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1. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3

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2. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Louke van Wensveen

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I propose an ecologically attuned criterion for genuine virtue, namely, the criterion of ecosustainable virtue: a genuine virtue includes the goal of ensuring ecosystem sustainability. I show how this criterion emerges from environmental practice and how it can be supported by syllogistic reasoning.
3. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Manussos Marangudakis

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Controversy about Lynn White, Jr.’s thesis that Western Christianity is to blame for the ecological crisis we face today has recently shifted to medieval social developments and how they affected theological notions of nature. Contributing to the social perspective of the debate, in this essay I examine the emergence of materialism as an effect of the relationship between the Latin Church and Western society. Rationalism and utilitarianism, two main features of Latin theology, were appropriated by medieval political and economic elites to produce a radical anthropocentric and materialist Weltanschauung. Utilitarianism and rationalism came to be so strongly embedded in Western culture that they became a diachronic feature of European thought.

discussion papers

4. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Laura Westra

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Aldo Leopold’s influence on environmental ethics cannot be overstated. I return to Leopold’s work in order to show the connection between the ethics of integrity and many of the points made by Leopold in his writings. I also show how the spirit of Leopold’s land ethic and his love and respect for wilderness is present and current in the Wildlands Project, and that it is a live part of public policy in North America, albeit a debated one.
5. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Cecilia Wee

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René Descartes is often thought to have exerted a pernicious influence on our views concerning the relationship of humans to the environment. The view that because animals are machines, “thoughtless brutes,” they have no moral standing, and we thus have a right to use them to further our own interests, is attributed to him. A celebrated passage from the Discourse on Method adds fuel to the view that he subscribes to the “dominion” theory. I argue that this picture is misleading and unfair. Descartes does not hold the dominion theory, and there is evidence that he accords animals (and plants) moral standing. Most importantly, Descartes holds that it is a human good to subordinate one’s interests to those of the larger universe. He can, in fact, be seen as a forerunner of modern ecocentrism.
6. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Ronnie Hawkins

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Whaling is back on the international stage as pro-whaling interests push to reopen commercial whaling by overturning the moratorium imposed in 1986. Proponents of ending the ban are using two strategies: (1) appealing to public sentiment that supports indigenous subsistence whaling by attempting to cloak commercial whaling in the same guise and (2) maintaining that reopening commercial whaling is the “scientific” option. I reject both ploys, and instead shift the focus for global debate to scrutinizing the industrial economic model that Western culture is currently imposing on the rest of the world, a model which ultimately reduces all life forms to mere commodities for the marketplace.
7. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Kevin DeLuca

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Through rethinking the trajectory of critical theory, I suggest the need to reconsider its environmental possibilities. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School, usually overlooked in environmental circles, provides a fecund opening for social and environmental theory with its recognition that the multiple catastrophes of the twentieth century are not extrinsic to civilization but intrinsic to the rationality of the Enlightenment. That is, the promise of the scientific domination of nature and rational forms of social organization simultaneously spawn the perils of environmental crises, fascism, genocide, world wars, and nuclear annihilation. With its theorizing of the domination of nature as involving the interconnection of humans and nature in a shared fate, the Frankfurt School provides a fundamentally ecocentric base for rethinking humanity-nature relations. Further, through its nuanced understanding of reason, critical theory provides a trenchant critique of instrumental reason and suggests judgment as the basis for a new ethic for humanity’s interactions with the natural world.

book reviews

8. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Lois Ann Lorentzen

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9. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Anthony Weston

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10. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
David Abram

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