Alan Carter is a professor of philosophy at the University of Glasgow, concentrating mainly on political, moral and environmental philosophy. His life, however, looks nothing like what you would expect from the typical professor of philosophy.

Alan Carter was born in England in 1953. He spent his childhood moving around from one air base to another with his stepfather, a RAF airplane mechanic. He studied chemistry at the University of Sussex, but the career in the field of chemical research wasn’t fulfilling. In his own words: “When I found out that my future would most likely consist of making nerve gas for British government or creating profit for a multinational corporation, I left my promising career in the chemical industry”. Alan tried almost every job, from a welder to a bus driver. He hitchhiked to India, he lived in a kibbutz for some time. After he returned to England, he started to study philosophy at the University of Kent. He studied in California, Sussex and Oxford respectively. In 1987, he started to teach at the Dublin University, then in London at Heythrop College. He accepted a professorship at the University of Colorado in 2001. After several short-time stays at various universities in various parts of the word, he settled at the University of Glasgow, the fourth oldest university in the United Kingdom, accepting the position of the Chair of Moral Philosophy department, a position that was once held by Adam Smith.

Alan Carter has written three books and published over fifty articles on various topics. In the area of political philosophy, he concentrated on the topics of political responsibility, equality and property rights, regarding environmental philosophy he wrote about the moral status of non-human beings and ecosystems, in the area of applied ethics, he focused on the problem of responsibility to future generations, but he also concentrated on the issue of poverty of the Third World. Recently he has been focusing on the development of the environmentalist moral theory.

In his latest book - A Radical Green Political Theory – he studies the relation between the environmental crisis, the character of economic structures and the role of the modern state. He concludes that the combination of these factors leads mankind to a catastrophe and after analyzing authoritarian, reformist, Marxist and anarchist approaches to the environmental issues, he arguments that only radical political action can avoid the catastrophe.

Alan Carter is certainly not just a philosopher. As an activist, he contributed to activities of organizations such as Friends of the Earth or Global Response. At present, he is the chairman of the organization committee of World Development Movement Scotland.