Jude Galbraith

In my dissertation, I address scientists’ social responsibilities when performing innovative research on a particularly novel and impactful kind of technology, a technology posing ethical, political, and scientific problems: climate engineering. Research in this area could embed controversial ethical and political values and priorities into climate engineering technologies, leading to the imposition of values on non-consenting populations. I consider a broad range of possible solutions to this problem, but standard political and ethical frameworks fail, I argue, to provide scientists the resources to adequately discharge their responsibilities. I develop an alternative framework for legitimizing scientific values, one that analyzes the science of climate engineering as composed of multiple overlapping communities of practice, with virtues internal to each practice. I explore characteristics of such communities, analyzing them as consisting in practices integrated into larger, robust conceptions of flourishing in relation to the biosphere as a whole, and I delineate a number of virtues clearly characteristic of the ethical climate engineering researcher.