and engage additional players. For climate change, he specifically proposes that common ground might be achieved by addressing the case for more ambitious climate science, and the centrality of conditionality in evaluations of purported solutions. To promote more ambitious climate science he joined with Tapio Schneider and Nadir Jeevanjee in an article in Physics Today, “Accelerating progress in climate science,” which demonstrated the power of multi-pronged analysis. He also generated an exploration of the interface of physics and climate science in the journal, Inference, via a book review that brought forth contributions from Lawrence Krauss, Nadir Jeevanjee, and David Romps. To grapple with inadequacies in the modeling of solutions he collaborated with Chris Greig and Sam Uden in an article that suggests “reverse engineering” as a way to identify under-investigated obstacles, both technical and social.
The Daedalus issue as a whole, edited by Nancy Rosenblum (Harvard), grew out of a May 2018 conference held in Princeton, “Witnessing Professionals and Climate Change,” co-hosted by Melissa Lane and Nancy Rosenblum and co-sponsored by CFI.