Understanding Environmental Philosophy

Environmental ethics calls into question whether moral obligations invariably arise within relationships and communities, and whether wrong can only be done if some identifiable party is harmed. The aim of this paper is to appraise these assumptions, to argue for negative answers, and to draw appropriate conclusions about the scope of moral standing (or moral considerability). Its findings include the conclusions that our moral obligations (or responsibilities) extend to people and non-human creatures of the foreseeable future, as far as the impacts of present actions and policies can themselves be foreseen, that moral standing attaches to the possible people and other living creatures of the future, and (with Derek Parfit) that ethics is to some degree impersonal, being concerned with future quality of life for whoever lives in future centuries, whether they are currently identifiable or not. This in turn requires sustainable forms of social practice and of the human population. Another conclusion is that these findings are compatible with the approach of stewardship which the author has defended elsewhere, since stewardship need neither be anthropocentric nor managerial, and precludes current and future human agents treating the natural world as we please.

Educating for Environmental Awareness, 1997

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 2005

kathie jenni WESTERN ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: AN OVERVIEW Although Western philosophers have considered humans' relationship to nature since ancient times, environmental ethics as a systematic discipline has emerged only in recent decades. In the early stages of the environmental movement, problems such as pollution, species extinctions, and the destruction of wilderness arose as concerns for anthropocentric, or human-centered, ethics. Philosophical discussions applied traditional ethical principles and theories to these problems, and "applied ethics" expanded to include those analyses. At the same time, some thinkers extended anthropocentric ethics by addressing our potential obligations to future generations of human beingshumans who do not yet exist. Problems such as resource conservation and toxic waste disposal were examined in light of responsibilities to future humans. Environmental ethics took a new turn when philosophers began to argue for nonanthropocentric ethics, which grants direct moral importance to natural objects besides humans. Animal rights philosophers took the lead in arguing for the moral standing of nonhuman animals, but they were soon followed by others who argued that we should extend moral standing to all living things, or even to all natural objects. These philosophers proposed extensions in the scope of application of Western moral principles and concepts. A more radical development came when the moral focus on individuals was challenged by thinkers who argued for holistic ethics: the expansion of moral responsibilities to collections, communities, or wholes. In these theories, entities such as species and ecosystems were accorded moral standing in place of, or in addition to, the individuals that constituted those wholes. Holistic theories challenged not only traditional conceptions of ethics, but also assumptions in metaphysics, epistemology, and political philosophy. Recently, environmental ethics has taken other new forms, from ecofeminism and the study of environmental racism, which connect KATHIE JENNI, professor, Department of Philosophy,

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Ethical Perspectives, 2019

Environmental ethics as a subfield of Anglophone philosophy was effectively inaugurated nearly half a century ago with Richard Routley's 'last man' thought experiment. In 'Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?' (Proceedings of the XVth World Congress of Philosophy, Bulgaria: Sofia Press, 1973), Routley (later Sylvan) argues that we must broaden our ethical thinking beyond 'human chauvinism' to include animals and the natural environment: The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system lays about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to basic chauvinism, but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong.

Environmental Ethics, 1999

In this paper, I examine the significance of Nietzsche's philosophy for environmental ethics. Nietzsche's philosophy of nature is, I believe, relevant today, because it makes explicit a fundamental ambiguity that is also characteristic for our current understanding of nature. I will show how the current debate between traditional environmental ethics and postmodern environmental philosophy can be interpreted as a symptom of this ambiguity. From the perspective of Nietzsche's critique of morality, environmental ethics is a highly paradoxical project. According to Nietzsche each moral interpretation of nature implies a conceptual seizure of power over nature. On the other hand, Nietzsche argues, the concept of nature is indispensable in ethics, because we have to interpret nature in order to have a meaningful relation with reality. I argue that awareness of this paradox might open a way to respect nature as radical otherness.

2004

The argument advanced is this thesis is that the entities that make up the environment are those that do not owe their origin to any willful creative activity but have evolved through accidental natural processes. This fact of not being willfully created makes the environment ontologically independent and confers on it intrinsic value as opposed to instrumental value. This intrinsic value is one that all the entities that make up the environment share. It is further argued that this intrinsic value is aesthetic rather than moral. Only beings that are specially endowed with certain capacities, like reflection and understanding, could be said, in the context of this work, to have intrinsic moral value in the sense of being moral agents. But as moral agents, we need to give moral considerability to all the natural entities in the environment since they share the same natural right with us, based on our common origin. So, even though the nonhuman, natural entities in the environment do ...

2008

This essay examines the foundations of contemporary environmental ethics vis-à-vis classic paradigms of modern moral philosophy by contrasting in particular the “ocular-phenomenological” and the “rational-discursive” modes—the former emerging from the work of Schopenhauer, Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, the latter by way of Kant, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas. This essay argues that, while the rational-communicative approach seems best fitted for success within the broader field of social ethics, it is in fact the phenomenological viewpoint which is ultimately more sympathetic with the modern environmental movement, and which is also coincident with religious ethics of attention and compassion, particularly those of East Asian traditions. If environmental issues are to be taken seriously, the framework of conventional moral theory (which tends towards the Kantian sort) needs to be expanded to admit the non-human, relinquishing the latent language of instrumentality and control that...

Market capitalism has increased wealth beyond the imagination of previous generations, but cannot, in and of itself, distribute it equally or even equitably. These are problems that cannot be solved within the terms set by modernity, for the simple reason that they are not procedural, but rather valuational or, to use the simple word, moral. There is no way of bypassing difficult moral choices by way of a scientific decision-procedure that states "Maximize X". We first have to decide which X we wish to maximize, and how to weigh X against Y when the pursuit of one damages the fulfilment of the other. The human project is inescapably a moral project." Jonathan Sacks (in Dunning, 2003)