Rate My Professor Stephen Gardiner

Stephen M. Gardiner is Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of the Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he directs the Program on Ethics. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cornell University in 1999. Gardiner's academic interests center on global environmental problems, with particular emphasis on the ethics of climate change, intergenerational justice, virtue ethics, and the governance of geoengineering technologies. His scholarship addresses complex moral challenges posed by environmental crises, advocating for institutional reforms such as a global constitutional convention to protect future generations.

Gardiner has authored and edited numerous influential works, including the seminal book A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford University Press, 2011), which frames climate change as a profound ethical dilemma involving multiple moral storms; Debating Climate Ethics (co-authored with David A. Weisbach, Oxford University Press, 2016); and Dialogues on Climate Justice (co-authored with Arthur R. Obst, Routledge, 2023). He edited Virtue Ethics, Old and New (Cornell University Press, 2005) and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Intergenerational Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2025), and co-edited Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics (with Allen Thompson, Oxford University Press, 2016) and Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (Oxford University Press, 2010). Key articles include "Climate Ethics in a Dark and Dangerous Time" (Ethics, 2017), "The Tollgate Principles for the Governance of Geoengineering: Moving Beyond the Oxford Principles to an Ethically More Robust Approach" (co-authored with Augustin Fragniere, Ethics, Policy & the Environment, 2018), and "A Call for a Global Constitutional Convention focused on Future Generations" (Ethics & International Affairs, 2014). His publications have garnered over 9,000 citations on Google Scholar. Gardiner has delivered prestigious lectures, such as the 2021 Academy Lecture for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Alan Saunders Lecture in Public Ethics at the Australasian Association for Philosophy, broadcast nationally by Australian Public Radio. In 2016, he co-received a National Science Foundation grant and was appointed to the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on International Cooperation. He regularly teaches advanced courses in ethics, environmental philosophy, and social and political philosophy.