research overview
- Dr. Szentkirályi’s interdisciplinary research centers on diverse, contemporary problems of applied ethics, including environmental health risks, sustainable development, corporate social responsibility, gun violence, and disaster risk reduction. In striving to develop ethically-justified yet pragmatic policy proposals, the broader aim of his research is to explore practical ways in which vulnerable groups in our communities can be protected from injustices. For example, Dr. Szentkirályi’s first book, The Ethics of Precaution (New York: Routledge, 2019), defends safeguards against scientifically-unverified environmental health threats and argues that industry is morally obligated to take reasonable strides to prevent putting others in the way of potential albeit uncertain harm—especially vulnerable groups, like children, the elderly, the poor, and marginalized minority groups. Similarly, his most recent manuscript, “Run, Hide, and Fight?!,” aims to raise the standard of corporate social responsibility by arguing that businesses have significant duties of due care to strive to safeguard the public against possibilities of gun-related injuries and deaths, which the gun industry has routinely failed to heed. Dr. Szentkirályi’s current book project, Future Uncertain, is a co-authored edited volume that critically engages genuine and manufactured challenges of uncertainty and brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners across the natural, social, and policy sciences, on a host of climate-change-related problems. In exploring prevailing uncertainties with the impacts of climate change on diverse issue-areas (like ocean health, infectious diseases, food systems, and water security), this book indicts those who would abuse uncertainty to sow doubt and confusion or to advance private agendas at the expense of truth and the public’s interest, and it reaffirms our capacity to overcome uncertainty and achieve greater environmental sustainability.
