Recent discussions concerned with the problematical human relationship with nature have justifiably focused on the important role that language plays in both defining and limiting knowledge of the natural world. Much concern about language among environmental thinkers has been focused at the semantic level—proposing and analyzing definitions of certain key terms, such as anthropocentric, biocentric, wilderness, ecology, or holistic. Work at the semantic level, however, has had very little effect in challenging the scientific metanarrative of nature which is based on the primacy of objective knowledge. Using examples from three postmodern stories, we suggest that the only real challenge to the way humans presently construct and understand their relationship to nature can be found at the narrative level. In our discussion of these stories, we show that nature ceases to be a passive, designified object of the human eye. The result of these narrative shifts is a conception of nature composed of other subjects and otherrealities rather than a nature rendered meaningless by objectivity.

The stereotype of the “ecologically noble savage” is still prevalent in European-American discourses. I examine the empirical justifications offered for this stereotype, concluding that we lack sound empirical grounds for believing in “ecological nobility.” I argue that the stereotype should be abandoned because it has negative consequences for native peoples. Instead of accepting questionable stereotypes, philosophers and others should focus on the lives of particular peoples in order to understand their philosophies as well as the relationships that they maintain with their homelands.

While the activity of imagination is present in much writing about environmental ethics, little direct attention has been given to clarifying its role. Both its significant presence and provocative theoretical work showing the central role of imagination in ethics suggest a need for discussion of its contributions. Environmental ethicists especially should attend to imagination because of the pervasive influence of metaphorical constructs of nature and because imaginative work is required to even partially envision the perspective of a nonhuman being. Without clear awareness of the limits of contemporary Western metaphoric constructs of nature, environmental ethicists may overlook or even contribute to the cultural extinction of ideas of nature present in the imaginative visions of indigenous cultures. In this article, I briefly review the reasons why the dominant Western philosophical tradition ranks imagination below the power of abstract reasoning, survey contemporary ideas about the role of imagination in ethics, and consider the implications of these ideas for environmental ethics. The work of imaginative empathy in constructing what might be the experience of nonhuman beings, the role of diverse metaphors and symbols in understanding nature, and the process of envisioning the possible future are developed as three central contributions of imagination to environmental ethics. Imaginative work is not peripheral, butcomplementary to the work of reason in shaping an environmental ethic.

Despite growing awareness of its various problems, private automobile use is still seen as an inviolable individual freedom. We consider the ethical arguments for and against private automobile use with particular reference to John Stuart Mill’s theory of freedom. There is much evidence to show that private automobile use is an other-regarding harmful activity that is, therefore, on Mill’s terms, liable to public control. Although it cannot be an entirely self-regarding activity, we consider private automobile use in this category and argue that even on Mill’s terms it can properly be subjected to extensive control. We also challenge Mill’s theory and argue that private automobile use lacks adequate moral justification. We then consider the policy implications of this ethical argument and review some of the policy options available. We conclude that although an immediate total ban on private automobile use is justifiable, it is inadvisable at this time and that more limited, but effective control should be implemented in preparation for a total ban.

In this paper I argue that the criterion of valuation in neoclassical economics is flawed because it is not an invariant measure of value. It is invariant only when unrealistically restrictive conditions are imposed on the class of admissible utility functions, which in fact makes it a special case. The only sensible alternative is to turn to classical value theory based on real sacrifices or opportunity costs.

Public concern for ecological and environmental values is making the job of forest management increasingly complex and uncertain and is gradually undermining the domination of timber value as the primary organizing goal of forest policy. The key question is how to balance the pursuit of short-term economic self-interests with the long-term public good. I articulate a moral theory that affirms the existence of a public good that is understood teleologically as an objective purpose to be pursued. I argue that there is a connection between the philosophical and moral concept of creativity and the scientific concept of biological diversity. I suggest that these concepts are both linked to the political question of the public good. The maximization of the ethical good of creativity according to this theory is linked to the maximization of the public good. In forestry, the management of forest ecosystems in order to maximize their creative good is linked to the maximization of the public good and vice versa. This ethical theory isessentially a religious one in the neoclassical theistic tradition, in which authentic human existence is defined in terms of our relationship to reality and a metaphysically and cosmologically informed world view.

Both Arne Naess and Warwick Fox have argued that deep ecology, in terms of “Selfrealization,” is essentially nonmoral. I argue that the attainment of the ecological Self does not render morality in the richest sense “superfluous,” as Fox suggests. To the contrary, the achievement of the ecological Self is a precondition for being a truly moral person, both from the perspective of a robust Kantian moral frameworkand from the perspective of Aristotelian virtue ethics. The opposition between selfregard and morality is a false one. The two are the same. The ecological philosophy of Naess and Fox is an environmental ethic in the grand tradition of moral philosophy.

Recent deconstructive developments in ecology (doubts about the existence of unified communities and ecosystems, the diversity-stability hypothesis, and a natural homeostasis or “balance of nature”; and an emphasis on “chaos,” “perturbation,” and directionless change in living nature) and the advent of sociobiology (selfish genes) may seem to undermine the scientific foundations of environmental ethics, especially the Leopold land ethic. A reassessment of the Leopold land ethic in light of these developments (and vice versa) indicates that the land ethic is still a viable environmental ethic, if judiciously updated and revised.

This paper examines the on-going debate on the conceptual usefulness of citizenship as an analytic tool, arguing that the academic debate often assumes that resistance to state control of mobility is manifested only in refusal to accept the il/legal boundary. Such an assumption leads to a tendency in the debate to privilege irregular migrants’ experiences. By looking at regular migrants who come to Japan with a legal status and the ways in which they negoti­ate the il/legal boundary, the paper highlights different practices of resisting state control: namely practices that pretend to accept state control while quietly rewriting the meaning of Il-/legality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the direction which the Japanese welfare state has pursued and what it has left behind, by contrasting the points of view of two representative approaches in economics: the traditional income approach and the capability approach which has been newly proposed by Amartya Sen. In extracting the structure of the tax-social security system, the paper refers to the framework of John Rawls, precepts of “common sense of justice” and their higher principles in his theory of justice. The main conclusion is that Japanese welfare state has followed universal liberalism based on continuity, the essential characteristic of the income approach, and has left behind the equality of the differences. This paper indicates that the capability approach which makes it possible to analyze the discontinuity within an individual’s life by focusing on her doings and beings is also suitable for understanding the differences among individuals.

Although technological progress has greatly created the possibilities for the expanded reach of risk management, its newly manufactured uncertainty may bring about a big scale of catastrophe. In order to control risk of the nature, the human ironically may create a hybrid monster that the human cannot control. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster also can be described as a hybrid monster, in which natural and technological elements combine to produce uncontrollable risks that may have disastrous consequences. This article scrutinizes the politics of the boundary between calculable risks and unpredictable uncertainty as well as the politics of the boundary between misfortune and injustice by focusing upon the lineage of a hybrid monster such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Following the check of implications of a hybrid monster, we will interrogate historical lineage. Third we will examine the way in which technocratic politics of <risk/uncertainty> would influence the boundary between misfortune and injustice. Fourth we will scrutinize problems with the probabilist way of thinking, which tends to suppress the risk of nuclear technology. Finally we shed a light on technocratic governance forcing the people to become resilient.

Focusing on the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, this article argues that there is or can be a form of reciprocity between the victims of a catastrophe and society at large to the extent that victims become the occasion and rationale for social reforms. The victims’ contribution to society in this case is the simple fact of being victims. Such a form of reciprocity requires a particular relation to time which Jean-Pierre Dupuy has recently analyzed. In the case of modern risks such as nuclear risk, the contribution of the victims is not only to a better future, but also takes place in the present by rendering patent risks which, as Ulrich Beck argued, though they are known tend to remain socially invisible.

This article illustrates how Japanese national identity continues to be imagined along ethnic lines in the aftermath of the ‘triple disasters’ of March 11, 2011 (hereafter 3/11). It critically examines the ‘new’ discourse of tabunka kyōsei which seeks to incorporate migrants and other ethnic minorities in the nation through an emphasis on cultural difference and argues that the stress on the insurmountability of cultural difference reifies the identities of migrant and minority populations. This in turn allows the State to treat them as homogenous groups with different interests which can be accommodated through the provision of public services at a local level, while effectively excluding them from the national level. In a post-3/11 context, the myth of an ethnically ‘homogenous’ nation is reproduced through the discourse of Ganbarō Nippon with profund implications for the human security of migrant and minority populations.

The aim of this paper is to show that science, understood as pure research, ought not to be affected by non-epistemic values and thus to defend the traditional ideal of value-free science. First, we will trace the distinction between science and technology, arguing that science should be identified with pure research and that any non-epistemic concern should be di­rected toward technology and technological research. Second, we will examine different kinds of values and the roles they can play in scientific research to argue that science understood as pure research is mostly (descriptively) and in any case ought to be (normatively) value-free. Third, we will consider and dismiss some widespread arguments that aim to defend, especially at a normative level, the inevitable value-ladenness of science. Finally, we will briefly return to the connections among science, technology, and values.

The article examines the moral sources and the cultural codifications of civil religion in Greece as this has been shaped by a series of historical contingencies and social forces. It identifies a certain developmental process from a “sponsored” by state and church civil religion (1830–1974) to an autonomous civil religion (1974–today). This development was not the result of an automatic process of social differentiation, but a cultural mutation caused by historical contingencies and the presence of charismatic social elites that instigated the change. Following the premises of the theory of multiple modernities, the analysis identifies foundational cultural patterns on which both sponsored and autonomous civil religions are based upon, patterns that can be traced back to Orthodox religious ontological and cosmological principles as well as visions of the moral self. These premises became the modality of a modern and secular, yet, schismogenetic civil religion that functions simultaneously as a force of social cohesion and of social rupture.

This article analyzes the idea of creativity due to its relevance in our habits and lifestyles. Until recent times the creativity was only a skill of artist, but now it has became in a normal activity for the rest of society. We must be creative. This is the new creative ethos.The core of article insist on the axial origin of this idea. And it intends to remember the reasons that explain its emergence and to re-think the outcomes of the axial revolutions, specially, the ideas of creativity and transcendence without the help of myth of secularization. The Thought of second degree will ocuppy a central place in this article in order to explain the importance of axial cultures for the future of the human history

Much of what passes today as “global(ization) theory” falls within the new transdisciplinary framework of “global studies” (GS). GS constitutes an academic space of tension that gener­ates critical investigations into our age as one shaped by the intensifying forces of globaliza­tion. Indeed, the young field both embraces and exudes the “global imaginary” – a sense of the social whole that frames our age as one shaped by the forces of globalization. Moreover, few GS scholars would object to the proposition that their field is significantly framed by “critical thinking.” But they need to be prepared to respond to a number of questions regard­ing the nature of their critical enterprise. What, exactly, does critical thinking signify in this context and how is it linked to GS? Do globalization scholars favor specific forms of critical thinking? If so, which types have been adopted and for what purposes? Finally, what forms of internal and external criticism have been leveled against GS itself and how have these objections been dealt with? These four questions provide the guiding framework for these reflections on the significance of critical thinking in GS.