About
About
The chapters that are not on the CV, and one that explains the rest.
The Navy
I served in the United States Navy during the Vietnam era, aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and afterwards aboard USS Constellation. I was aboard Enterprise on the January morning in 1969 when a rocket detonated on her flight deck and twenty-eight men died. I took an honorable discharge and went to Seattle University on the GI Bill.
I have never thought of that morning as the reason I became an ethicist. But I did not come to questions about suffering and dying out of a library, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Alaska
In the middle of my doctoral work at Notre Dame I went north. I spent three years in Alaska — first in Anchorage, then on Kodiak Island, working for the New England Fish Company on the docks and crewing shrimp, cod and bottomfish boats. I climbed Mount Alyeska. Then I went back to Notre Dame and finished.
The photographs below are my own.
The sea
I have kept a long interest in sailing, and hold a Competent Crewman certificate from the Southern Cross Sailing School through the Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron. Between the Navy, the Alaskan boats and the Squadron, I have spent a fair amount of my life on water and expect to spend more.
Technology and consulting
Alongside the ethics work I built and ran an independent consulting practice in business and information technology. It sits oddly beside moral theology until you notice that most of what I have done — the courses, the conferences, the handbooks, the outreach programmes, and now the websites and video — has been production work. The subject changes. The craft of getting something made and in front of the people who need it does not.
Now
I live in Brisbane, where I have been for the past thirty years. I am politically independent and hold a long-standing interest in progressive public life and in the human rights of Indigenous peoples, with particular attention to First Nations peoples in Australia.