Guest scholar to assess risks associated with natural events

Colleen Murphy, associate professor of philosophy and law and director of the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will discuss “Evaluating the Source of the RisksAssociated with Natural Events” when she visits Skidmore on Monday, Feb. 23.

Free and open to the public, her talk will begin at 8 p.m. in Emerson Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. She will differentiate between the risks associated with anthropogenic climate change and other risks that humans take. She will also attempt to develop a moral framework for judging this risk or the actions that sustain and impact such risks. To do so, her talk will focus on the ways the construction and modification of built and natural environments can alter the probability of occurrence of natural events and the character and magnitude of the impact that such events have. She will then argue for the need to develop a standard of reasonable care for decisions about the built and modified natural environment, which accounts for technical and resource constraints, as well as the place of natural hazard mitigation in public policy.

According to her web site, Murphy’s research interests are in the areas of jurisprudence, political philosophy, and risk ethics.

She joined the Illinois faculty after a stint at Texas A&M University, where she was an associate professor of philosophy. During 2010-2011, she was a Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a bachelor of arts from the University of Notre Dame. She is an editor-in-chief of the Springer Series The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology (ELTE) and a consulting editor for the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics (ESTE2). Murphy is also a member of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women.

She is the author of A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation (Cambridge University Press), which was the subject of a special symposium issue of the journal Criminal Law and Philosophy. Her second book, The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice, is currently under contract with Cambridge University Press. Professor Murphy is co-editor of Engineering Ethics for a Globalized World (Springer). Her work has also been published in leading journals including Law and Philosophy, Risk Analysis, and Science and Engineering Ethics. Murphy’s research has received financial support from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Qatar National Research Fund.

Murphy’s Skidmore talk is sponsored by the department of philosophy and the environmental studies program.