"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.
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.
Carrie L. Hull discusses debates taking place among environmental scientists, providing a brief overview of the history of the formalist tendency in philosophy, and an illustration of the ways in which advocates of a strict laboratory methodology implicitly rely on this foundation.
Brian Baxter responds to Onora O’Neill’s argument that environmental ethics could and should be reformulated in terms of a search for the obligations held by moral agents towards each other, with respect to the non-human world.
Sheila Jasanoff reflects on the role of science in promoting convergent perceptions of risk across disparate political cultures.
Alan Carter seeks to advance our understanding of some of the possibilities within Humean moral theory, while simultaneously providing new foundations for both animal welfare and a wider environmental ethic.
Peter Alward examines a naive argument against moral vegetarianism.
In the context of current concerns within the environmental humanities to challenge the idea that humans are somehow irreducible to nature, the authors in this article take up the much-neglected history of the idea of human exceptionality itself, arguing that this form of humanist discourse often forgets its own contingencies and instabilities, and its comprehensively violent inheritances.
This collection of essays maps the heterogeneous and asymmetrical ecologies within which we are enmeshed, a material world that makes the human possible but also offers difficulties and resistance.