Clare Palmer

Clare Palmer (born 1967) is a British philosopher, theologian and scholar of environmental and religious studies. She is known for her work on environmental and animal ethics. She was appointed as a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University in 2010. She had previously held academic appointments at the Universities of Greenwich, Stirling, and Lancaster in the United Kingdom, and Washington University in St. Louis in the United States, among others.

She has published three sole-authored books: Environmental Ethics (ABC-CLIO, 1997), Environmental Ethics and Process Thinking (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Animal Ethics in Context (Columbia University Press, 2010). She has also published two co-authored books and has edited (or co-edited) seven collections or anthologies. She is a former editor of the religious studies journal Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion, and a former president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics.

In Environmental Ethics and Process Thinking, which was based on her doctoral research, Palmer explores the possibility of a process philosophy-inspired account of environmental ethics, focussing on the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. She ultimately concludes that a process ethic is not a desirable approach to environmental questions, in disagreement with some environmentalist thinkers. In Animal Ethics in Context, Palmer asks about responsibilities to aid animals, in contrast to the typical focus in animal ethics on not harming animals. She defends a contextual, relational ethic according to which humans will typically have duties to assist only domestic, and not wild, animals in need. However, humans will often be permitted to assist wild animals, and may be obligated to do so if there is a particular (causal) relationship between humans and the animals' plight.

Career The Queen's College, Oxford (pictured 2012) where Palmer read for her doctorate. Palmer read for a BA (Hons) in theology at Trinity College, Oxford, graduating in 1988, before reading for a doctorate in philosophy at the same university. From 1988 to 1991, she was based at Wolfson College, before becoming a Holwell Senior Scholar at The Queen's College. She graduated from Oxford in 1993 with a doctorate from The Queen's College; her thesis focussed on process philosophy and environmental ethics. In 1997, she published her first Additionally, the first issue of Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion (later renamed Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology), a peer reviewed academic journal in religious studies, was published. Palmer was the founding editor, and she remained editor until 2007. This was based ultimately on her doctoral dissertation. Richard J. Matthew in Environment, and Stephen R. L. Clark in Studies in Christian Ethics, Timothy Sprigge in Environmental Ethics, and Randall C. Morris in The Journal of Theological Studies. It was also the subject of a "forum" in the journal Process Studies. Introduced by David Ray Griffin, the forum's editor, it featured a "Palmer on Whithead: A Critical Evaluation" by John B. Cobb and "Clare Palmer's Environmental Ethics and Process Thinking: A Hartshornean Response" by Timothy Menta, as well as a reply by Palmer herself. The next year, Cobb published "Another Response to Clare Palmer" in the same journal.

Palmer remained at Stirling for several years before taking up the post of senior lecturer in philosophy at Lancaster University in 2001. While at Lancaster, she became the vice-president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE). In 2005, she moved to Washington University in St. Louis, where she took up the role of associate professor, jointly appointed in departments of philosophy and environmental studies. and, in the subsequent year, she was part of "The Animal Studies Group" which published the collection Killing Animals with the University of Illinois Press. While at Washington, she was also the editor of both Teaching Environmental Ethics (Brill, 2007) and Animal Rights (Ashgate Publishing, 2008). In 2007, she was elected president of the ISEE, a position she held until 2010. Among reviews of this book were pieces by Bernard Rollin in Anthrozoös, Jason Zinser in The Quarterly Review of Biology, J. M. Dieterle in Environmental Ethics, Scott D. Wilson in Ethics and Daniel A. Dombrowski in the Journal of Animal Ethics. She has subsequently published papers on the theme of assisting animals in the wild—ideas discussed in her Animal Ethics in Context —in animal-focussed journals, prompting commentary from Joel MacClellan, Gordon Burghart, and Catia Faria.

While at Texas A&M, Palmer co-edited the 2011 Veterinary Science: Humans, Animals and Health with Erica Fudge and the 2014 Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World: Values, Philosophy, and Action with Calliott, Ricardo Rozzi, Steward Pickett, and Juan Armesto. In 2015, Wiley-Blackwell published Palmer's Companion Animal Ethics, co-authored with Peter Sandøe and Sandra Corr, and, in 2023, Wiley published her Wildlife Ethics: The Ethics of Wildlife Management and Conservation, which was co-authored with Bob Fischer, Christian Gamborg, Jordan Hampton, and Sandøe.

Thought

Environmental ethics The process philosopher John B. Cobb (pictured, 2013) challenges Palmer's interpretation of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy. In Environmental Ethics and Process Thinking, Palmer examines whether process philosophy, in particular the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, can provide an appropriate background for engaging in environmental ethics. urban environmental ethics, and scholarship on the environment in the work of English writers. Much of her work in environmental ethics has explored questions concerning animals, including the tension between protecting individuals and protecting species.

Animal ethics Palmer opens her Animal Ethics in Context by comparing our intuitive response to the suffering in a case of wildebeest drowning during migration (example migration pictured) and a case of horses neglected by their human owners. Palmer does not explicitly connect Environmental Ethics and Process Thought to Animal Ethics in Context, her second monograph; the latter does, however, address environmental ethics, insofar as it offers an attempt to bridge environmental ethics and animal ethics. and companion animals. The latter topic was the focus of her co-authored text Companion Animal Ethics,

Selected bibliography In addition to her books, Palmer has written or co-written over 30 articles in peer-reviewed journals and over 25 articles in scholarly collections, as well as various encyclopaedia articles and book reviews. Editorial duties have included acting as an associate editor for Callicott and Robert Frodeman's two-volume encyclopaedia Environmental Philosophy and Ethics and editing the journal Worldviews. Palmer has served on the editorial boards of two Springer series (first, the International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, and, second, Ecology and Ethics) and one Sydney University Press series: Animal Publics. She has served on the editorial boards of various journals, including Environmental Humanities; Ethics, Policy and Environment; Environmental Ethics; Environmental Values; the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics; and the Journal for the Study of Religion, Culture and Nature.

Books Palmer, Clare (1997). Environmental Ethics. Santa Barbara and Denver: ABC-CLIO. Palmer, Clare (1998). Environmental Ethics and Process Thinking. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Palmer, Clare (2010). Animal Ethics In Context. New York: Columbia University Press. Sandøe, Peter, Sandra Corr and Clare Plamer (2015). Companion Animal Ethics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Palmer, Clare, Bob Fischer, Christian Gamborg, Jordan Hampton and Peter Sandøe (2023). Wildlife Ethics: The Ethics of Wildlife Management and Conservation. Oxford: Wiley.

Edited collections and anthologies Ball, Ian, Margaret Goodall, Clare Palmer and John Reader, eds. (1992). The Earth Beneath. London: SPCK. Callicott, J. Baird, and Clare Palmer, eds. (2005). Environmental Philosophy, Vols. 1–5. London and New York: Routledge. The Animal Studies Group, ed. (2006). Killing Animals. Champaign-Urbana: Illinois University Press. Palmer, Clare, ed. (2007). Teaching Environmental Ethics. Leiden: Brill. Palmer, Clare, ed. (2008). Animal Rights. Farnham: Ashgate. Fudge, Erica, and Clare Palmer, eds. (2014). Veterinary Science: Humans, Animals and Health. London: Open Humanities Press. Rozzi, Ricardo, Steward Pickett, Clare Palmer, Juan Armesto and J. Baird Callicott, eds. (2014). Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World: Values, Philosophy, and Action. Dordrecht: Springer.