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

Browse by:



Displaying: 1-20 of 47 documents


news and notes
1. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
NEWS AND NOTES
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
features
2. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
Alan Carter Saving Nature and Feeding People
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Holmes Rolston, III has argued that there are times when we should save nature rather than feed people. In arguing thus, Rolston appears tacitly to share a number of assumptions with Garrett Hardin regarding the causes of human overpopulation. Those assumptions are most likely erroneous. Rather than our facing the choice between saving nature or feeding people, we will not save nature unless we feed people.
3. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
Kevin de Laplante Environmental Alchemy: How to Turn Ecological Science into Ecological Philosophy
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Ecological science has been viewed by some philosophers as a foundational resource for the development of metaphysical, epistemological and normative views concerning humanity’s relationship with the natural environment, or what might be called an “ecological philosophy.” Analysis of three attempts to infer philosophical conclusions from ecological science shows that (1) there are serious obstacles facing any attempt to derive unique philosophical consequences from ecological science and (2) the project of developing an ecological philosophy relevant to human-environment relations is seriously hindered by a reliance on traditional ecological science that focuses on relations between nonhuman organisms and their environments. However, the search for an ecological philosophy is not inherently misguided because (1) although ecological science may never support a unique philosophical interpretation of ecological theory, empirical evidence can function to narrow the range of possible interpretations, which is a significant epistemic achievement; and because (2) there are several non-traditional branches of ecological science that focus on human-environment relations and that consequently may be better suited to function as conceptual resources for the sorts of problems that concern environmental philosophers.
discussion papers
4. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
Stephen J. Duffin The Environmental Views of John Locke and the Maori People of New Zealand
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In recent years, the trend in environmental ethics has been to criticize the traditional Western anthropocentric attitude toward nature. Many environmentalists have looked toward some of the views held by indigenous peoples in various parts of the world and argue that important ecological lessons can be learned by studying their beliefs and attitudes toward nature. The traditional Western viewpoint has been labeled as a form of shallow environmentalism, allowing few rights for anything other than human life. In contrast, indigenous peoples are seen as respecting all things. Thus, the claim is made that the latter’secological views are deeper than those of Western views. John Locke is often placed at the center of this tradition that is associated with indifference to the environment. Yet, a comparison of the fundamental beliefs that drive the environmental ethics of the Maori people with those of John Locke reveals surprising similaries. It may well be the case that any adoption by the West of another culture’s view would be too difficult given that there are so many foundational beliefs that are alien to the West, but which are nevertheless required to drive such an ethic. Nevertheless, if we can find similarities between various views, such as those of the Maori and Locke, we may have a greater appreciation of one another’s beliefs and hence less reluctance to adopt them if they will benefit the environment. Our efforts could then perhaps be directed toward putting environmental ethics into practice rather than fighting over which doctrine is the correct one.
5. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
Aaron Lercher Is Anyone to Blame for Pollution?
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
By making use of a distinction between “making something happen” and “allowing it to happen,” a polluting act can be defined as making something happen with widely scattered externalized costs. Not all polluting acts are blameworthy, but we can investigate which polluting acts are sufficiently badly performed as to be blameworthy. This definition of polluting act permits us to justify the belief we often have that behavior concerning pollution may be blameworthy, even when we do not know whether the behavior caused harm.
6. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
Paul M. Wood Intergenerational Justice and Curtailments on the Discretionary Powers of Governments
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Governments of all nations presume they possess full discretionary policymaking powers over the lands and waters within their geopolitical boundaries. At least one global environmental issue—the rapid loss of the world’s biodiversity, the sixth major mass extinction event in geological time—challenges the legitimacy of this presumption. Increment by increment, the present generation is depleting the world’s biodiversity by way of altering species’ habitats for the sake of short term economic gain. When biodiversity is understood as an essential environmental condition—essential in the long term because it is the source of the biological resources upon which humans depend—then the strongly differential distribution of benefits and burdens between generations raises an issue of intergenerational justice. We receive the short-term benefits of economic development; future generations will receive the resulting burden of a biosphere in which one of the life-support systems necessary for humanity will have been compromised. Using Ronald Dworkin’s conceptions of distributive justice, it can be demonstrated that constitutional constraints on the discretionary powers of governments, for the sake of intergenerational justice, are entirely consistent with central tenets of liberal democracy. As a result, we should abandon to some extent the presumption that governments have full jurisdiction over the lands and waters within their boundaries.
book reviews
7. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
Ernest Partridge Justice, Posterity, and the Environment
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
8. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
Shari Collins-Chobanian Democracy and the Claims of Nature
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
9. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands “Earthwork: Women and Environments,” Special Issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
comment
10. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
A. Dionys de Leeuw Angling and Sadism: A Response to Olson
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
referees
11. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
REFEREES 2004
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
index
12. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
INDEX FOR 2004
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
news and notes
13. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
NEWS AND NOTES
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
features
14. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Katie McShane Ecosystem Health
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
On most understandings of what an ecosystem is, it is a kind of thing that can be literally, not just metaphorically, healthy or unhealthy. Health is best understood as a kind of well-being; a thing’s health is a matter of retaining those structures and functions that are good for it. While it is true both that what’s good for an ecosystem depends on how we define the system and that how we define the system depends on our interests, these facts do not force us to the conclusion that an ecosystem has no good of its own. Ecosystems and persons can have goods of their own in spite of the fact that the schemes we use to categorize them are matters that we decide upon.
15. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Rachel Brown Righting Ecofeminist Ethics: The Scope and Use of Moral Entitlement
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Rights have been criticized as incorporating features that are antithetical to ecofeminism: rights are allegedly inherently adversarial; they are based on a conception of the person that fails to reflect women’s experience, biased in an illegitimate way toward humans rather than nonhumans, overly formal, and incapable of admitting the importance of emotion in ethics. Such criticisms are founded in misunderstandings of the ways in which rights operate and may be met by an adequate theory of rights. The notions of entitlement and immunity that flow from a conception of rights have great use and potential in environmental ethics. Nonetheless, our understanding of moral rights must be revised in order to realize this potential. The usual attribution of moral rights is structurally arbitrary because obligations arising from others’ rights are unjustifiably distinguished from other sorts of obligations for which the same sorts of justificatory bases obtain. Once this arbitrariness is recognized, there remains little reason not to extend a continuous framework of entitlement toward nonhuman animals and nature more generally. Reassessing moral rights according to a basic principle of respect delivers an integrated account of our moral obligations toward one another, and a satisfactory basis from which to account for our diverse obligations toward nonhuman animals and the environment.
discussion papers
16. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Kimberly Smith Black Agrarianism and the Foundations of Black Environmental Thought
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Beginning with the nineteenth-century critiques of slave agriculture, African American writers have been centrally concerned with their relationship to the American landscape. Drawing on and responding to the dominant ideology of democratic agrarianism, nineteenth-century black writers developed an agrarian critique of slavery and racial oppression. This black agrarianism focuses on property rights, the status of labor, and the exploitation of workers, exploring how racial oppression can prevent a community from establishing a responsible relationship to the land. Black agrarianism serves as an important starting point for understanding black environmental thought as it developed in the twentieth century, and for illuminating the connections between social justice and environmental stewardship.
17. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Derek Bell Environmental Justice and Rawls’ Difference Principle
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
It is widely acknowledged that low-income and minority communities in liberal democratic societies suffer a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards. Is “environmental injustice” a necessary feature of liberal societies or is its prevalence due to the failure of existing liberal democracies to live up to liberal principles of justice? One leading version of liberalism, John Rawls’ “justice as fairness,” can be “extended” to accommodate the concerns expressed by advocates of environmental justice. Moreover, Rawlsian environmental justice has some significant advantages over existing conceptions of environmental justice.
18. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Adrian Del Caro Nietzschean Considerations on the Environment
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The superhuman (Übermensch) is a human being attuned to his or her environment in such a way that human and environment function as a whole, in keeping with Zarathustra’s prophecy that the superhuman is the meaning of the Earth. Nietzsche’s rhetorical embrace of the Earth in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is actually grounded in the works of the 1870s, in particular Human, All Too Human, whichdoes not receive its due in critical engagement but which requires serious critical revisitation if the ecological Nietzsche is to be heard above his own rhetoric. When Nietzsche’s writings are considered from the standpoint of ecology, it emerges that the phrase “the superhuman shall be the meaning of the Earth” is not so much focused on a debatable vision of future humanity, but instead addresses strategies for inhabiting our finite Earth in a spirit of creativity, partnership, and meaningful daily interaction. The hotly debated doctrine of will to power, for example, undergoes clarification and grounding when subjected to ecological standards, resulting in a will to empowerment whose beneficiaries are not only humans who assume proper stewardship of the Earth, but all Earthly life forms insofar as the meaning of Earth must include them.
book reviews
19. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Alan Carter Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
20. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Seamus Carey Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth
view |  rights & permissions | cited by