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1. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
NEWS AND NOTES
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from the editor
2. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
After Twenty Years
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features
3. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
Alastair S. Gunn Rethinking Communities: Environmental Ethics in an Urbanized World
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Humans have largely transformed the natural environment and there is scarcely an area of the world which has not been affected by human activity. Human domination of the environment, in particular by the creation of infrastructure, urbanization, and conversion to agriculture, has mostly proceeded in an unplanned and frequently destructive manner. Almost fifty percent of humans already live in cities and this proportion will continue to grow. However, issues of urbanization are little addressed in the environmental philosophical literature. I explore community and sustainability in an urban context, drawing on the work of the landscape architect Ian McHarg who, I argue, may have more to offer an urbanized world than iconic figures such as Aldo Leopold.
4. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
James P. Sterba A Biocentrist Strikes Back
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Biocentrists are criticized (1) for being biased in favor of the human species, (2) for basing their view on an ecology that is now widely challenged, and (3) for failing to reasonably distinguish the life that they claim has intrinsic value from the animate and inanimate things that they claim lack intrinsic value. In this paper, I show how biocentrism can be defended against these three criticisms, thus permitting biocentrists to justifiably appropriate the salutation, “Let the life force (or better the ethical demands of life) be with you.”
discussion papers
5. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
Roy W. Perrett Indigenous Rights and Environmental Justice
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The modern environmental movement has a tradition of respect for indigenous cultures and many environmentalists believe that there are important ecological lessons to be learned from studying the traditional life styles of indigenous peoples. More recently, however, some environmentalists have become more sceptical. This scepticism has been sharpened by current concerns with the cause of indigenous rights. Indigenous peoples have repeatedly insisted on their rights to pursue traditional practices or to develop their lands, even when the exercise of these rights has implications in conflict with environmentalist values. These conflicts highlight some important questions in environmental ethics, particularly about the degree to which global environmental justice should be constrained by therecognition of indigenous rights. I explore some of these issues and argue for the relevance of the “capability approach” to environmental justice.
6. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
Sandra B. Rosenthal, Rogene A. Buchhholz Bridging Environmental and Business Ethics: A Pragmatic Framework
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In the last few years, some attempts have been made to overcome the disparity between environmental ethics and business ethics. However, as the situation now stands the various positions in business ethics have not incorporated any well-developed theoretical foundation for environmental issues, and conversely, environmental ethics is failing to capture an audience that could profit greatly from utilizing its theoretical insights and research. In this paper, we attempt to provide a unified conceptual framework for business ethics and environmental ethics that can further the dialogue that has recently begun, perhaps bringing it to a deeper theoretical level.
7. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
Christopher J. Preston Epistemology and Intrinsic Values: Norton and Callicott’s Critiques of Rolston
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Debates over the existence of intrinsic value have long been central to professional environmental ethics. Holmes Rolston, III’s version of intrinsic value is, perhaps, the most well known. Recently, powerful critiques leveled by Bryan G. Norton and J. Baird Callicott have suggested that there is an epistemological problem with Rolston’s account. In this paper, I argue first that the debates over intrinsic value are as pertinent now as they have ever been. I then explain the objections that Norton and Callicott have raised against Rolston’s position. In the main body of the paper, I attempt to show that Rolston’s position can accommodate these objections. In this defense of Rolston’s position, I have two goals: first, to show that the notion of non-subjective intrinsic value in nature is coherent, and second, to illuminate the places where further philosophical work on intrinsic value remains to be done
book reviews
8. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
Timothy Casey Interpretations on Behalf of Place: Environmental Displacements and Alternative Responses
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9. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
Patrick Hayden The Natural Contract
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10. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
Anna Peterson Good Natured: The Origin of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals
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11. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
Gary E. Varner A Wolf in the Garden: The Land Rights Movement and the New Environmental Debate
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referees
12. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
REFEREES 1998
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index
13. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
INDEX FOR 1998
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14. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 4
TWENTY-YEAR INDEX (1979–1998)
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15. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 3
NEWS AND NOTES
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features
16. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 3
Julie Cook The Philosophical Colonization of Ecofeminism
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There is general agreement among ecofeminists regarding the desirability of a variety of expressions of ecofeminism, but this pluralism is under threat with the emergence of an approach that emphasizes the primacy of a philosophical ecofeminism which claims the authority to prescribe what ecofeminism should be. The recent anthology Ecological Feminism is symptomatic of this trend, with contributors who affirm the philosophical significance of ecological feminism by privileging philosophers’ voices over those of other ecofeminists, rather than by engaging in critical dialogue with, and exploring connections between, different ecofeminist discourses. This colonizing strategy actively excludes many women’s voices from the creation of an environmental ethic, including those of activist, spiritual, and “Third World” ecofeminists, but fails to offer any adequate philosophical grounds for doing so.
17. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 3
Chris Crittenden Subordinate and Oppressive Conceptual Frameworks: A Defense of Ecofeminist Perspectives
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In this essay, I first demonstrate that Beth Dixon’s central arguments challenging Karen Warren’s “logic of domination” do not succeed. Second, I argue that the logic of domination not only connects the oppression of women and animals—a possibility that Dixon disputes—but it in fact plays a significant role in connecting these oppressions, and many others besides, in its capacity as a component of a larger oppressive conceptual framework. My negative arguments against Dixon provide a foundation for the positive arguments in the second half of the paper, wherein, in contravention of her project, I establish that humans and animals clearly share emotions in a philosophically interesting sense, that this affective similarity allows us to draw conclusions about the oppression of animals from situations oppressive to humans, and, the main thesis, that the suffering of women, animals, and other oppressed groups is the symptom of a ubiquitous mindset morally untenable, psychologically dysfunctional, and characterized by an ideology of superior/inferior-dominator/dominated thinking.
discussion papers
18. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 3
Jim Cheney Universal Consideration: An Epistemological Map of the Terrain
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I offer an epistemologically grounded revisioning of Tom Birch’s ethical principle of universal consideration, suggesting that epistemologies have ethical dimensions and hence that universal moral consideration is intrinsic to the epistemological enterprise. I contrast epistemologies of domination with epistemologies in part constituted by the generosity of spirit that is the hallmark of Birch’s notion of universal consideration.
19. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 3
Anthony Weston Universal Consideration as an Originary Practice
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Tom Birch has decisively transformed the so-called “considerability” question by arguing that all things must be “considerable” from the start in “the root sense” if we are to determine what further kinds of value they may have. Spelling out this kind of “root” or “deep” consideration proves to be difficult, however, especially in light of post-Kantian conceptions of mind. Such consideration may also ask of the world too ready a kind of self-revelation. This paper proposes another, complementary version of universal consideration: as a kind of practical invitation, as a way of creating the space within which a response can emerge or an exchange coevolve. I conclude by locating this vision within a picture of ethics as a whole that brings what I call its “originary” stage, rather than its formal stage, into focus.
20. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 20 > Issue: 3
Stan Godlovitch Things Change: So Whither Sustainability?
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Two broad metaphysical perspectives deriving from Parmenides and Heraclitus have implications for our notion of sustainability. The Parmenidian defends a deepseated orderliness and permanence in things, while the Heraclitian finds only chance and change. Two further outlooks, the nomic (or the big-picture scientific) and the prudential, present differing accounts of our place in the world. While the nomic outlook accepts nothing privileged about the human perspective or even life itself, the prudential outlook is obviously welfare-centered. It is argued that nomic views, whether Parmenidian or Heraclitian, fail to provide any rationale for sustainability measures or concerns. The only such rationale comes from Parmenidian prudentialism, which, I argue, can operate only if it disowns at its peril the nomic point of view and couches sustainability entirely under the rubric of maximizing certain preferred opportunities drawn from collective self-love. But doing so merely evades rather than answers the tension imposed by the nomic Heraclitian for whom nothing lasts and nothing human counts specially in the measure. The liabilities of Parmenidian prudentialism are examined and found to be too great for any consistent notion of sustainability to bear.