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1. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 29
Nathan Beaucage, Polina Whitehouse Editors' Introduction
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2. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 29
Bryan G. Norton Environmental Philosophy at the Edges of Science
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While environmental ethics has flourished and contributed to the discussion of environmental policy, other areas of philosophy (epistemology, for example), have been less in evidence in these discussions. In this paper, we explore a role for these neglected areas: they are best viewed as meta-level discussions of the conceptual and linguistic problems that arise as scientists develop models at the edges of scientific fields relevant to our understanding of environmental problems and possible solutions. The relevant fields, which might differ depending on the specific environmental problem being addressed, can be thought of as a collection of “philosophies of ____” where the blank stands for one of the relevant disciplines, such as biology, ecology, or economics. We eschew the typical arguments regarding which models are correct in favor of a pragmatic/pluralistic approach to understanding scientific models. This pragmatic approach softens interdisciplinary conflicts as Rudolf Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance (linguistic conventionalism) urges an experimental approach to developing linguistic frameworks for differing situations. This approach is illustrated by an examination of the models proposed by ecologists and economists.
3. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 29
Michael Marder Is a Philosophy of Nature Still Tenable?
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This article contemplates the possibility of a philosophy of nature in and for the twenty-first century. Following an examination of the contemporary critiques of the concept of nature, I propose an alternative approach, inspired by Heraclitus and Friedrich Schelling, according to which nature is not an archaic category, but something yet to come, to be invented and reinvented. At the same time, I argue that the irreducible futurity of nature needs to be set in the context of the current global destruction of ecosystems, which indicates the exhaustion of the fecundity and self-renewal that are at the core of the future-oriented conception of nature as an activity. Hence, whatever is yet to come as far as nature is concerned ought to be anticipated in light of what I call “finite finitude,” implying an ethics that is distinct from the ideologies of infinite renewability.
4. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 29
Elisa Aaltola Platonic Love of Nonhuman Nature and Animals
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Some philosophers have argued that love has moral-psychological power, as it can motivate one to appreciate the existence of others and to offer care for them. This appears evident in the context of our relations with nonhuman animals and nature: love can motivate one to think of them as morally considerable. But what is love? The paper at hand investigates one classic philosophical definition of love and applies it to our relationship with other animals and nature. This definition is the quality view of love, i.e., Platonic love, which, I argue, facilitates deeper moral concern for nonhuman animals and things.
5. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 29
Simon P. James Against Relational Value
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In some environmental circles, talk of relational values is very much in fashion. It is said that we must think in terms of such values if we are to understand how such things as canyons, mangroves, and coral reefs matter to people. But that is bad advice. Appeals to relational values are typically misleading in several respects. Granted, those who make such appeals often do so in order to make the important point that some values are neither intrinsic nor instrumental in form, but that point can be made more clearly by referring to other concepts, such as that of constitutive value. To this objection, some may respond that appeals to relational value are nonetheless useful. However, as things stand, their usefulness remains unproven.
6. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 29
Serenella Iovino Politics and Ecology among Calvino’s Trees: An Exercise in Narrative Scholarship and the Environmental Humanities
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This article examines one of Italo Calvino’s most beloved novels, (1957), contextualizing it in its landscape and exploring the multifaceted strands of its environmental creativity. Unsuspected paths of political ecology, environmental history, and even biosemiotics and plant neurophysiology will emerge, thus showing the timeliness and clairvoyance of his books vis-à-vis our planetary crises. Written in a seminarrative form, this piece is an invitation to read literary works not only along with their landscapes, but their landscapes, and to consider the potential of more-than-human stories for the shaping of our ethical-environmental imagination.
7. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 29
Marion Hourdequin Intergenerational Ethics, Moral Ambivalence, and Climate Change
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Global climate change raises critical issues of intergenerational ethics. One of these issues involves what Stephen Gardiner calls intergenera­tional buck-passing (IGBP)—a pattern through which each generation does little to address climate change and instead passes the problem along to the next, progressively amplifying the climate crisis over time. My goal in this paper to explore two key questions: (1) What is at the root of intergenera­tional buck-passing? and (2) What changes might help to disrupt it? To an­swer these questions, I argue that we need to understand and address the role of moral ambivalence in reinforcing the status quo and creating friction that impedes climate action. Confronting moral ambivalence may enable more thoughtful and just responses to climate change that support intergenerational solidarity and mutual flourishing.
8. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 29
Daniel M. Haybron In Lieu of an Environmental Ethic: Beauty, Good Lives, and the Preservation of Nature
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This paper argues that a specifically environmental ethic is neither needed nor perhaps desirable for effecting the change in values for which many environmentalists have rightly called. Rather, familiar values such as beauty and excellence, and especially an outlook that regards those values as central aspects of a good life, may be all that is needed. The requisite ethic of appreciation is already embedded to some degree in a wide range of cultures, so no radical shift in values is called for, nor convergence on a tendentious moral framework. But this outlook meets with skepticism from the dominant public ethos, as embodied for instance in mainstream economics. While this paper does not offer a full-blooded defense of an aesthetic grounding for environmental concern, it does suggest that the skepticism about such a grounding is considerably overblown.
9. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 29
J. Baird Callicott, Nathan Beaucage, Noemi Iten An Interview with J. Baird Callicott
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10. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 29
Holmes Rolston III, Sam Lebenson, Justin Wong An Interview with Holmes Rolston III
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11. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 29
Noemi Iten, Sam Libenson An Interview with Peter Singer
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12. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 28
Justin Wong, Woojin Lim Editors' Introduction
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13. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 28
William A. Edmundson "In Such Ways as Promise Some Success"
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This year is the centenary of the birth of philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) and the semi-centenary of his monumental A Theory of Justice (1971). This essay explores the differences between political opposition and political resistance as reflected in his work. Rawls is remembered for the careful conditions he imposed in the Vietnam-War era upon justifiable civil disobedience in “nearly just” societies. It is less well known that he came to regard the United States as a fundamentally unjust society. The nation has shown itself not merely unserious about political equality—the cornerstone of Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness—but hostile to it. The Supreme Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence sanctifies spending as speech and denies Congress the power to try to level the electoral playing field. In the Supreme Court’s Constitution, substantive political equality is of no value. The upshot is that civil disobedience, conceived as an appeal to a just constitution, is no longer possible in the United States. Political resistance may be permissible, however, within the bounds of right, “in such ways as promise some success.” This essay ekes out Rawls’s suggestive remarks about the justification of political resistance and attempts to extend them to current conditions.
14. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 28
Adam Burgos A Dialectical Taxonomy of Resistance
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Working from Adorno’s notion of negative dialectics, this essay charts a dialectical course of resistance toward a horizon of universal freedom. Rather than propose relations between ideal types of resistance, it emphasizes the ineliminable historical dimensions of not only real-world resistance movements but also the philosophical and political theorizing that attempts to make sense of them. In doing so it brings out certain conceptual relations that emerge or recede as the context of resistance shifts. The first moment considers the dichotomy between reform and revolution, the second moment delves into modes of reform, and the third looks to modes of revolution. Along the way the essay discusses the work of such varied figures and organizations as Rosa Luxemburg, John Rawls, Martin Luther King, Jr., Candice Delmas, Robin Celikates, Kimberlee Brownlee, Emma Goldman, Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground, and the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. In the end, the essay is written in the service of understanding the stakes and presuppositions of resistance, in theory and practice.
15. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 28
Michele Bocchiola, Emanuela Ceva Whistleblowing, or the Resistance to Institutional Wrongdoing from Within
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The article discusses the resort to whistleblowing as a form of resistance to institutional wrongdoing that comes from within an institution. The resort to whistleblowing can take either an individual or an institutional form. As an individual act of resistance, whistleblowing has often been presented as a last resort against institutional wrongdoing whose justification draws on normative arguments for civil disobedience. The institutional form we present in this article shows a nontrivial sense in which a “normalized resort” to whistleblowing can be morally justified as an ordinary practice to resist institutional wrongdoing. Whistleblowing is thus a component of an institutional ethics of office that calls on officeholders’ responsibility to engage in practices of self-scrutiny and self-correction of institutional dysfunctions. The integration of the justification of the resort to whistleblowing within this framework emphasizes the importance of entrusting the oversight of institutional action primarily to institutional members.
16. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 28
Tony Milligan The Tolerant Animal Advocate
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One of the recurring problems of animal rights advocacy in recent years has been the difficulty of matching up such advocacy with the broadly liberal political environment in which it operates. Animal advocates may score high on compassion for the animal victims of injustice, but much lower when it comes to political compassion for opponents. Fairly or otherwise, those with a robust, partisan commitment to animal rights have secured a reputation for intolerance. So much so, that it may even be difficult to form a plausible picture of what tolerant animal advocacy would look like, without compromising the partisanship of advocates. This paper attempts to unify partisanship and tolerance within a picture of the tolerant animal advocate as someone whose agency is marked by at least two significant constraining features. Firstly, they will engage in negative appraisals of dietary practices, but will not ordinarily move from such appraisals to any overall judgment of the character of others. Hence, they will be in no position to hold that vegetarians or vegans are in some sense better people than meat eaters. Secondly, they will deploy charges of hypocrisy rarely and with caution.
17. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 28
William E. Scheuerman Politically Motivated Property Damage
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Can politically inspired property damage or destruction be justified? This question is hardly of mere academic interest, in light of recent political protests in Hong Kong, the USA, and elsewhere. Against some contemporary writers, I argue that placing property damage under an open-ended rubric of uncivil disobedience does not generate the necessary conceptual and normative distinctions. Drawing on Martin Luther King, Jr., I instead argue that property damage should not be equated or conflated with violence against persons; it also takes a variety of quite different forms. Anyone hoping to pursue politically motivated property damage should meet preconditions whose stringency will be determined by a key question: Do their acts generate or at least plausibly relate to violence against persons? Our answer to the question provide some space for legitimate, politically motivated property damage. Although some theories of property resist the strict delineation of violence to persons from property damage I defend, they fail to capture the realities of property ownership in existing societies, including the USA and, as such, do not undermine my defense, under existing conditions, of limited property damage.
18. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 28
Bernardo Caycedo Masked Protesting: On Anonymous Civil Disobedience
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The rise of digital technologies has made possible a variety of anonymous acts of disobedience. Although the use of anonymity in political contestation is not new, online anonymous disobedience—such as that of the hacktivist collective Anonymous—urges political thinkers to reexamine the concept of civil disobedience. Important questions need to be asked about the extent to which anonymous, principled law-breaking is compatible with the definition, tradition, and justification of civil disobedience. This article argues that the understanding of civil disobedience employed by liberal thinkers, which rejects the notion that anonymous actions can be classified as civil disobedience, should be reviewed. Both the context in which actors break the law and the extreme risks they might face for doing so in illiberal and undemocratic societies need to be considered when thinking about what constitutes civil disobedience. The article takes these factors into account and offers a radical democratic account of civil disobedience according to which anonymous disobedience is indeed compatible with civil disobedience.
19. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 28
William Smith The Politics of Protest Policing: Neutrality, Impartiality, and “Taking the Knee”
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The dramatic fallout from the siege of the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump has included extensive debate about the role of law enforcement before and during the events. The apparent lack of adequate preparation and deployment fits with disturbing trends in protest policing, reflecting pervasive discrepancies between police responses to protests by right-wing or white supremacist movements and their responses to Black Lives Matter (BLM) or left-wing movements. This article addresses the ethical and political implications of these discrepancies by making the case for impartiality rather than neutrality in protest policing. The principle of impartiality is preferred because of its comparative advantages in expressing and encouraging rights-respecting forms of protest policing. The case for impartiality is also related to calls for a broader overhaul of protest policing, including a reversal of trends that pose a serious threat to the rights of assembly and protest.
20. The Harvard Review of Philosophy: Volume > 28
Ashwini Vasanthakumar Victims’ Reasons and Responses in the Face of Oppression
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Victims of oppression often disagree amongst themselves on how best to respond to their oppression. Often, these disagreements are cast as disagreements about what strategies of resistance would be most effective. In this article, I argue that victims have a wider repertoire of responses to their oppression which reflect the different underlying reasons they have to respond. I outline three distinct reasons for action—self-respect, assistance, and justice—and the respective responses to oppression—rejection, assistance, and resistance—that these reasons call for. I then provide some general comments on how these distinct reasons and responses relate to one another. Appreciating a wider repertoire of reasons and responses can illuminate the nature of disagreement amongst victims, points to the unavoidability of conflict, and provides for a more nuanced understanding of resistance and its alternatives—an understanding that can aid in better responding to injustice.