Allison Hagerman

I'm a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. I've been teaching undergraduate courses in critical thinking and ethics for six years, and currently I am working with a team at the National Hispanic Cultural Center on developing curriculum for a sustainability studies summer program for high school and undergraduate college students in Albuquerque. Namely, we are interested in making the science and economics of sustainability culturally relevant for students here in New Mexico by combining contemporary analysis with an examination of their own cultural histories; as such, cultural sustainability is one of our main focuses.

Generally speaking, I am interested in how conceptual schemata affect how humans perceive and engage their environment and fellow inhabitants. The application of my current research is in contributing to discourse regarding how cognition and perception combine to inform the rules which govern ethical consideration and moral behavior, as well as morally appropriate vs. inappropriate emotional response to one’s environment. Specifically, in my dissertation I am working on understanding the connection between aesthetic appreciation and moral consideration of natural environments. In what ways can cultural aesthetic criteria enhance the virtue or viciousness of our manner of inhabiting our environment? If art history informs the aesthetic criteria that governs art criticism in which art is not reduced to a means to an end (that is, has intrinsic worth, regardless of market value), then what role can science play in informing an aesthetic criteria that would govern our appreciation of nature in such a way that we would be more hesitant to reduce the natural world to a mere resource for human ends? Does any particular aesthetic sensibility yield a moral attitude that recognizes the natural world as intrinsically valuable, an end in itself and not a mere means? If there are multiple such sensibilities, what do they share in common, and how are they cultivated?