Topic: The Moral Implications of Brownspinning
Speaker: Simon Rosenqvist
Date: March 19, 2026
Time: 13.00-14.00
Location: Teams, sign up here >
Organizers: Sustainable Finance Lab
ABSTRACT: Companies sometimes respond to pressure from regulators and stakeholders by divesting their most polluting assets—a practice known as “brownspinning.” This allows sellers to appear more environmentally responsible, even though overall emissions remain unchanged or rise. In this talk, I present my ongoing research on brownspinning. First, I summarize the findings of an ethical analysis in which I argue that companies can be held responsible for their divestment practices by assessing the comparative emissions of asset sales. Second, I present preliminary results from a study, conducted in collaboration with psychologists at Linköping University, which examines public responses to fossil fuel divestments.
BIO: Simon Rosenqvist is a researcher in the Financial Ethics group at the University of Gothenburg and an affiliated researcher at the Sustainable Finance Lab. He earned his PhD in 2020 from Uppsala University with a dissertation on the utilitarian moral theory. Since then, he has conducted research in medical ethics, climate ethics, and financial ethics. His current work examines the concept of “impact” in sustainable finance, along with issues related to collective action problems and corporate carbon accounting.
