My Ph.D. is from Ohio State University and I joined the department in 1978.

Environmental ethics, Intergenerational Ethics, Philosophical Logic, Formal Value Theory

Recent, representative publications

• Recent Books
  • Environmental Ethics for the Long Term: An Introduction, single-author textbook, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2015.
  • A Land Imperiled: The Declining Health of the Southern Appalachian Bioregion, (editor) University of Tennessee Press, 2005
• Recent Journal Articles and Chapters
  • “Are There Infinite Welfare Differences among Living Things?” Environmental Values, forthcoming.
  • “Nuclear Power” in Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics, Benjamin Hale and Andrew Light, eds., Routledge/Taylor & Francis, forthcoming.
  • “Future Generations in Environmental Ethics,” in Stephen Gardiner and Allen Thompson, eds., Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, ch. 25, Oxford University Press, online publication January 2016, print forthcoming.
  • “Hope, Self-Transcendence and Biocentrism,” in Ecology, Ethics, and Hope:  A Bird in the Gale, Andrew Brei, ed., Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.
  • “Non-Anthropocentric Nuclear Energy Ethics,” ch. 9 in Ethics of Nuclear Energy:  Risk, Justice and Democracy in the post-Fukushima Era, Behnam Taebi and Sabine Roeser, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2015.
  • “Casualties as a Moral Measure of Climate Change,” Climatic Change 130, 3 (June 2015), pp. 347-58, DOI 10.1007/s10584-014-1131-2.
    “Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice,” in Social Justice and the University: Globalization, Human Rights, and the Future of Democracy, Jon Shefner, Harry Dahms, Robert E. Jones, and Asafa Jalata, eds., Palgrave Publishers, 2014, pp. 114-27.
  • “Free Logic,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (April 5, 2010; updated June 13, 2014), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-free/.
  • “The Individual’s Obligation to Relinquish Unnecessary Greenhouse-Gas-Producing Devices,” Philosophy and Public Issues (New Series) 3, 1 (2013), pp 139-165 (special issue on “A Changing Moral Climate,” edited by M. Di Paola & G. Pellegrino).
  • “Anthropocentrism and Egoism,” Environmental Values, 22, 4 (August 2013), pp. 441-459.
  • “Comparing Suffering across Species” Between the Species 16, 1 (June 2013), pp. 86-104 (Special issue featuring papers from the UT Animals, Ethics and Law Symposium, March 2-3 2012, the organizing committee of which I chaired; I also wrote the introduction to the issue).
  • “Replies to Critics of ‘How Harmful Are the Average American’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions?’” Ethics, Policy and Environment 16, 1 (June, 2013), pp. 111-119.
  • Henry Bi and John Nolt, “Toward a Unified Formal Semantics for Control-Flow Process Models,” Journal of Database Management, 23, 2 (April-June 2012), pp. 73-99.
  • “Injustice in the Handling of Nuclear Weapons Waste:  The Case of David Witherspoon, Inc.” in Mountains of Injustice: Environmental and Social Equity in Appalachia, Michele Morrone and Geoff Buckley, eds., Ohio University Press, 2011, pp. 126-141.
  • “Nonanthropocentric Climate Ethics,” WIRES Climate Change 2, 2011, pp. 701-711. (http://wires.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WiresArticle/wisId-WCC131.html).
  • “How Harmful Are the Average American’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” Ethics, Policy and Environment 14, 1, March 2011, pp. 3-10.  (Target article, with commentaries by Robin Attfield, Lauren Hartzell, Avram Hiller, Jason Kawall, Jay Odenbaugh, Ronald Sandler, Anders Schinkel and Thomas P. Seager, Evan Selinger and Susan Spierre.)
  • “Greenhouse Gas Emission and the Domination of Posterity” in Denis Arnold, ed., The Ethics of Global Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 60-76.
• Policy Brief
  • “Nuclear Power, Fossil Fuels, and Climate Change:  The Long View,” Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy (September 2015)

Recent Presentations

• “Long-Term Climate Justice,” Cornell University Climate Justice Conference (invited) May 24-25, 2016.  Video at:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkhmyBAjALA.
• “Harm as a Function of Carbon Emissions,” International Workshop on Climate Change and Its Impact: Risks and Inequalities (invited) University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, March 10-11, 2016.
• “A Defense of Biocentric Individualism,” Workshop on Value Theory in Environmental Ethics:  Sentience, Life, Richness, Centre de Recherche en Éthique (invited), Montréal, Feb. 4-5, 2016.
• “Sustaining Life’s Welfare” International Conference on the Normative Grounds of Sustainability, Frankfurt University (invited) October 29-30, 2015.
• “Are There Infinite Welfare Differences among Living Things?” International Society for Environmental Ethics, Kiel, Germany, July 23-6, 2015.
• “Domination across Space and Time:  Smallpox, Special Relativity and Climate Ethics” Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University (invited) April 17, 2015; also presented at the 2015 Calgary Sustainability Conference:  Sustainability as Intergenerational Justice, University of Calgary, (invited) June 12-13, 2015.
• “The Moral Significance of Climate Change,” Department of English and Philosophy, University of West Georgia, (invited) April 1, 2015.
• “Biotic Welfare vs. Biodiversity: Non-anthropocentric Conservation in the Anthropocene,” International Society for Environmental Ethics, Allenspark, Colorado, June 17-20, 2014.
• “Temporally Invariant Consequentialist Biocentrism” Ben Rabinowitz Symposium on Intergenerational Ethics, University of Washington, (invited) March 6, 2014.
• “Casualties as a Moral Measure of Climate Change,” Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives on Climate Change Workshop, Como, Italy, Sept. 26-7, 2013.
• “Some Biocentric Value Aggregation Principles,” International Society for Environmental Ethics session at American Philosophical Society Eastern Division Meeting, Atlanta, January 2013.