"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.
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.
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.
Val Plumwood clarifies her stance on intentionality and the possibility of nonhuman agency, with reference to apparently purposeful machines and to Dennett’s theory of consciousness.
Michael Prior discusses the theory behind economic valuation, concluding that all environmental valuation is at odds with beliefs based upon the existence of objective and intrinsic values.
Roger Crisp responds to Dale Jamieson’s views on animal liberation as environmental ethic.
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.
Jon Wetlesen addresses the question: Who or what can have a moral status in the sense that we have direct moral duties to them?