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1. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4

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features

2. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4
Simon P. James

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In several works, Holmes Rolston, III has argued that a satisfactory environmental ethic cannot be built on a virtue ethical foundation. His first argument amounts to the charge that because virtue ethics is by nature “self-centered” or egoistic, it is also inherently “human-centered” and hence ill suited to treating environmental matters. According to his second argument, virtue ethics is perniciously human-centeredsince it “locates” the value of a thing, not in the thing itself, but in the agent who is “ennobled” by valuing it. These charges, though illuminating, are not in the final analysis compelling. The first misconceives the role of motivation in virtue ethics, while the second ultimately rests on a misunderstanding of the place of the human perspective in ethical considerations.
3. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4
John Nolt

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The move from good to ought, a premise form found in many justifications of environmental ethics, is itself in need of justification. Of the potential moves from good to ought surveyed, some have considerable promise and others less or none. Those without much promise include extrapolations of obligations based on human goods to nonsentient natural entities, appeals to educated judgment, precautionary arguments, humanistic consequentialist arguments, and justifications that assert that our obligations to natural entities are neither directly to those entities nor derived from our obligations to humans. Some arguments that extrapolate obligations based on goods involving sentience from humans to sentient animals are promising, but whether they are sufficient is controversial. Gandhian andAristotlian arguments are also promising, provided we can justify their ought premises.

discussion papers

4. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4
Anna L. Peterson

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Environmental ethics has been dominated by an idealist logic that limits its positive impact on the natural world about which environmental philosophers care deeply. Environmental ethicists need to alter the ways we think and talk about what we value and the relations among ideas, values, and actions. Drawing on the sociology of religion and Marxian philosophy among other sources, a new approach may increase our understanding of how ideas are lived out and how we might increase the impact of our ideas about the value of nature.
5. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4
Darren Domsky

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J. Baird Callicott defends a communitarian environmental ethic that grounds moral standing in shared kinship and community. This normative theory is unacceptable because it is out of synch with our considered moral judgments as environmental philosophers. Ecological communitarianism excludes in advance entities that would obviously qualify for moral standing, and scuttles itself in the process.
6. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4
Ian Mills

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Suggestions made by Luce Irigaray in her book, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, may offer a solution to a problem in environmental ethics which has much in common with the gender problem: the tendency of the masculine to exploit the Other as “a-place-to-be-in.” If humans are to achieve the ethicality of mutually beneficial, sustainable relating with all beings, we need to initiate an economy of desire which has regard to a reciprocity of receptivity-activity, as a way of safeguarding a clear space open to the kind of relating that makes possible a “permanent becoming” together of all beings. We need to live in a psychic No-Place, to experience our environment as the potentially infinite “Open” of “our-between.”

book reviews

7. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4

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8. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4
Elizabeth Mauritz

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9. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4
Philip Cafaro

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10. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4
Albert Cinelli

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11. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4
Joyce M. Barry

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referees

12. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4

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index

13. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 4

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news and notes

14. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 3

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features

15. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 3
Mick Smith

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The question of environmental responsibility is addressed through comparisons between Hannah Arendt’s and Ulrich Beck’s accounts of the emergent and globally threatening risks associated with acting into nature. Both theorists have been extraordinarily influential in their respective fields but their insights, pointing toward the politicization of nature through human intervention, are rarely brought into conjunction. Important differences stem from Beck’s treatment of risks as systemic and unavoidable side effects of late modernity. Arendt, however, retains a more restrictive anthropogenic view of political action which, while recognizing its unpredictable consequences for human (and nonhuman) others, includes a direct link between individually initiated acts and the taking of ethical responsibility. This latter account best explains the ethical motivations behind much environmental activism.
16. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 3
Ronald Sandler

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If claims about which character traits are environmental virtues are to be more than rhetoric, there must be some basis or standard for evaluation. This naturalistic, teleological, pluralistic, and inclusive account of what makes a character trait an environmental virtue can be such a standard. It is naturalistic because it is consistent with and motivated by scientific naturalism. It is teleological becausecharacter traits are evaluated according to how well they promote certain ends. It is pluralistic because those ends are both agent-relative and agent-independent. It is inclusive because it counts environmentally justified, environmentally responsive and environmentally productive virtues as environmental virtues. This theory of environmental virtue provides the basis for the development of a typology ofenvironmental virtue that includes virtues of sustainability, virtues of communion with nature, virtues of respect for nature, virtues of environmental activism, and virtues of environmental stewardship.

discussion papers

17. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 3
Tom Spector

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The sustainability movement, currently gathering considerable attention from architects, derives much of its moral foundation from the theoretical initiatives of environmental ethics. How is the value of sustainability to mesh with architecture’s time-tested values? The idea that an ethic of sustainability might serve architects’ efforts to reground their practices in something that opposes consumer values of the marketplace has intuitive appeal and makes a certain amount of sense. However, it is far from obvious that the sustainability movement provides a strong enough conceptual framework for an entire designphilosophy. This issue is complicated by two different sustainable design outlooks which parallel two conceptions of environmental ethics: the practical and the radical. Neverthleless, sustainability need not resort to the philosophical excess of its radical branch to help foster a new public-spiritedness.
18. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 3
Colette R. Palamar

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Most restoration projects are designed to approximate the species composition and ecotypes ecologists and historians determine were present in an area at some point in the historical past. In most cases, although somewhat arbitrary, the specific time chosen (usually immediately before European settlement) is based on an understanding of historic species composition and anthropogenic disturbances.Although restoring an area to the estimated, historical vegetation types is widely accepted, the exclusory nature of the restoration process often actively eliminates not just invasive species, but also non-invasive, nonnative species as well as displaced native species. These exclusory activities echo patterns of domination and degradation that led to a need for restoration in the first place. Although the domination present in restoration stems from an earnest desire to repair harms inflicted by human carelessness, it at the same time enforces a human conception of the ideal landscape. Attending to ecofeminist concepts such as inclusivism and pluralism, and embracing their rejection of dualistic thinking and the logic of domination demands an expanded tolerance within the practice of ecological restoration. An expanded ecofeminist conceptualization of restoration, a restorashyn, attempts to reduce the presence of overt human domination of the land. Doing so may ultimately mean that the species composition of an ecofeminist restorashyn will not be purely native, but may instead include a diverse mix of both native and non-invasive, nonnative species.
19. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 3
Charles S. Cockell

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The discovery of Earth-sized extrasolar planets orbiting distant stars will merit an expansion of the sphere of entities worthy of moral consideration. Although it will be a long time, if ever, before humans visit these planets, it is nevertheless worthwhile to develop an environmental ethic that encompasses these planets, as this ethic reflects on our view of life on Earth and elsewhere. A particularly significant case would be a planet that displays spectroscopic signatures of life, although the discovery of many lifeless planets might itself intensify the value of life on Earth. A derivation of Schweitzer’s general principle of “reverence for life” and similar frameworks are appropriate ethics with which to view extrasolar planets. The development of an ethical framework for extrasolar planets might provide a means to fashion a deeper and more effective environmental ethic for Earth’s biosphere.
20. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 3
Aaron Lercher

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Our concern for nonhuman nature can be justified in terms of a human right to liberty of ecological conscience. This right is analogous to the right to religious liberty, and is equally worthy of recognition as that fundamental liberty. The liberty of ecological conscience, like religious liberty, is a negative right against interference. Each ecological conscience supports a claim to protection of the parts of nonhuman nature that are current or potential sites of its active pursuit of natural value. If we acknowledge the fallibility of each conscience in its pursuit of genuine natural value, a policy of indefinitely extensive conservation can be justified. Destruction of an object of current or potential natural value is like destroying a church, mosque, temple, or other holy place. This justification for environmental conservation is analogous to the standard justification for individual negative rights, as upheld by the liberal tradition of Locke, Mill, and Rawls.