Dr. Tony Milligan

Tony Milligan: Research Interests: Applied Ethics, Animal Ethics, Philosophy of Love, Iris Murdoch, Space Ethics, Civil disobedience, and Dogen studies About: I work primarily on normative and applied ethics with a special focus upon the relation between the human and the non-human: other creatures, other places, other ways of being. An interest in the ethical dimensions of human activity in space falls into this territory. In January, McFarland released my short book on this subject, Nobody Owns the Moon (North Carolina: McFarland, 2015), looking at issues such as the off-world extension of property rights as well as the usual, more speculative problems (terraforming, our earthliness, our adaptability). Generally, I'm trying to engage with and help to give a bit more shape to discussions of what we can and ought-not to do on our travels. This is ongoing work so, for example, I'm collaborating on a co-edited volume on space ethics with Jim Schwartz over at Wichita State University and I also recently guest edited a special edition of the journal Space Policy on ethical dimension of space. The book on Civil Disobedience: Protest, Justification and the Law (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) covers protest over animals and the environment as well as the civil disobedience tradition and recent dissent. It advances a central argument that we need a revised and more open account of civil disobedience, one which is not modelled restrictively upon the protests of decades ago but which can help us to understand contemporary dissent. More particularly, we need to understand various forms of protest over the environment (including, arguably, some ecosabotage or 'monkey-wrenching') as civil disobedience. Similarly with prostests over the treatment of animals (particularly animal rescue, including some instances of covert rescue as well as open rescue). Anyone who reads Beyond Animal Rights (London & New York: Continuum, 2010) will recognize that my sympathies are very much with animals. I'm not disputing the idea that animals have rights but I do hold that we need a rich moral vocabulary, one that doesn't reduce everything down to a single concept. (Such as 'rights', consequences' or 'virtue'.) We need lots of moral concepts to do lots of different jobs. Effectively, this is a form of normative pluralism. A further text, Animal Ethics: The Basics (London and New York: Routledge, 2015) will be out during the summer. There seems to be a good deal of interest in how I'm going to handle the final chapters on what has become known as the 'political turn'. Love (Durham: Acumen, 2011) argues that, as humans, we need to see ourselves not just as the bearers of rights, or as rational agents. We need to see ourselves as beings who can be recipients of a defensible love, i.e. as loveable. An appreciation of this is central to our grasp of our own worth. Openness to love turns out to be an important human virtue. So, again, the concern is with the human and the non-human. In the final chapter I return directly to the question of what is at stake in our love for the non-human, for other creatures, for places, and for nature. The other love book, Love and its Objects (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) is a co-edited volume of essay put together with colleagues (Christian Maurer at Friburg and Kamila Pacovska at Pardubice). The volume was tied to a conference held at the University of Pardubice in 2013.