Dr Tony Milligan

Current research, as part of the KCL (China) team and the University of Manchester (Russia) team within the Cosmological Visionaries project, takes in the ethical aspects of dialogue building between local scientists, indigenous peoples and national minorities in Russia and China in the face of climate change. The key theme uniting my broader areas of research is otherness and our shared future. This works its way into various publications on Space (other places), philosophy of love (other people), and animals (other creatures). Tony is also an Affiliate of the Lau China Institute.

Teaching

Social Ethics, Applied Ethics, Meta-ethics, Philosophy of Religion.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• The science/religion boundary and its implications for deliberation and policy.
• The relationship between scientific cosmologies and indigenous/national minority cosmologies.
• Pragmatics of inclusion/democratisation of decision making about future landscapes and technologies.

Expertise and public engagement

Associate editor for Springer’s Space and Society series; co-editor of the White Paper on Astrobiology and Society in Europe (2018), drawing on the collaborative work of scientists across 20 countries and 30 scientific institutions as part of Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action TD1308 Origins; collaborative work on Space covered in international press and publications, from Der Spiegel to Scientific American. Most recent TV appearance: Conflicts over Space resources: RTVI 2 Dec, 2020

Selected publications

• Elvis, Milligan and Krolikowski, ‘Concentrated lunar resources: imminent implications for governance and justice’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. 20190563, (2020).
• Pravda v době populismu/Truth in a Time of Populism (2019). 
• ‘Valuing Humans and Valuing Places: “Integrity” and the Preferred Terminology for Geoethics’, Geosciences, 8.25 (2018), 17-29.
• Jim Schwartz and Tony Milligan (eds), The Ethics of Space Exploration (2016). 
• Nobody Owns the Moon: The Ethics of Space Exploitation (2015).