Cover of Environmental Ethics
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articles
1. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 43 > Issue: 4
Michel Bourban Strong Sustainability Ethics
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This article explains how strong sustainability ethics has emerged and developed as a new field over the last two decades as a critical response to influential conceptions of weak sustainability. It investigates three competing, normative approaches to strong sustainability: the communitarian approach, the Rawlsian approach, and the capabilities approach. Although these approaches converge around the idea that there are critical, non-substitutable natural resources and services, they diverge on how to reconcile human development and environmental protection. The aim of the paper is to provide a critical overview of these three perspectives, but also and mostly to show that when we put them into dialogue with each other, we can clarify the demands of sustainability. The paper concludes that the capabilities approach is the most suitable way to think about sustainability, but only if it goes beyond its dominantly anthropocentric view.
2. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 43 > Issue: 4
Igor Eterović Grounding Responsibility to Future Generations from a Kantian Standpoint
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The problem of responsibility to future generations is inherently related to responsibility for the environment. Attempting to provide a new grounding for the figuration of such responsibility, Hans Jonas used Immanuel Kant’s ethics as a paradigm of traditional ethics to provide a critique of their limitations in addressing these issues, and he found three crucial problems in Kant’s ethics (formalism, presentism, and individualism). Kant’s philosophy provides enough material for an answer to Jonas by building an account which 1) gives a teleological grounding of responsibility for the environment and consequently responsibility to future generations; 2) enables the establishment of collective responsibility towards the idea of moral progress, which includes future generations; and 3) answers Jonas’s challenge by extending moral concerns to other living and non-living beings and especially to future generations.
3. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 43 > Issue: 4
Espen D. Stabell Why Environmental Philosophers Should Be "Buck-Passers" about Value
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The value of nature has been extensively debated in environmental ethics. There has been less discussion, however, about how one should understand the relation between this value and normativity, or reasons: if something in nature is seen as valuable, how should we understand the relation between this fact and claims about reasons to, for example, protect it or promote its existence? The “commonsense” view is that value gives rise to reasons. The buck-passing account of value (BPA), on the other hand, implies that for an entity or state of affairs in nature to be valuable just is for it to have properties (other than that of being valuable) that provide reasons to promote or have a pro-attitude towards it. BPA has been extensively debated, but has received little attention in environmental philosophy. In this paper, it is argued that the view suggests a “reasons first” approach to environmental ethics, and that it should be preferred to competing accounts of value in the context of environmental ethics.
4. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 43 > Issue: 4
Jean-Paul Vessel Desert-Adjusted Utilitarianism, People, and Animals
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Recent decades have witnessed a surge in philosophical attention to the moral standing of non-human animals. Kantians, Neo-Kantians, utilitarians, and radical animal rights theorists have staked their claims in the literature. Here Fred Feldman’s desert-adjusted utilitarianism is introduced into the fray. After canvassing the prominent competitors in the dialectic, a conception of an overall moral ranking (relative to a moral choice scenario) consonant with desert-adjusted utilitarianism is developed. Then the conception’s implications regarding the particular locations of individual people and animals in such rankings across various scenarios is explored. Ultimately, it is argued that when it comes to evaluating whether or not some benefit (or burden) morally ought to be bestowed upon some specific person or animal, this new conception of an overall moral ranking is sensitive to a wider range of morally relevant phenomena than its more prominent competitors.
book reviews
5. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 43 > Issue: 4
Bryan E. Bannon Christian Diehm. Connection to Nature, Deep Ecology, and Conservation Social Science: Human-Nature Bonding and Protecting the Natural World
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6. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 43 > Issue: 4
Ben Mylius Steve Vanderheiden. Environmental Political Theory
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7. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 43 > Issue: 4
Richard Newman John Lauritz Larson. Laid Waste! The Culture of Exploitation in Early America
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8. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 43 > Issue: 4
Referees 2021
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9. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 43 > Issue: 4
Index to Volume 43
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