"Getting Behind Environmental Ethics"
The article explores the possibilities of a new ethic that incorporates the phenomenon of environmental crisis and aims at changing people’s outlooks and behaviour.
The article explores the possibilities of a new ethic that incorporates the phenomenon of environmental crisis and aims at changing people’s outlooks and behaviour.
Robert Elliot discusses anthropocentric ethics, concluding with a subjectivist account of intrinsic value.
Brian K. Steverson argues against James Sterba’s attempt to show that anthropocentrists and nonanthropocentrists would accept the exact same principles of environmental justice.
Tom Crowards discusses nonuse values as a potentially very important, but controversial, aspect of the economic valuation of the environment, introducing the concept of Safe Minimum Standards.
Michael Mason argues that Habermasian moral theory reveals a key tension between, on the one hand, an ethical commitment to wilderness preservation informed by deep ecological and bioregional principles that is oriented to a naturalistic value order and, on the other, the procedural norms of democratic participation.
Mark A. Michael explains why the failure to insist on the distinction between different kinds of equality has led many to believe that egalitarianism generally has counter-intuitive implications, when in fact only one version of egalitarianism has this problem.
David Schmidtz argues that “the philosophies of both conservation and preservationism can fail by their own lights, since trying to put their respective principles of conservationism or preservationism into institutional practice can have results that are the opposite of what the respective philosophies tell us we ought to be trying to achieve.”
Stan Godlovitch examines “aesthetic offenses” against nature.
Robin Attfield refutes the neo-Malthusian paradigm put forward by Holmes Rolston, arguing that authentic development will seldom conflict with nature conservation.
Ben A. Minteer criticises the tendency in environmental ethics to demonstrate a preference for foundationalist approaches in the theoretical justification of environmentalism. He argues for a more contextual, social, and pragmatic approach.