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news and notes
1. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
NEWS AND NOTES
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features
2. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Clare Palmer “Taming the Wild Profusion of Existing Things”?: A Study of Foucault, Power, and Human/Animal Relationships
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I explore how some aspects of Foucoult’s work on power can be applied to human/animal power relations. First, I argue that because animals behave as “beings that react” and can respond in different ways to human actions, in principle at least, Foucoult’s work can offer insights into human/animal power relations. However, many of these relations fall into the category of “domination,” in which animals are unable to respond. Second, I examine different kinds of human power practices, in particular, ways in which humans construct animal constitutions and animal subjectivities. Finally, I use a case study of a pet cat to show how such power practices may come together in a single instance.
3. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Mick Smith Environmental Anamnesis: Walter Benjamin and the Ethics of Extinction
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Environmentalists often recount tales of recent extinctions in the form of an allegory of human moral failings. But such allegories install an instrumental relation to the past’s inhabitants, using them to carry moralistic messages. Taking the passenger pigeon as a case in point, I argue for a different, ethical relation to the past’s inhabitants that conserves something of the wonder and “strangeness of the Other.” What Walter Benjamin refers to as the “redemptive moment” sparks a recognition of the Other that allows us to engage in heartfelt mourning for them, rather than falling into the repetitive self-absorption characteristic of Freudian melancholy. This redemptive moment changes forever our relations to the world around us.
discussion papers
4. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Jay R. Harmon Notions of Self-Interest: Reflections on the Intersection between Contingency and Applied Environmental Ethics
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If agents motivated only by self-interested reasons practice different degrees of ethical environmental behavior at least partly because they hold different notions of what is in their self-interest, then the nature of our self-interest conceptions is a central issue in environmental ethics. Unless set by biology, as seems unlikely from the evidence, the breadth of the individual self-interest conception we each develop must depend on the specific experiences we are each contingently exposed to in our lives. If nurturing a stronger environmental ethic within our society is a goal, if that ethic depends at least in part on how we individually conceive of our self-interest, and if the development of each of our self-interest conceptions responds contingently to input from others, then these reflections lead to normative considerations that reach beyond the standard ethical questions regarding how to act to others that concern, antecedently, whether to act at all.
5. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Scott Friskics Dialogical Relations with Nature
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I suggest that our dialogical encounters with our fellow creatures furnish the experiential ground of ethical action with respect to them. Unfortunately, this ground is seldom realized or recognized in our society; our capacity for ethical action remains unmoored from its animating sources. Yet despite our habitual inattentiveness, nature’s creatures may still grace us with their presence in dialogue. The works of Martin Buber and Henry Bugbee provide the theoretical framework within which I attempt to work through these ideas and interpret their ethical significance in the context of personal experience.
6. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Hugh McDonald Toward a Deontological Environmental Ethics
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In this paper, I outline both a nonanthropocentric and non-subjective theory of intrinsic value which incorporates pragmatism in environmental ethics in a novel way. The theory, which I call creative actualization, is a non-hierarchical, nonsubjective theory of value which includes the value of nonhuman species and the biosphere. I argue that there are conditions to such values. These limitations include evaluations of actual improvement (meliorism) and reciprocity as conditions. These conditions are necessary limitations upon actions, i.e., duties. I incorporate a deontological ethic thereby as an alternative to utilitarian and other ethical theories in environmental ethics. Duties are to species and to habitats, not to individuals. I conclude that the distinction between ethics and ecological ethics is no longer tenable, given a theory of obligation which is truly universal rather than speciesist. Ecological ethics is the ethics of the future, embracing a way of life, duty, and questions of ultimate worth.
book reviews
7. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Michael Black Fishy Business: Salmon, Biology, and the Social Construction of Nature
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8. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Jonathan Olsen Bioregionalism
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9. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Ned Hettinger The Natural and the Artefactual: The Implications of Deep Science and Deep Technology for Environmental Philosophy
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referees
10. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
REFEREES 2001
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index
11. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
INDEX FOR 2001
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news and notes
12. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
NEWS AND NOTES
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features
13. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Louke van Wensveen Ecosystem Sustainability as a Criterion for Genuine Virtue
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I propose an ecologically attuned criterion for genuine virtue, namely, the criterion of ecosustainable virtue: a genuine virtue includes the goal of ensuring ecosystem sustainability. I show how this criterion emerges from environmental practice and how it can be supported by syllogistic reasoning.
14. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Manussos Marangudakis The Medieval Roots of Our Environmental Crisis
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Controversy about Lynn White, Jr.’s thesis that Western Christianity is to blame for the ecological crisis we face today has recently shifted to medieval social developments and how they affected theological notions of nature. Contributing to the social perspective of the debate, in this essay I examine the emergence of materialism as an effect of the relationship between the Latin Church and Western society. Rationalism and utilitarianism, two main features of Latin theology, were appropriated by medieval political and economic elites to produce a radical anthropocentric and materialist Weltanschauung. Utilitarianism and rationalism came to be so strongly embedded in Western culture that they became a diachronic feature of European thought.
discussion papers
15. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Laura Westra From Aldo Leopold to the Wildlands Project
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Aldo Leopold’s influence on environmental ethics cannot be overstated. I return to Leopold’s work in order to show the connection between the ethics of integrity and many of the points made by Leopold in his writings. I also show how the spirit of Leopold’s land ethic and his love and respect for wilderness is present and current in the Wildlands Project, and that it is a live part of public policy in North America, albeit a debated one.
16. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Cecilia Wee Cartesian Environmental Ethics
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René Descartes is often thought to have exerted a pernicious influence on our views concerning the relationship of humans to the environment. The view that because animals are machines, “thoughtless brutes,” they have no moral standing, and we thus have a right to use them to further our own interests, is attributed to him. A celebrated passage from the Discourse on Method adds fuel to the view that he subscribes to the “dominion” theory. I argue that this picture is misleading and unfair. Descartes does not hold the dominion theory, and there is evidence that he accords animals (and plants) moral standing. Most importantly, Descartes holds that it is a human good to subordinate one’s interests to those of the larger universe. He can, in fact, be seen as a forerunner of modern ecocentrism.
17. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Ronnie Hawkins Cultural Whaling, Commodification, and Culture Change
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Whaling is back on the international stage as pro-whaling interests push to reopen commercial whaling by overturning the moratorium imposed in 1986. Proponents of ending the ban are using two strategies: (1) appealing to public sentiment that supports indigenous subsistence whaling by attempting to cloak commercial whaling in the same guise and (2) maintaining that reopening commercial whaling is the “scientific” option. I reject both ploys, and instead shift the focus for global debate to scrutinizing the industrial economic model that Western culture is currently imposing on the rest of the world, a model which ultimately reduces all life forms to mere commodities for the marketplace.
18. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Kevin DeLuca Rethinking Critical Theory: Instrumental Reason, Judgment, and the Environmental Crisis
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Through rethinking the trajectory of critical theory, I suggest the need to reconsider its environmental possibilities. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School, usually overlooked in environmental circles, provides a fecund opening for social and environmental theory with its recognition that the multiple catastrophes of the twentieth century are not extrinsic to civilization but intrinsic to the rationality of the Enlightenment. That is, the promise of the scientific domination of nature and rational forms of social organization simultaneously spawn the perils of environmental crises, fascism, genocide, world wars, and nuclear annihilation. With its theorizing of the domination of nature as involving the interconnection of humans and nature in a shared fate, the Frankfurt School provides a fundamentally ecocentric base for rethinking humanity-nature relations. Further, through its nuanced understanding of reason, critical theory provides a trenchant critique of instrumental reason and suggests judgment as the basis for a new ethic for humanity’s interactions with the natural world.
book reviews
19. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Lois Ann Lorentzen The Earthist Challenge to Economism: A Theological Critique of the World Bank
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20. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Anthony Weston Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology
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