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1. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
News and Notes
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features
2. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
Bryan E. Bannon From Intrinsic Value to Compassion: A Place-Based Ethic
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If the value of intrinsic value accounts lies in the establishment of an impetus to accept duties with respect to nature and to make sense of specific feelings of attachment and affection toward nature, then these goals can be met equally well through the virtue of compassion. Compassion is an other-directed emotion, and is thus not anthropocentric when directed toward nature. It requires us to be capable of relating to and identifying suffering in another. However, basing an ethic on compassion requires a hermeneutic shift in how we think about nature and particular places such that we consider more closely how time is related to suffering. Since suffering is inevitable, there are several ways that compassion might be embodied in our actions, all of which share the feature of promoting the wildness of a place.
3. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
Mitsuyo Toyoda Revitalizing Local Commons: A Democratic Approach to Collective Management
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The abandoment of the use of local natural resources has caused serious ecological degradation in some parts of the world. Such situations highlight the importance of a democratic approach to the revitalization of commons. According to traditional systems of resource management, a clear boundary should be set between users and non-users: a closed community has been regarded as the basis for appropriate governance of resources. To the contrary, when restoring commons, it is more important to create an open platform that gathers people from various backgrounds and generations and to consider together possible means for sustainable resource governance. In terms of field research in environmental restoration conducted on Sado Island, Japan, there are three conditions that need to be stressed in the process of establishing a collaborative platform: (1) accepting a variety of participants, (2) maintaining a fair and neutral stance, and (3) respecting various sorts of knowledge. In addition to these conditions, cultivating the ability to engage in adaptive rule making is crucial to the realization of an autonomous community for sustainable resource governance.
4. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
S. P. Morris Challenging the Values of Hunting: Fair Chase, Game Playing, and Intrinsic Value
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Hunting is typically valued for its instrumentality for food procurement, wildlife management, conservation, heurism, and atavism. More importantly, some hunting is valued intrinsically. A particular form of hunting (i.e., fair-chase hunting) is a game and game playing, categorically, is often valued intrinsically. This view can be further supported with an application of a concept of caring and an accompanying argument that hunting generally, and fair-chase hunting in particular, is cared about deeply by millions of its practitioners. There are normative grounds for a shift in the way that hunting is valued. While hunting as game playing is valued and cared about deeply by millions of fair-chase practitioners, which is (morally) far more important than any of its various instrumentalities, the position that such hunting is morally villainous can be sustained.
discussion papers
5. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
Elspeth Whitney The Lynn White Thesis: Reception and Legacy
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If we are to accurately gauge the validity of Lynn White, Jr.’s thesis as articulated in his article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (1967), we must bring together recent research not only in the fields of environmental ethics and ecotheology but also in environmental history. We must also consider White’s work as a whole, including his Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962), which has been ignored for the most part by non-medievalists. Environmental history provides a corrective to White by anchoring medieval attitudes and practices in specific times and places and demonstrating that the medieval period was not monolithic or uniform with respect to attitudes toward nature. Recent work by medieval environmental historians confirms that while many of the broad claims made by White in “Roots” and Medieval Technology and Social Change must be strongly qualified, his central point that medieval agriculture was an important part of European environmental history has been largely sustained.
6. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
Jeff Baldwin What Ought I to Eat?: Toward an Ethical Biospheric Political Economy
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Humanity’s food production activities profoundly affect our planet’s biosphere. While people commonly apply various ethical frameworks in making food choices, few consider the individual’s relationship with or obligation to our biosphere, the source of all food. A practical ethical framework capable of evaluating the relative biospheric goodness of various food production systems is needed. Toward that end there are three foundational concepts: (1) an elaboration of Marx’s concept of value here extended to incorporate the life activity of all living beings, (2) a refocusing of ecological thought to include the value and the spaces created by nonhuman communities, and (3) a characterization of power which also works to include all life and to obviate certain human/biospheric dichotomies. This approach joins the Marxist theory of value and exchange—which has well developed ethical principles—with ecology, which offers key insights into biotic relationships, but as a science eschews ethical positions. It is important to attend not only to the value resident in nonhuman bodies, but also to the value that these co-inhabitants invest in biospheric spaces—a matter often overlooked in both the social and natural sciences.
7. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
Ryan Gunderson Animal Epistemology and Ethics in Schopenhauerian Metaphysics
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Within Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy he set aside a special place for animals. Not only did Schopenhauer show great affection for other species and repeatedly criticize Western anthropocentrism, but he also argued that we could know a great deal about animals by intimately knowing ourselves. Although currently underdeveloped, Schopenhauer’s introspective methodology sheds light on how we can begin to mend the epistemic human-animal boundary through his emphasis on immediate, concrete knowledge and intuition. In practice too, Schopenhauer’s metaphysically grounded ethical system of compassion offers an alternative to both utilitarianism and deontology to bridge the human-animal moral boundary. For Schopenhauer, if a person recognizes the identical, underlying substance of their self and the animal kingdom, he or she will extend loving kindness and justice to all creatures.
book reviews
8. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
Roger J. H. King Anthony Karvonen. Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City
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9. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
Robert L. Chapman William R. Jordon III and George M. Lubick. Making Nature Whole: A History of Ecological Restoration
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10. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
Piers H. G. Stephens Ben A. Minteer. Refounding Environmental Ethics: Pragmatism, Principle, and Practice
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11. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
Andrew Biro Deborah Cook. Adorno on Nature
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12. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
Ilan Safit Simon P. James. The Presence of Nature: A Study in Phenomenology and Environmental Philosophy
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13. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
Nancy M. Rourke Donna Bowman and Clayton Crockett, eds. Cosmology, Ecology, and the Energy of God
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14. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 35 > Issue: 3
David Dillard-Wright In Defense of the Ark of the Possible: A Reply to Chris Nagle
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