“One of the most visible and impactful ways that philosophers demonstrate their practical value,” says Matthew Kisner, professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, is by having ethicists “embedded in a professional setting, working alongside clinicians and health care professionals.” He is now applying this model to environmental ethics.
Kisner recently won a $200,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation (via its Democracy, Ethics, and Public Trust program) to establish the Luce Environmental Ethics in Practice (LEEP) Fellowship.
Currently set up as a two-year postdoctoral fellowship, the program embeds philosophers with practitioners working on problems of environmental justice. These include government employees tasked with addressing environmental injustice, professionals in nonprofit organizations, and professionals in the private sector who work to promote environmental justice (corporations, such as energy utilities, will sometimes hire environmental justice coordinators).
The work of such practitioners primarily involves outreach and technical assistance to support communities in responding to environmental challenges, such as planning for extreme heat, flooding, pollution, energy independence, and so forth. Analogizing to the clinical health care setting, Kisner says, “environmental justice practitioners are the clinicians, and communities are the patients.”
Dr. Sigsbee will work alongside environmental practitioners in the Arnold School of Public Health and the McCausland College of Arts and Science [at the University of South Carolina] to coordinate recent environmental justice initiatives across South Carolina. Federal funding for two key environmental programs in South Carolina was recently terminated. The participants of those programs—including client communities—are interested in finding new ways to continue their work. With staff positions terminated, the LEEP Fellow will provide critical bandwidth to support these efforts. The LEEP Fellow will help coordinate a stakeholder engagement process to ensure that new organizations and programming are effective at advancing environmental justice goals, including respecting community autonomy in decision-making and responding to community environmental needs.
The program is, to Kisner’s knowledge, the first of its kind, and there are some uncertainties as to how exactly it will develop. He says:
How precisely the LEEP Fellow will provide ethical guidance remains an open question. Unlike the medical context, where there are developed norms and procedures for clinical ethical consultations, there is no established formula for how ethicists can bring their expertise to bear in the environmental context. Beginning to establish such norms and procedures will be one of the fellow’s primary tasks. CEFPs may provide some guidance because many of the challenges that clinical ethicists face are similar to the challenges facing environmental justice practitioners. Medical ethicists are essentially entering into a conversation between patients and clinicians. The ethicists’ aim is partly to make these conversations more productive by illuminating the ethical dimensions of those conversations. The LEEP Fellow will likely play a similar role in the conversations between communities and practitioners. Consequently, many of the norms and practices for clinical ethical consultations may be applicable to the environmental context.
The new program illustrates a possible path for expanding the professional opportunities available to those with advanced training in philosophy. Kisner writes:
Widespread adoption of the embedded fellowship model could provide much needed support to environmental justice communities while supporting early career environmental ethicists, bringing a new perspective to ethical research, and demonstrating the practical value of environmental ethics.
It would be interesting to hear about how the “embedded fellowship” model or related approaches have or could be applied to other domains, beyond medicine and the environment.
Note: Kisner is a colleague of mine at the University of South Carolina, and Sigsbee is a South Carolina philosophy PhD who also served as an assistant editor here at Daily Nous for a while. (This disclosure was added at the suggestion of a reader; it should have been included when first posted.)
[photo of Dustin Sigsbee by Alastair Norcross]
Very good, environmental justice is so evolutionaryly necessary, humans must learn from the natural environments to understand their purposes on this planet
This is really cool, and congrats to Dustin (a WMU alumnus!).
One thought I had here was after teaching Haidt’s *The Righteous Mind* yesterday was to notice the focus here on “environmental justice”. This would probably code as a “care-based” foundation, or maybe also “fairness”. And those are the two foundations most prominent for liberals. But for conservatives, there are additional foundations, and part of the point of Haidt’s book is to notice that alternate framings would increase public uptake.
So, for example, we might also think about the sanctity of nature, which would code more conservative. Or talk about natural gods, or frame the environment as part of our in-grouping. Or use disgust against environmental degradation to catalyze change.
And so my Haidt-inspired idea here is that “environmental injustice” might not be the most powerful lens by which to view project–maybe especially in South Carolina. And that some alternate framing might draw more diverse/bipartisan interest.
Congrats to the team!
Agree that the framing is mission-critical. And this applies to most everything with diverse audiences or stakeholders.
But I like my gods to be unnatural. They’re easier to defeat. 😑
Amazing work Matt and Dustin!
I know this is currently a perhaps over-discussed domain, but another domain that could benefit from this kind of embedded ethics role and does already (to some extent) is the use of AI. We are seeing both the public and private sector navigating how best to use AI-enabled technologies (or not use them) — this is something philosophers are well-positioned to speak to.