Ben Bramble

I am a philosopher based at the Australian National University in Canberra, in the Fenner School of Environment & Society, with affiliations at ANU's School of Philosophy and InSpace. My research asks what a genuinely good future for humanity would involve, and how our economies, institutions, and public policies might be reorganised to pursue it. That question runs through my work on the ethics of AI, bioethics and medicine, and space technologies, and increasingly draws me toward ecological economics and the "wellbeing economy": the idea that human and ecological flourishing, rather than endless economic growth, should be the real measure of progress and the aim of public policy.

My book Lunacy: Ten False Promises of the New Space Age (Princeton University Press, 2026) makes this case against one seductive vision of the future, that humanity's destiny lies in colonising space, and argues that our real task is to solve the problems we face here on Earth. I am now extending this work toward questions of how governments might define, measure, and budget for national wellbeing beyond GDP.

Before joining ANU, I was a tenured Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Liverpool, a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values (2019–2020), and a visiting senior research fellow at the University of Oxford. Alongside my academic work, I write for a general audience in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Sydney Morning Herald.

For a full list of publications and accurate citation count, please see my profiles at Philpapers and Google Scholar.