Animals, Ethics and Geography

Area, 1998

Summary Geographers have become increasingly interested in questions of ethics. In this paper, I introduce the scope and major concerns of ethics, briefly reviewing recent literature as a means of situating geography's potential contribution. I then link ethics to the geographical imagination by developing a twofold schema representing geography's ontological project and epistemological process, an approach that unites existing professional and substantive ethical concerns among geographers. Examples of recent work by geographers in these areas are noted. I close with a set of broad questions at the interface of ethics and geography worthy of further reflection.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).

Geographies and Moralities

I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural then yes let it be … these are small distinctions where do we see it from is the question. Rich, 'Here is a Map of Our Country', in An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991)

In this review article the author identifies two distinct ethical spheres current in human geographical discourse: anthropocentric ethics and biocentric ethics. Without discriminating against either he calls for a ‘true biocentric ethics’ that collapses this binary incorporating the social and political factors bound up in human/human relationships integral in todays planetary ethical and ecological concerns.

Progress in Human Geography, 2009

Anthropological Forum, 2018

A recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land and place as groundings for moral challenges and practices that are nevertheless not place-bound. A critical moral anthropology of land and place should be directed, we argue, to the interplay of mobility and emplacement, to the dynamics of landscape and ‘dwelling’, and to the multiplicities of expectation and meaning that surround the making and exploitation of resources. In contexts of global and local change, land and place offer productive grounds from which to consider the moral horizons – both spatial and temporal – of our world and our discipline.

Progress in Human Geography, 2007

In this second report, I consider the relationship between emotion and morality from a geographical perspective. Though traditional and contemporary engagements in moral philosophy and psychology offer a diverse range of theories and approaches to emotions and morality, few of these explicitly consider or incorporate the role of space. I consider theories of embodiment and relationality as one means through which emotions become collective and institutionalized, with a focus on emotional geographies and care. I conclude by reflecting on political emotions as conflictive but insightful signals of societal shifts in our moral emotions, and suggest that incorporating emotions may also provide a different way of thinking about the problem of distant care.