Steering Committee/Affiliated faculty

headshot of Anja Karnein

Anja Karnein

Associate Professor, Graduate Director of Philosophy

Philosophy

Background

Anja Karnein's main areas of research are intergenerational-, climate- and global justice. 

Three concerns drive her research:

  1. What we owe to others — our contemporaries and future generations — with regard to the just distribution of the benefits and burdens involved in intra-and intertemporal social cooperation 
  2. What happens to our duties under nonideal circumstances, and 
  3. How to ensure, institutionally, that we keep our duties

Select Publications

  • “Historical Immortality and the Prospect of Human Extinction.” The Journal for the Philosophy of History, 2025.
  • “Two Kinds of Social Cooperation?” Economics and Philosophy, 2025. 
  • “Intergenerational Distributive (Climate) Justice.” Res Publica 2025.
  • “What’s Wrong with the Presentist Bias? On the Threat of Intergenerational Domination.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2023
  • “Rawls and the Future: On the Possibility of Cooperation Across Time.” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2022

She also has expertise in bioethics, such as the ethics of reprogenetic technologies (A Theory of Unborn Life, OUP 2012) and the ethics of parenthood in “Parenthood -Whose Right is it Anyway?” 2012).

Research Interests

  • Intergenerational Justice
  • Climate Justice
  • Global Justice
  • Theories of Social Cooperation
  • Ethics of Reprogenetic Technologies
  • Ethics of Parenthood

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