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Elizabeth Finneron-Burns
Contact Information
Office: SSC 7211
Tel: 519 661-2111 X 82236
E-mail: efinnero@uwo.ca
Education
Research Interests
Dr. Finneron-Burns is interested in our obligations to future generations, including who and how many people we create, and what kind of lives we leave them.
I am interested in supervising MA and PhD projects about intergenerational justice, the ethics of human extinction, climate ethics, rectifying historic injustice, and feminist political theory.
Current Research Projects
Dr. Finneron-Burns is currently working on ‘The Ethics of Human Extinction’ project funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant. I am exploring how we ought to think about the ethics of human extinction, in particular: (i) what we mean by ‘humanity’ and ‘human extinction’; (ii) whether there would be anything bad or wrong about causing or allowing humans to become extinct and (iii) whether we have an obligation to our ancestors to preserve the human species.
Dr. Finneron-Burns is also interested in intergenerational ethics more broadly, especially how we ought to balance what we owe to future people with what we owe to the world’s current poor.
Scholarly Books (Authored & Co-Authored)
- 2024. Finneron-Burns, Elizabeth, What We Owe to Future People, Oxford University Press.
- 2022. Arrhenius, Gustaf, Krister Bykvist, Tim Campbell and Elizabeth Finneron-Burns, eds. Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics, Oxford University Press.
Refereed Journal Articles
- 2025. ‘Would conceptualising past, current, and future generations as constituting a ‘league of patients’ be useful for humanity?’ American Medical Association Journal of Ethics 27(8).
- 2025. ‘Do we have relational reasons to care about intergenerational equality?’ Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 2(3).
- 2024. ‘Productive Justice in the ‘Post-Work’ Future’ Journal of Applied Philosophy 41(2) (with Caleb Althorpe).
- 2024. ‘Humanity: Its Constitution, Value, and Extinction’ The Monist 107(2).
- 2023. ‘Are Savior Siblings a Special Case in Procreative Ethics?’ Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26(1) (with Caleb Althorpe).
- 2023. ‘Global Justice, Sovereign Wealth Funds, and Saving for Future People’ Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. Online First.
- 2023. ‘Luck Egalitarianism and Non-Overlapping Generations’ Ratio 36(3).
- 2022. ‘Human Extinction and Moral Worthwhileness’ Utilitas 34(1).
- 2019. Review of Diana Coole’s Should We Control World Population? in Ethics & International Affairs, 33(1).
- 2018. ‘The Intergenerational Original Position.’ Social Theory & Practice, 43(4).
- 2017. ‘What’s Wrong with Human Extinction?’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 47(2).
- 2016. ‘Contractualism and the Non-Identity Problem’. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 19(5).
Book Chapters
- 2021. 'State Pension Schemes and the Duties of Retirees' (forthcoming) in Stephen Gardiner (Ed.) Oxford Handbook of Intergenerational Justice, Oxford University Press.