Steve’s current research focuses on global environmental problems (especially climate change), future generations, and virtue ethics.

Steve is the author A Perfect Moral Storm: the Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford, 2011), co-author of Debating Climate Ethics (Oxford, 2016), co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics (Oxford, 2016), coordinating co-editor of The Ethics of “Geoengineering” the Global Climate: Justice, Legitimacy and Governance (Routledge, 2020) and Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (Oxford, 2011), and editor of the Oxford Handbook of Intergenerational Ethics (Oxford, in press) and Virtue Ethics: Old and New (Cornell, 2005).  He has also published articles on climate justice, geoengineering, the precautionary principle in international law, nuclear protection, Aristotle’s basic and nonbasic virtues, and Socrates’ pessimism about politics.  Some have appeared in leading journals, while others have been published in important edited volumes.  A number have been reprinted in standard textbooks and collections.  (For downloads, see ‘Links’.)

Much of Steve’s work has a broad and interdisciplinary audience.  For example, it has been cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s report on governing geoengineering, the National Research Council’s report on America’s Climate Choices, and the U.K. Treasury’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.  He is also often interviewed by the media, including in the past by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation (UK, Brazil, Nigeria), CNBC, China Radio International, Der Standard (Austria), the Guardian (UK), National Public Radio, Scientific American, the Seattle Times, the Sunday Times (of London), Volkskrant (the Netherlands), the Washington Post, and the Weather Channel.