PHI113 - Environmental Ethics

Socratic dialogue whose events occur in the weeks before the trial of Socrates (399 BC), between Socrates and Euthyphro. The dialogue covers subjects such as the meaning of piety and justice.

English philosopher, political economist, and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy.

When deciding what to do, we often face uncertainty over, confusions about, or conflicts between, our inclinations, desires, interests, and beliefs.
Ethics in Practice : An Anthology, edited by Hugh LaFollette, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014

Reading philosophy differs from reading science fiction or the daily newspaper. The subjects are different; the purposes are different; the styles are different. Science fiction attempts to transport us imaginatively to distant worlds of larger-than-life heroes and villains.

Climate change is a complex problem raising issues across and between a large number of disciplines, including the physical and life sciences, political science, economics, and psychology, to name just a few.

Philosophers use the term consequentialism to identify a general way of thinking about right and wrong and thereby provide a convenient label for a whole family of theories or possible theories in normative ethics. Consequentialist ethical theories maintain that right and wrong are a function of the consequences of our actions – more precisely, that our actions are right or wrong because, and only because, of their consequences.

When people try to decide how they should act, they often think about the consequences of their actions: they try to find the action that leads to the best overall outcome.

Rights are fundamental to contemporary ethical debates. The third edition of Ethics in Practice (here in its fourth edition) contained 1596 references to rights.

“Virtue ethics” is a technical term in contemporary Western analytical moral philosophy, used to distinguish a normative ethical theory focused on the virtues, or moral character, from others such as deontology (or contractarianism) and consequentialism. Imagine a case in which it is agreed by every sort of theorist that I should, say, help someone in need.

The moral significance of preserving natural environments is not entirely an issue of rights and social utility, for a person’s attitude toward nature may be importantly connected with virtues or human excellences. The question is, “What sort of person would destroy the natural environment—or even see its value solely in cost/benefit terms?” The answer I suggest is that willingness to do so may well reveal the absence of traits which are a natural basis for a proper humility, self-acceptance, gratitude, and appreciation of the good in others.

The essay "The Ethics of Respect for Nature" by Paul W. Taylor argues for an environmental ethic known as Biocentrism - a system of ethics that attempts to protect all life in nature. Under Biocentrism, all life - not just human life - should be protected for the organism's sake, regardless of the good it does humans.

I argue for an environmental virtue ethics which specifies human excellence anti flourishing in relation to nature. I consider Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson as environmental virtue ethicists, and show that these writers share certain ethical positions that any environmental virtue ethics worthy of the name must embrace.

A number of philosophers have recognized that the environmental movement, whatever its practical political effectiveness, faces considerable theoretical difficulties in justification.

Radical Environmentalism and Wilderness preservation: A Third World Critique" was written at the end of an extended period of residence in the United States, which followed directly upon several years of research on the origins of Indian environmentalism.

Ecological feminism is the position that there are important connections-historical, symbolic, theoretical-between the domination of women and the domination of nonhuman nature. I argue that because the conceptual connections between the dual dominations of women and nature are located in an oppressive patriarchal conceptual framework characterized by a logic of domination, (1) the logic of traditional feminism requires the expansion of feminism to include ecological feminism and (2) ecological feminism provides a framework for developing a distinctively feminist environmental ethic. I conclude that any feminist theory and any environmental ethic which fails to take seriously the interconnected dominations of women and nature is simply inadequate.

The fundamental idea in the concept of justice is that of fairness. It is this aspect of justice for which utilitarianism, in its classical form, is unable to account, but which is represented, even if misleadingly so, in the idea of the social contract

I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a
nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical
solution to the problem.

While, at the vaguest level, cost-benefit analysis may be regarded simply as systematic thinking, when applied to environmental, safety and health regulation, from an ethical standpoint, its conclusions may not be morally correct. Advocates of cost-benefit analysis are utilitarian moral philosophers, and this is a very controversial ethical philosophy.

Shrader-Frechette offers a rigorous philosophical discussion of environmental justice. Explaining fundamental ethical concepts such as equality, property rights, procedural justice, free informed consent, intergenerational equity, and just compensation--and then bringing them to bear on real-world social issues--she shows how many of these core concepts have been compromised for a large segment of the global population, among them Appalachians, African-Americans, workers in hazardous jobs, and indigenous people in developing nations.

Acclaimed author and award-winning scientist and activist Vandana Shiva lucidly details the severity of the global water shortage, calling the water crisis “the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth.”

Fresh water has gone through some significant changes over the past twenty years. What once had been sold by the gallon as an emergency storm supply in grocery stores in the U.S. is now marketed by the pint by global corporations. Public water supplies are increasingly pressured to privatize their services as local fresh water sources are bought by these same companies, and global trade agreements and international development organizations increasingly promote the privatization of fresh water supplies.

Sometimes people act contrary to environmentalist values because they reject those values. This is one kind of conflict: conflict in values. There is another kind of conflict in which people act contrary to environmentalist values even though they embrace those values: because they cannot afford to act in accordance with them.

The respected radical journalist Kirkpatrick Sale has celebrated “the passion of a new and growing movement that has become disenchanted with the environmental establishment and has in recent years mounted a serious and sweeping attack on it—style, substance, systems, sensibilities and all” (Sale 1986: 26). The vision of those whom Sale calls the “New Ecologists”—and what I refer to in this chapter as deep ecology—is a compelling one. Decrying the narrowly economic goals of mainstream environmentalism, this new movement aims at nothing less than a philosophical and cultural revolution in human attitudes towards nature.

his chapter aims to examine the different perspectives on the issues held by environmental scientists and environmental activists on the one hand, and women’s health researchers and feminist activists on the other. It discusses the dissonance between mainstream environmentalists from the North and women’s health researchers and activists from both North and South. The chapter seeks to identify the positions taken by these two broad groupings within the larger discourses on development and on population and to propose a possible basis for greater mutual understanding. Economic theories of fertility are closely associated with the “new” household economics. Both feminist researchers and activists within women’s health movements have been attempting to change the terms of the debate and to expand its scope. During the late 1960s and much of the 1970s, the principal debate in the field of population policy centered on the impact of poverty on population growth.

Immanuel Kant's essay on the duties human beings have toward animals and non-humans

The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?

Most of us believe that we are entitled to treat members of other species in ways which would be considered wrong if inflicted on members of our own species. We kill them for food, keep them confined, use them in painful experiments. The moral philosopher has to ask what relevant difference justifies this difference in treatment. A look at this question will lead us to re-examine the distinctions which we have assumed make a moral difference.

Species egalitarianism is the view that all species have equal moral standing. To have moral standing is, at a minimum, to command respect, to be something more than a mere thing. Is there any reason to believe that all species have moral standing in even this most minimal sense?

Accessible classic and contemporary works that
fall into the two main categories of research in environmental ethics.

Environmental ethics has been a formal sub-field of philosophy since the early 1970s. While its historical roots are certainly older, that’s when classes were first taught in the U.S. in environmental ethics in philosophy departments and articles and books on the topic written by professional philosophers in this area began appearing.

In the past thirty years environmental ethics has emerged as one of the most vibrant and exciting areas of applied philosophy. Several journals and hundreds of books testify to its growing importance inside and outside philosophical circles. But with all of this scholarly output, it is arguably the case that environmental ethics is not living up to its promise of providing a philosophical contribution to the resolution of environmental problems. This article surveys the current state of the field and offers an alternative path for the future development of environmental ethics toward a more publicly engaged model of applied philosophy.

There are many uncertainties concerning climate change, but a rough international consensus has emerged that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from its pre-industrial baseline is likely to lead to a 2.5 degree centigrade increase in the earth's mean surface temperature by the middle of the next century. Such a warming would have diverse impacts on human activities and would likely be catastrophic for many plants and nonhuman animals.