Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Browse by:



Displaying: 1-8 of 8 documents


news and notes
1. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 2 > Issue: 3
NEWS AND NOTES (1)
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
features
2. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 2 > Issue: 3
J. Donald Hughes The Environmental Ethics of the Pythagoreans
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Two conflicting tendencies may be discerned in Pythagorean ethics as applied to the environment: on the one hand, a sense of reverence for nature and kinship with all life that opposed killing and other forms of interference in the natural world, and on the other hand, a doctrine of the separability of soul and body which denigrates the body and the external world of which it is apart. The prescriptive content of Pythagorean ethics includes prohibitions against taking life, even in sacrifices to the gods, and against eating anything that has been killed. Pollution of certain kinds is forbidden. These strictures were based on an organic, cyclical view of the world, emphasizing its harmony and balance. The Pythagoreans investigated some questions that would today be called ecological. Perhaps most importantly, they evinced a genuine respect for living things, deriving in part from the belief that animals and plants contain the reborn souls of human beings. These doctrines may have been derived from the attitudes and practices of ancestral hunters and gatherers in southeast Europe, with traditional Greek religion serving as the means of transmission from tribaI cultures to c1assical philosophy. The followers of Pythagoras split into two schools: a “scientific” school that neglected biology and therefore ecology, and a “religious” school that emphasized purity of soul and rejected any concern with physical nature. The more “environmentalist”teachings were gradually abandoned as the Pythagoreans accommodated themselves to the general attitudes of Greco-Roman culture. For instance, the objections to animal sacrifice, and to most plants as food, were dropped. The divorce of body and soul in later Pythagorean thought, wherever its influence was strong, brought with it indifference not only to the body, but to all the rest of the natural environment.
3. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 2 > Issue: 3
Walter H. O'Briant Leibniz’s Contribution to Environmental Philosophy
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In this essay I survey the philosophy of the seventeenth-century German thinker Gottfried Leibniz as a preliminary to eliciting some of the implications of his views for environmental philosophy. Reference is also made to the views of the ancient atomists, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza.
4. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 2 > Issue: 3
Alan R. Drengson Shifting Paradigms: From the Technocratic to the Person-Planetary
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In this paper I examine the interconnections between two paradigms of technology, nature, and social life, and their associated environmental impacts. The dominant technocratic philosophy which now guides policy and technological power is mechanistic. It conceptualizes nature as a resource to be controlled fully for human ends and it threatens drastically to alter the integrity of the planet’s ecosystems. Incontrast, the organic, person-planetary paradigm conceptualizes intrinsic value in all beings. Deep ecology gives priority to community and ecosystem integrity and seeks to guide the design and applications of technology according to principles which follow from ecological understanding. I describe this shift in paradigms and how it affects our perceptions, values, and actions.
discussion papers
5. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 2 > Issue: 3
James E. Scarff Ethical Issues in Whale and Small Cetacean Management
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Three main ethical issues involved in the management of whales and small cetaceans are examined: ethical values concerning extinction and their implications for consumptive management regimes, the humaneness of current and feasible future harvesting techniques, and the ethical propriety of killing cetaceans for various uses. I argue that objections to human-caused extinction are primarily ethical, and that the ethical discussion must be expanded to include greater consideration of acceptable risks and problems associated with extinction due to human-caused genetic selection. Whaling methods are objectively described including death times for whales. I show that the debate on humaneness is not about the facts of the hunt, but about the appropriate standard for judging whether or not a technique ishumane. Economic and ecological arguments which attempt to preempt the ethical questions are discussed and dismissed as specious. Arguments which attempt to distinguish ethically human relations with cetaceans from relations with other wildlife species are reviewed critically.
news and notes
6. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 2 > Issue: 3
NEWS AND NOTES (2)
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
discussion papers
7. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 2 > Issue: 3
Kenneth E. Goodpaster On Stopping at Everything: A Reply to W. M. Hunt
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Contrary to W. Murray Hunt’s suggestion, living things deserve moral consideration and inanimate objects do not precisely because living things can intelligibly be said to have interests (and inanimate objects cannot intelligibly said to have interests). Interests are crucial because the concept of morality is noncontingently related to beneficence or nonmaleficence, notions which misfire completely in theabsence of entities capable of being benefited or harmed.
book reviews
8. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 2 > Issue: 3
Peter Danielson The Ethics of War
view |  rights & permissions | cited by