Online research in philosophy

Abstract Everyday inanimate things such as stones, teapots and bicycles are not objects to which moral agents could have direct duties; they do not have moral status. It is usually assumed that there is therefore no reason to think that a morally good person would, on account of her goodness, be disposed to treat them well for their own sakes. I challenge this assumption. I begin by showing that to act for the sake of an entity need not be to (...) suppose that it has moral status, but simply to regard it as an end in itself. Having done this, I argue that it is not, as is conventionally assumed, implausible to suppose that to be morally good is to be disposed to treat at least some inanimate things gently, and to do so, moreover, for the sake of those things, rather than for some other reason. (shrink)

Environmental thinkers often suppose that the natural world (or some parts of it, at least) exists in its own right, independent of human concerns. The arguments developed in this paper suggest that it is possible to do justice to this thought without endorsing some form of metaphysical realism. Thus the early sections look to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception to develop an anti-realist account of the independent reality of the natural world, one, it is argued, that has certain advantages over the (...) accounts proffered by 'environmental realists'. The concluding sections draw upon certain of Merleau-Ponty's later works to defend a rather bolder claim: that the conceptions of realism endorsed by environmental thinkers are not just ill equipped but, in fact, unable to acknowledge what may be provisionally referred to as the more-than-human dimension of reality. (shrink)

In several works, Holmes Rolston, III has argued that a satisfactory environmental ethic cannot be built on a virtue ethical foundation. His first argument amounts to the charge that because virtue ethics is by nature “self-centered” or egoistic, it is also inherently “human-centered” and hence ill suited to treating environmental matters. According to his second argument, virtue ethics is perniciously human-centeredsince it “locates” the value of a thing, not in the thing itself, but in the agent who is “ennobled” by (...) valuing it. These charges, though illuminating, are not in the final analysis compelling. The first misconceives the role of motivation in virtue ethics, while the second ultimately rests on a misunderstanding of the place of the human perspective in ethical considerations. (shrink)

Part I It is a perennial theme in the literature on environmental ethics that the exploitation of the environment is the result of a blindness to (or perhaps a refusal to recognize) the intrinsic value of natural beings. The general story here is that Western traditions of thought have tended to accord natural beings value only to the extent that they prove useful to humans, that they have tended to see nature as only instrumentally valuable. By contrast, it is said (...) that a new, environmentally friendly understanding of the world would value nature ?for its own sake?, would conceive natural beings as having intrinsic value. In the light of such an understanding, the oak tree, for instance, would be seen not merely as a source of timber or shade or as a decoration for the front lawn, but as valuable ?in itself?, as having an intrinsic value that ought to be respected (see further, O'Neill 1993, chapter 2). (shrink)

I address the problem of reconciling environmental holism with the intrinsic value of individual beings. Drawing upon Madhyamaka (“middle way”) Buddhism, the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger, and deep ecology, I present a distinctly holistic conception of nature that, nevertheless, retains a commitment to the intrinsic worth of individual beings. I conclude with an examination of the practical implications of this “thing-centered holism” for environmental ethics.