Jesus’ teachings on neighborliness, frugality, support for the poor, and nonviolence should become more central to Christian environmental ethics. His actionoriented teachings do not explicitly mention nature, yet should have a beneficial collateral effect on environments when practiced by Christian communities. This issue affects Christian economics, simple causality models of environmental beliefs and impacts, and “love of nature” theology.

Industrialism’s assimilation of the natural world has developed over the centuries through complex hierarchies of effects involving ecological, cultural, and psychological dimensions. One of the consequences of this assimilation is the fragmentation of the temporal structure of the world and its replacement by a short-term logic that also infects human subjectivity. Because of this fragmentation, the healing of the natural world cannot be realized either simply or directly, and effective action requires us to locate our immediate objectives within a recovered longerterm vision of a healthy natural world.

Although controversy concerning the morality of hunting is generally focused on sport hunting, sport hunting itself is not a morally distinctive kind of hunting. The understanding of hunting in general needs to be supplemented with reference to the goods which hunting seeks. Attempts to draw a moral distinction between sport and subsistence hunting are inadequate and historically suspect. Likewise, trying to establish sport hunting as morally distinctive by emphasizing its similarities to other sports also fails. Nevertheless, there are standards accepted by hunters that support ethical judgments about hunting. Ethical hunting requires reentry into a community of nonhuman beings governed by ecology and evolution, not human constructs, the development of virtues such as tenacity, courage, moderation, and discipline, and the achievement of a heightened respect for the biotic community in which the hunt takes place. By means of such standards, we may yet be able to determine what good hunting is even though we are unable to determine whether sport hunting is good.

The view that organisms deserve moral respect because they have their own purposes is often grounded in a specification of the biological functions that the organism has. One way to identify such functions, adopted by Gary Varner, is to determine the etiology of some behavior based on the evolution of the structures enabling it. This view suffers from some unacceptable problems, including that some organisms with profound defects will by definition have a welfare interest in their defects. For example, this view entails that the patented oncomice, intentionally engineered and bred for a genetic defect that leads to extremely high incidence of cancer, would have a welfare interest in the development of tumors. The systems-based theory of biological functions, which refers not to the evolution of structures but rather to their role in the organism, escapes these problems, and shows how a theory of an organism’s welfare interest in its purposes can be grounded in a sound naturalistic approach. This approach also has some fruitful corollaries, including an elegant theory of why species may require special moral regard.

Act utilitarians often use causation in after-the-fact assessments of accountability in group environmental harms. Such attempts are seriously flawed. Causation need not, and many times should not, be important in assessments of accountability for act utilitarians. A model that maximizes utility in such assessments called the “best fit model” provides a good alternative. Because use of this model leads to more utility than models of after-the-fact accountability which rely on causal links, act utilitarians should adhere to the “best fit model” regardless of actual causal links. Although the “best fit model” is a better method to assign accountability using an act utilitarian approach than methods involving causation, it does have a serious flaw in regard to application and future utility. Given this flaw, the model (indeed, any after-the-fact model of accountability) is not enough to ensure future utility maximization. To maximize utility to the fullest, the model should be used along with incentives to prevent environmental harm before it occurs. Perhaps if such incentives are strong enough, the model may not need to be imposed at all. However, in cases where harm does occur, the “best fit model” yields the most utility. Thus, if the “best fit model” is not an acceptable method by which to assess responsibility, neither is act utilitarianism

The application of constructivism to “nature” and “wilderness” is intellectually and politically objectionable. Despite a proclivity for examining the social underpinnings of representations, constructivists do not deconstruct their own rhetoric and assumptions; nor do they consider what socio-historical conditions support their perspective. Constructivists employ skewed metaphors to describe knowledge production about nature as though the loaded language use of constructivism is straightforward and neutral. They also implicitly rely on a humanist perspective about knowledge creation that privileges the cognitive sovereignty of human subject over nature. Politically, the constructivist approach fails to take the scientific documentation of the biodiversity crisis seriously; it diverts attention toward discourses about the environmental predicament, rather than examining that predicament itself; and it indirectly cashes in on, and thus supports, human colonization of the Earth.

The familiar “centrisms” in environmental ethics aim to make ethics progressively more inclusive by expanding a single circle of moral consideration I propose a radically different kind of geometry. Multicentrism envisions a world of irreducibly diverse and multiple centers of being and value—not one single circle, of whatever size or growth rate, but many circles, partly overlapping, each with its own center. Moral consideration necessarily becomes plural and ongoing, and moral action takes place within an open-ended context of negotiation and covenant. Much critical and constructive work, both in environmental ethics proper and in many related fields, is already multicentric in spirit. It needs to be drawn together into an explicit, alternative environmental-ethical “platform.”

The biocentric outlook on nature affirms our fellowship with other living creatures and portrays human beings as members of the Earth’s community who have equal moral standing with other living members of the community. A comparison of Paul Taylor’s biocentric theory of environmental ethics and the life and writings of St. Francis of Assisi reveals that Francis maintained a biocentric environmental ethic. This individualistc environmental ethic is grounded in biology and is unaffected by the paradigm shift in ecology in which nature is regarded as in flux rather than tending toward equilibrium. A holistic environmental ethic that accords moral standing to holistic entities (species, ecosytems, biotic communities) is more vulnerable to these changes in ecology than an environmental ethic that accords moral standing to individuals. Another strength of biocentrism is its potential to provide a unified front across religious and scientific lines.