Although it is widely held that we do not owe basic respect to nonhuman animals, a close examination of why we owe this respect to human beings leads to the conclusion that we owe it to nonhuman animals as well. While Kant’s basic notion of respect for persons is intuitively plausible, Kant’s two arguments for why respect is owed to human beings ultimately fail, and a reconsideration of which feature of human beings actually grounds the respect that humans are owed is called for. Ultimately, it is not the robust rational autonomy that Kant suggests, but rather the basic subjectivity that underlies it (being the subject-of-a-life). Since this subjectivity is shared by nonhuman animals, they are owed respect as well.

The Alberta tar sands, and the proposed pipelines which would carry their bitumen to international markets, comprise one of the most visible environmental controversies of the early twenty-first century. Jacques Ellul’s theory of technology presents ostensibly physical phenomena, such as the tar sands, as social phenomena wherein all values are subsumed under the efficient mastery of nature. The effect of technological rationality is totalizing because technical means establish themselves as the exclusive facts of the matter, which creates a socio-political environment wherein ethical engagement is precluded. Analyzing the tar sands controversy through Ellul’s hermeneutic challenges environmental ethics to a more radical stance than the continuation of the technological worldview, and thus offers meaningful and hopeful alternatives to the status quo.

Juxtaposing the ecological insights of Arne Naess and Eihei Dōgen, Deane Curtin maintains that Dōgen’s metaphysical conception of sentience subsumes and corrects Naess’s ecologi­cal Self and its problem of limits. However, an alternative reading of Dōgen, one which deemphasizes the ontological status of the natural world in favor of how we epistemically view it, revitalizes Naess’s question of limits and enables us to reappropriate the problem as our problem. This line of thinking forces us to rethink how we relate to the natural world.