Mark Reiff has taught political, legal, and moral philosophy at the University of Manchester, the University of Durham, and is currently at UC Davis.  He was a Faculty Fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.  He is also a lawyer who practiced in California prior to obtaining his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 2003.  Dr. Reiff’s areas of interest include ethics, legal theory, social and political economy, and public policy.  His articles have appeared in leading academic journals internationally, and he is the author of five books, most recently: In the Name of Liberty: the Argument for Universal Unionization (2020).

Mark will discuss how climate change is the result of the failure our political system to reign in the conduct of economic actors, not the system that defines who those actors are. In this talk, he will explain what the political failures that plague us are and why they have occurred, and show that rather than encouraging the mismanagement of our environment, capitalism actually explains where we have gone wrong. Indeed, if we simply take the principles of capitalism more seriously, we can find all the justification that we need for addressing our environmental problems rather than ignoring them.

Sponsored by: The Davis Friends Meeting, Yolo Interfaith Alliance for Climate Justice, Cool Davis