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161. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Louke van Wensveen Ecosystem Sustainability as a Criterion for Genuine Virtue
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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.
162. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Manussos Marangudakis The Medieval Roots of Our Environmental Crisis
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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.
163. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Ronnie Hawkins Cultural Whaling, Commodification, and Culture Change
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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.
164. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Cecilia Wee Cartesian Environmental Ethics
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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.
165. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Kevin DeLuca Rethinking Critical Theory: Instrumental Reason, Judgment, and the Environmental Crisis
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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.
166. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
David Abram A Reply to “Phenomenology versus Pragmatism”
167. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Hugh McDonald Toward a Deontological Environmental Ethics
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In this paper, I outline both a nonanthropocentric and non-subjective theory of intrinsic value which incorporates pragmatism in environmental ethics in a novel way. The theory, which I call creative actualization, is a non-hierarchical, nonsubjective theory of value which includes the value of nonhuman species and the biosphere. I argue that there are conditions to such values. These limitations include evaluations of actual improvement (meliorism) and reciprocity as conditions. These conditions are necessary limitations upon actions, i.e., duties. I incorporate a deontological ethic thereby as an alternative to utilitarian and other ethical theories in environmental ethics. Duties are to species and to habitats, not to individuals. I conclude that the distinction between ethics and ecological ethics is no longer tenable, given a theory of obligation which is truly universal rather than speciesist. Ecological ethics is the ethics of the future, embracing a way of life, duty, and questions of ultimate worth.
168. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Scott Friskics Dialogical Relations with Nature
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I suggest that our dialogical encounters with our fellow creatures furnish the experiential ground of ethical action with respect to them. Unfortunately, this ground is seldom realized or recognized in our society; our capacity for ethical action remains unmoored from its animating sources. Yet despite our habitual inattentiveness, nature’s creatures may still grace us with their presence in dialogue. The works of Martin Buber and Henry Bugbee provide the theoretical framework within which I attempt to work through these ideas and interpret their ethical significance in the context of personal experience.
169. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Clare Palmer “Taming the Wild Profusion of Existing Things”?: A Study of Foucault, Power, and Human/Animal Relationships
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I explore how some aspects of Foucoult’s work on power can be applied to human/animal power relations. First, I argue that because animals behave as “beings that react” and can respond in different ways to human actions, in principle at least, Foucoult’s work can offer insights into human/animal power relations. However, many of these relations fall into the category of “domination,” in which animals are unable to respond. Second, I examine different kinds of human power practices, in particular, ways in which humans construct animal constitutions and animal subjectivities. Finally, I use a case study of a pet cat to show how such power practices may come together in a single instance.
170. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Jay R. Harmon Notions of Self-Interest: Reflections on the Intersection between Contingency and Applied Environmental Ethics
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If agents motivated only by self-interested reasons practice different degrees of ethical environmental behavior at least partly because they hold different notions of what is in their self-interest, then the nature of our self-interest conceptions is a central issue in environmental ethics. Unless set by biology, as seems unlikely from the evidence, the breadth of the individual self-interest conception we each develop must depend on the specific experiences we are each contingently exposed to in our lives. If nurturing a stronger environmental ethic within our society is a goal, if that ethic depends at least in part on how we individually conceive of our self-interest, and if the development of each of our self-interest conceptions responds contingently to input from others, then these reflections lead to normative considerations that reach beyond the standard ethical questions regarding how to act to others that concern, antecedently, whether to act at all.
171. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 4
Mick Smith Environmental Anamnesis: Walter Benjamin and the Ethics of Extinction
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Environmentalists often recount tales of recent extinctions in the form of an allegory of human moral failings. But such allegories install an instrumental relation to the past’s inhabitants, using them to carry moralistic messages. Taking the passenger pigeon as a case in point, I argue for a different, ethical relation to the past’s inhabitants that conserves something of the wonder and “strangeness of the Other.” What Walter Benjamin refers to as the “redemptive moment” sparks a recognition of the Other that allows us to engage in heartfelt mourning for them, rather than falling into the repetitive self-absorption characteristic of Freudian melancholy. This redemptive moment changes forever our relations to the world around us.
172. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 24 > Issue: 1
Irene Klaver, Jozef Keulartz, Henk van den Belt Born to be Wild
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With the turning of wilderness areas into wildlife parks and the returning of developed areas of land to the forces of nature, intermediate hybrid realms surface in which wild and managed nature become increasingly entangled. A partitioning of environmental philosophy into ecoethics and animal welfare ethics leaves these mixed territories relatively uncharted—the first dealing with wild (animals), the second with the welfare of captive or domestic animals. In this article, we explore an environmental philosophy that considers explicitly these mixed situations. We examine a recent Dutch policy of introducing domesticated and semi-wild large herbivores in newly developed nature areas. Larger issues are at stake, such as the intertwinement of nature and culture, the dynamic character of de-domestication processes, and the relation between concepts of authenticity and the wild. We sketch a pluralistic, dynamic, and pragmatic environmental philosophy that is capable of dealing with the complicated ethicalproblems concerning creatures and land caught between domestication and the wild.
173. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 24 > Issue: 1
Emily Brady Aesthetic Character and Aesthetic Integrity in Environmental Conservation
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Aesthetics plays an important role in environmental conservation. In this paper, I pin down two key concepts for understanding this role, aesthetic character and aesthetic integrity. Aesthetic character describes the particularity of an environment based on its aesthetic and nonaesthetic qualities. In the first part, I give an account of aesthetic character through a discussion of its subjective and objective bases, and I argue for an awareness of the dynamic nature of this character. In the second part, I consider aesthetic character in a conservation context. I develop the diachronic concept of aesthetic integrity to guide decisions about how to manage change to aesthetic character. My argument is illustrated with a case study of the proposal for a superquarry on the remote isle of Harris in Scotland.
174. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 24 > Issue: 1
Alastair S. Gunn “The Female is Somewhat Duller”
175. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 24 > Issue: 1
Steven Vogel Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature
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I call for “postnaturalism” in environmental philosophy—for an environmental philosophy that no longer employs the concept nature. First, the term is too ambiguous and philosophically dangerous and, second, McKibben and others who argue that nature has already ended are probably right—except that perhaps nature has always already ended. Poststructuralism, environmental history, and recent science studies all point in the same direction: the world we inhabit is always already one transformed by human practices. Environmental questions are social and political ones, to be answered by us and not by nature. Many will worry that this conclusion leads to environmentally pernicious consequences, and to problems of relativism and idealism, but I argue that it does not. Practices are real, not ideal, and not all practices are equal: those that acknowledge human responsibility for transforming the world are preferable to those that don’t. Environmental harm results when we do not recognize our own responsibility for the world our practices create.
176. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 24 > Issue: 1
Meg Holden A Reply to David Abrams
177. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 24 > Issue: 1
Lisa Gerber What is So Bad about Misanthropy?
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This paper is an exploration of the vice of misanthropy particularly as it manifests itself in people who love nature. Misanthropy is a hatred and disgust of humans, particularly of a group of humans. I look to wilderness to illustrate the vice of misanthropy. With regard to wilderness, misanthropy functions in three distinct spheres. First, there is misanthropy in the use of wilderness to flee other people. Second, there is misanthropy in the assumption that humans taint the wilderness. Finally, there is misanthropy in the assumption that humans can only relate to nature in a way that is harmful. In the end, we need to avoid misanthropy and its attendant despair. It is important that we see ourselves, not as a determined mass of people, but rather as individual people who are able to create positive change.
178. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 24 > Issue: 1
Daniel G. Campos Assessing the Value of Nature: A Transactional Approach
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Henry David Thoreau’s discussion of the highest value of wild apples and my own reflection upon my experience, interacting with the sea and enjoying its products during my Central American upbringing, motivate this discussion of how human beings may apprehend nature’s highest worth. I propose that in order to apprehend nature’s highest value it is necessary to understand the complete transaction between human beings and nature—an active transaction that requires from the human being a continuous movement along experience, reflection, and responsible action. I argue that the economic valuation of natural products—via the contemporary economic concepts of utility, use-value, existence-value, and willingness-to-pay—is insufficient to comprehend the full worth of nature because it reduces the human being-nature transaction to mere economic terms. Hence, a reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature provides insight into the services—commodity, beauty, language, and discipline—that the human being receives, as part of the transaction, from nature. In turn, a reading of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac complements the Emersonian position by considering the human being’s position as a member of a natural community. Finally, I propose that in order to apprehend the worth of nature, it is further necessary to move from the reflective understanding of the human being-nature transaction into necessary action, that is, into the assumption of responsibility towards nature.
179. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 24 > Issue: 2
Vrinda Dalmiya Cows and Others: Toward Constructing Ecofeminist Selves
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I examine the kind of alliances and ironic crossing of borders that constitute an ecofeminist subjectivity by appeal to a postcolonial literary imagination and ahistorical philosophical argumentation. I link the theoretical insights of a modern short story “Bestiality” with a concept of “congenital debt” found in the ancient Vedic corpus to suggest a notion of ecological selfhood that transforms into the idea of a “gift community” to encompass nonhumans as well as people on the fringes of society, but without the usual problems associated with such a two-pronged extensionism.
180. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 24 > Issue: 2
Mikael Stenmark The Relevance of Environmental Ethical Theories for Policy Making
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I address the issue of whether differences in ethical theory have any relevance for the practical issues of environmental management and policy making. Norton’s answer, expressed as a convergence hypothesis, is that environmentalists are evolving toward a consensus in policy even though they remain divided regarding basic values. I suggest that there are good reasons for rejecting Norton’s position.I elaborate on these reasons, first, by distinguishing between different forms of anthropocentrism and nonanthropocentrism, second, by contrasting the different goals that anthropocentrists, biocentrists, and ecocentrists set up for environmental policy making, and, lastly, by identifying three important policy areas (population growth, wilderness preservation, and wildlife management) where differences in basic values generate divergent policies.