Environmental Ethics

It is widely observed that Asian traditions of thought contain the conceptual resources for environmental ethics. Most studies have been devoted to Buddhist environmental ethics, but there have also been monographs that examined its presence in Hinduism, Jainism, and Neo-Confucianism. Quite surprisingly, prior to 2020, there had been no book that explored the most radical and consistently non-anthropocentric form of Asian environmental ethics, namely that of the Daoists. Previous studies analyzed Daoist ecology in general and focused on its manifestation in (...) the religious practices, meditation techniques... (shrink)

To teach the ethics of science to science majors, I follow several teachers in the literature who recommend “persona” writing, or the student construction of dialogues between ethical thinkers of interest. To engage science majors in particular, and especially those new to academic philosophy, I recommend constructing persona dialogues from Henri Poincaré’s essay, “Ethics and Science” (1963/1913), and the non-theological third chapter of Pope Francis’s (2015) encyclical on the environment, Laudato si. This pairing of interlocutors offers two advantages. The first (...) is that science students are likely to recognize both names, since Poincaré appears in undergraduate mathematics and physics textbooks, and because Francis is an environmentalist celebrity. Hence students (in my experience) show more interest in these figures than in other philosophers. The second advantage is that the third chapter of Laudato si reads like an implicit rebuttal of Poincaré’s essay in many respects, and so contriving a dialogue between those authors both facilitates classroom discussion, and deserves attention from professional ethicists in its own right. In this paper, I present my own contrived dialogue between Francis and Poincaré, not for assigning to students as a reading, but as a template for an effective assignment product, and as a crib sheet for educators to preview the richly antiparallel themes between the two works. (shrink)

Human–wildlife conflicts involving protected predators are a major social and environmental problem worldwide. A critical aspect in such conflicts is the role of state institutions regarding predators’ conservation, and how this is construed by affected local populations. These interpretations are frequently embodied in conspiratorial rumours, sharing some common traits related to wild and domestic categories, spatial ordering and power relations. In southern Chile, a one-year, multi-sited ethnographic study of human–animal relations in and adjacent to protected areas was undertaken, foregrounding conspiratorial (...) rumours concerning protected predators. Through an analysis of this study and related international cases, this article argues that the uncritical dismissal of rumours and the categories used to interpret such conflicts have detrimental impacts on the conservation of wild predators. Such rumours should be understood as significant comment devices within human–animal relations and the power dynamics that frame human groups affected by them. (shrink)

Our case study draws on emerging ideas of degrowth, showing how degrowth values and strategies may emerge where cities rely heavily on global food systems, and contributes to literature on food for degrowth in local contexts. Degrowth rejects the imperative of economic growth as a primary indicator of social wellness. A holistic understanding of wellness prescribes radical societal transformation, downscaling and decreasing consumption, strengthening community relationships and promoting resilience. Building on Bloemmen et al., we apply a holistic model of degrowth (...) in a small-scale context, embedded within larger capitalist economies, to examine degrowth opportunities and constraints in Edmonton, Canada. Emergent themes in interviews reveal opportunities and challenges for local food for degrowth, by altering local food supplies, reducing food waste and decreasing consumption. We explore the role of social relationships in food justice work, increasing food knowledge, and building capacity for local, sustainable food production. (shrink)

Engaging in environmental stewardship is critical for sustainability. Understanding individual differences and engagement is an important gap in present scholarship and addressing it is necessary to understand individual factors that relate to the types of activities engaged in, motivations and barriers to environmental stewardship. We surveyed 637 Canadian and American adults via Amazon Mechanical Turk, querying a range of demographic, psychological and environmental perceptions factors as well as motivations and barriers to stewardship activities. Respondents were ultimately grouped into Non-Stewards, Home-Oriented (...) Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards. Few differences were found among these groups. However, Home-Oriented Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards exhibited very different initial and ongoing motivations to engage in environmental stewardship. Accordingly, we identify stewardship motivations as a potential leverage point and as one of several promising avenues for future research related to enhancing engagement in environmental stewardship for the sustainability of the planet. (shrink)

Medicines and medical devices containing animal-derived ingredients are frequently used on patients without their informed consent, despite a significant proportion of patients wanting to know if an animal-derived product is going to be used in their care. Here, I outline three arguments for why this practice is wrong. Firstly, I argue that using animal-derived medical products on patients without their informed consent undermines respect for their autonomy. Secondly, it risks causing non-trivial psychological harm. Thirdly, it is morally inconsistent to respect (...) patients' dietary preferences and then use animal-derived medicines or medical devices on them without their informed consent. I then address several anticipated objections, and conclude that the continued failure to address this issue is an ethical blind spot that warrants applying the principles of respect for autonomy and informed consent consistently. (shrink)

Plant biologists widely accept plants demonstrate capacities for intelligence. However, they disagree over the interpretive, ethical and nomenclatural questions arising from these findings: how to frame the issue and how to signify the implications. Through the trope of ‘plant neurobiology’ describing plant root systems as analogous to animal brains and nervous systems, plant intelligence is mobilised to raise the status of plants. In doing so, however, plant neurobiology accepts an anthropocentric moral extensionist framework requiring plants to anthropomorphically meet animal standards (...) to be deserving of moral respect. I argue this strategy is misguided because moral extensionism is an erroneous ontological foundation for ethics. (shrink)

Genome editing in livestock could potentially be used in ways that help resolve some of the most urgent and serious global problems pertaining to livestock, including animal suffering, pollution, antimicrobial resistance, and the spread of infectious disease. But despite this potential, some may object to pursuing it, not because genome editing is wrong in and of itself, but because it is the wrong kind of solution to the problems it addresses: it is merely a ‘technological fix’ to a complex societal (...) problem. Yet though this objection might have wide intuitive appeal, it is often not clear what, exactly, the moral problem is supposed to be. The aim of this paper is to formulate and shed some light on the ‘technological fix objection’ to genome editing in livestock. I suggest that three concerns may underlie it, make implicit assumptions underlying the concerns explicit, and cast some doubt on several of these assumptions, at least as they apply to the use of genome editing to produce pigs resistant to the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome and hornless dairy cattle. I then suggest that the third, and most important, concern could be framed as a concern about complicity in factory farming. I suggest ways to evaluate this concern, and to reduce or offset any complicity in factory farming. Thinking of genome editing’s contribution to factory farming in terms of complicity, may, I suggest, tie it more explicitly and strongly to the wider obligations that come with pursuing it, including the cessation of factory farming, thereby addressing the concern that technological fixes focus only on a narrow problem. (shrink)

Many scholars have argued that the distinction between the natural and the unnatural does not have any moral relevance, either because the distinction does not make sense or because, even if it does make sense, it does not make any moral sense. Before we can decide on the latter, we must therefore determine first whether a semantic distinction can be made. In this article, I argue that the distinction can be maintained. In spite of the fact that the categories of (...) the natural and the unnatural are blurred as no unnatural things are completely unnatural, I argue that we can meaningfully distinguish between different types of unnaturalness along the natural-unnatural spectrum. To my knowledge, this article is the first publication to distinguish between three types of unnaturalness. (shrink)

This article investigates human-nature relations in the light of the recent call for degrowth, a radical reduction of matter-energy throughput in over-producing and over-consuming cultures. It outlines a culturally sensitive response to a paradox where humans embedded in nature experience alienation and estrangement from it. The article finds that if nature has a core, then the experienced distance makes sense. To describe the core of nature, three temporal lenses are employed: the core of nature as 'the past', 'the future', and (...) 'the present'. It is proposed that while the degrowth movement should be inclusive of temporal perspectives, the lens of the present should be emphasised to balance out the prevailing romanticism and futurism in the theory and practice of degrowth. (shrink)

Based on analyses of a 2016 German survey, this article contributes to debates on 'societal nature relations' by investigating the systematic differences between socially specific types of social relations with nature in a flexible capitalist society. It presents a typology of ten different 'syndromes' of attitudes toward social and environmental issues, which are then grouped to distinguish between four ideal types of social relationships with nature: dominance, conscious mutual dependency, alienation and contradiction. These are located in Pierre Bourdieu's social space (...) to illustrate how social relationships with nature correspond to people's positions within the totality of social relations. Understanding how people's perceptions of and actions pertaining to nature are shaped by their positions in these intersecting relations of domination - both within social space and between society and nature - is an important precondition for developing transformative strategies that will be capable of gaining majority support in flexible capitalist societies. (shrink)

This article explores the existential conditions for a transition towards socioeconomic degrowth through an analysis of a paradigm shift between two extreme polarities of socio-ecological positioning: the Dominant Social Paradigm and the New Ecological Paradigm. It is suggested that the transition from one to the other - understood as the first collective step towards degrowth - requires a transformation in the way we, in western capitalist society, define ourselves in relation to nature. This identity transformation corresponds with the reconnection between (...) humans and nature that ecopsychology has been calling for since its emergence in the 1970s. However, according to recent empirical studies in existential psychology, such a transformation contains potentially disquieting aspects, since it implies recognising and accepting the idea of our own mortality. Staging a dialogue between ecopsychology and critical degrowth theories, this article argues that the necessary transition towards degrowth requires new ways of dealing with these existential fears - namely, confronting them in a 'reflexive' rather than 'defensive' way - so as to develop relationships with nature that respect the limits of the biosphere. (shrink)

This paper examines the theory of sustainable development presented by Jeffrey Sachs in The Age of Sustainable Development. While Sustainable Development ostensibly seeks to harmonise the conflict between ecological sustainability and human development, the paper argues this is impossible because of the conceptual frame it employs. Rather than allowing for a re-conceptualisation of the human-nature relation, Sustainable Development is simply the latest and possibly last attempt to advance the core idea of western modernity — the notion of self-determination. Drawing upon (...) Hegel's account of historical development it is argued that Sustainable Development and the notion of planetary boundaries cannot break out of a dualism of nature and self-determining agents. (shrink)

Radical virtue serves two distinct purposes: consolation in unfavorable circumstances, and prescription to achieve better ones. This paper maps out the theoretical nuances important for practical guidance. For a Stoic, radical virtue is a way to live well through environmental tragedy. For a consequentialist, it is an instrument to motivate us to combat climate change. For an Aristotelian, it is both. I argue that an Aristotelian approach fares the best, balancing the aim of external success with the aim of living (...) well through practical wisdom. This involves criticizing assumptions about living well that underlie behaviors that contribute to climate change. Some might object virtue theory suffers from application problems, and an Aristotelian approach suffers even more because it does not tell the virtuous person how to negotiate her aims. In response, Aristotelian revision starts with moral perception that adds valuable content by navigating through the messiness. (shrink)

Space being the precondition for human existence, human perception and experience vary responding to different spaces. Modern urban dwellers live in urban space where they seem to have much space mobility but end up living in a homogenized concrete jungle. This fact has influenced, if not defined, modern urban dwellers’ life experience and caused their anxieties about such an existence. However, wilderness, as opposed to urban space, is not merely a type of space, but a way of existence relating to (...) diversity, freedom, and healthy savagery. Civilizational evolution explains the change of human perception of wilderness from fear and desire to conquer to longing and affection, and in this sense the history of the evolution of space perception is also a history of civilization because space and culture are entwined and the more diversified the types of human living space, the more diversified their existences. In the contemporary world, the significance of wilderness not only lies in its resistance to the aforementioned homogenized, unidimensional, urban human existence, but the civilization of wilderness points to a new form of civilization that is intrinsically different from technological civilization for whose disease the civilization of wilderness per se may serve as a possible remedy. (shrink)

According to the essence of industrial civilization, wilderness is bound to disenchantment. However, in the ecological civilization era, based on the demands of ecological balance, we must reserve a certain degree of wilderness in urban environment. Therefore, we need to bring back enchantment to aesthetic appreciation of wilderness. On the surface, the re-enchantment of wilderness seems to be a regression of agricultural civilization; however, in fact, it is a transcendental development of agricultural civilization. In recent years, there have been some (...) deviations in the application of “garden urbanism” and “landscape urbanism” have existed in contemporary Chinese urban landscaping. To some extent, the recovery of wilderness is a major mission in Chinese urban construction. (shrink)

Chinese painting is dominated by landscape painting, which is a unique form of artistic expression for Chinese people, while landscape generally refers to nature. Wild natural landscape can be called “wilderness,” which embodies the vitality and upward vitality of nature, and also contains unique cultural characteristics. “Wilderness” is the most important “original ecological” environment in the natural environment. Its existence has natural, ecological, and aesthetic significance. It is nature in its primitiveness and ecology in its wildness; the aesthetic lives on (...) in it. Compared with Western landscape painting, it pays particular attention to realism, good at depicting beautiful natural scenery and recording the reality of scenery. On the other hand, Chinese landscape painting pays more attention to the expression of connotation. Chinese landscape painting focuses on nature, takes meaning as its purpose and pursues culture. Chinese landscape painting is the outstanding expression of wilderness spirit, which is mainly manifested in three aspects: Chinese landscape painting is of the same origin as “Tao” ; the “wilderness” in landscape painting has a strong vitality; “wilderness” has a special cultural connotation. China’s wilderness is not ecological, but is vibrant; not in the dust, but out of the dust; not in nature, but in culture. (shrink)

Ecopsychology holds that a full-fledged self should be in harmony with nature, but when the human’s social self, consumptive false self, and paranoid cultural narcissism prevail, the ecological self goes from dominant existence to recessive existence. Because of this predicament with regard to the ecological self, one should make full use of wildness spirit to reshape the ecological self. Due to the abstract nature of the wilderness spirit and in an attempt to present the wilderness spirit in a more concrete (...) and vivid way, the wilderness spirit needs to be set apart from wilderness literature so as to analyze the role that the wilderness spirit plays in rebuilding the ecological self. (shrink)

Transcendentalism and Confucianism involve different understandinsgs of the concepts of nature, wilderness, and supreme goodness in terms of the metaphysical understanding of nature and how it influences the understanding of human nature. The goodness of Tao is not transcendental as understood by transcendentalism. Rather the goodness of Tao as the important moral values is shaped by human beings’ experience of the natural world. It is this deeper philosophical reason why transcendentalism encourages the aesthetic appreciation of wilderness while Confucianism encourages the (...) aesthetic appreciation of humanized nature. (shrink)

The so-called “Paradigm of the Wild” means either environmental ethics or environmental aesthetics has gone wild. According to Holmes Rolston, III, “philosophy has gone wild.” Chinese traditional environmentalism takes another anthropocosmic way, and it has a global applicability in cultural diversity. The dichotomy of “nature-culture” is already out of date, and humans have to face the new relation of humanized-nature today. From the perspec­tive of “ethics and aesthetics” in Chinese Confucianism, a different passageway between environmental ethics and environmental aesthetics can (...) be shaped. (shrink)

This paper explores the notion of ‘relational values’ from a phenomenological point of view. In the first place, it stresses that in order to make full sense of relational values, we need to approach them through a relational ontology that surpasses dualistic descriptions of the world structured around the subject and the object. With this aim, the paper turns to ecophenomenology’s attempt to apprehend values from a first-person perspective embedded in the lifeworld, where our entanglement with other beings is not (...) a theoretical construction but a palpable reality. Overall, the article’s main purpose is to show that, in our direct and raw experience, values do not appear as subjective judgments or as objective properties but as events in which we participate alongside other human and non-human beings. (shrink)

Despite the strength of arguments for veganism in the animal rights literature, alongside environmental and other anthropocentric concerns posed by industrialised animal agriculture, veganism remains only a minority standpoint. In this paper, I explore the moral motivational problem of veganism from the perspectives of moral psychology and political false consciousness. I argue that a novel interpretation of the post-Marxist notion of political false consciousness may help to make sense of the widespread refusal to shift towards veganism. Specifically, the notion of (...) false consciousness fills some explanatory gaps left by the moral psychological notion of akrasia, often understood to refer to a weakness of will. Central to my approach is the idea that animal exploitation is largely systemic and the assumption that moral motivation is inseparable from moral thinking. In this light, the primary obstacle to the adoption of veganism arises not so much from a failure to put genuine beliefs into action, but rather in a shared, distorted way of thinking about animals. Thus, common unreflective objections to veganism may be said to be manifestations of false consciousness. (shrink)

What kinds of issues does the global crisis of climate change present to aesthetics, and how will they challenge the field to respond? This paper argues that a new research agenda is needed for aesthetics with respect to global climate change and outlines a set of foundational issues which are especially pressing: attention to environments that have been neglected by philosophers, for example, the cryosphere and aerosphere; negative aesthetics of environment, in order to grasp aesthetic experiences, meanings, and dis/values in (...) light of the catastrophic effects of GCC; bringing intergenerational thinking into aesthetics through concepts of temporality and ‘future aesthetics’ understanding the relationship between aesthetic and ethical values as they arise in regard to GCC. (shrink)

The paper offers a new model of politics adequate for the Anthropocene epoch. It uses the concept of ‘heterotopia’ to argue for the environmental potential of Arendtian political philosophy. The adopted meaning of heterotopia combines its Foucauldian and medical sources. It is argued that, thus understood, the concept can be applied to the Arendtian idea of judgment. In this capacity, the concept of heterotopia is both politically foundational and environmentally relevant. It helps us maintain the idea of politics as humanely (...) construed activity, while recognising that political actors are also natural beings, whose actions draw on and affect the non-human world. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that individuals are, prior to the existence of just institutions requiring that they do so, bound as a matter of global distributive justice to restrict their use, or share the benefits fairly of any use beyond their entitlements, of the Earth’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases (EAC) to within a specified justifiable range. As part of the search for an adequate account of climate morality, I approach the task by revisiting, and drawing inspiration from, two (...) prominent models from classical political philosophy for thinking about norms (rights, permissions, limits, etc.) regarding “pre-institutional” appropriation of unowned resources; Locke and Kant, respectively. The basic resources they develop—connected to fundamental norms of equality and rights to self-preservation and freedom—in order to generate their particular schema for distributive shares prior to the existence of just institutions can be usefully and plausibly connected up with the scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable, global, and unowned resource that is EAC in order to undergird a picture of individual climate duties in the contemporary world. It is a picture that comes with some fairly radical implications, especially for the well-off. (shrink)

In Turkey, the numbers of studies that deal with agriculture and food as a system and process, and that address the issue with an integrated approach are very limited. Besides, there is no empirical study available in the national literature in which agricultural and food system has been analyzed within the framework of applied ethics. The present study aims to investigate the characteristics of food and agricultural engineers and veterinary physicians in terms of their tendency to carry out ethical evaluations (...) when faced with issues falling under the field of agriculture and food ethics, and detect their capacity to identify ethical problems.A cross-sectional survey was employed in this study. Descriptive statistics like percentages and frequencies based on the scores from the scale were used. Data were collected via survey method from three occupational groups, namely, food and agricultural engineers and veterinary physicians working in 12 regions of Turkey, and analyzed using chi-square and score test. A total of 865 professionals from 55 different cities participated in the study. Data concerning participants’ level of ethics awareness regarding the identification and evaluation of ethical problems in the fields of food and agriculture were obtained. While the participating professionals could easily detect the problems in food and agriculture system that carried no ethical dilemma, they had difficulty in identifying issues that involved ethical dilemmas. It was also revealed that there was a significant difference between professionals in terms of their perception of ethical problems, demonstrating the need for a comprehensive ethics education to be imparted during and after under-graduate. (shrink)

This paper analyses the cluster of aesthetic features involved in the common experience of the weather. Perceptual features are accompanied by ‘atmospheric’ moods that are irreducible to physiological well-being. Representation and imagination reach their limits due to the more-than-human spatiotemporal scale of the atmosphere. Finally, some ‘transaesthetic’ aspects include the agency of an active matter and the longing for an elemental alterity. The aesthetics of the weather has to account for the interdependence between aesthetic and ethical values, between bodily engagement (...) and appropriate knowledge, individual contemplation and social commitment, in order to develop ecological responsibility. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper considers the recent growth in different kinds of learning outside the classroom, especially Forest Schools. It shows how the activities associated with Forest Schools often involve mainstream curriculum content delivered in outdoor settings, with a focus on developing skills and attitudes that can be utilised when back in the classroom. Drawing on the works of Henry David Thoreau and Anna Shepherd, we suggest that there is an important distinction to be made between an education in the outdoors, (...) and an education of the outdoors. Through a close reading of ‘Walden’ and ‘The Living Mountain’, we argue that both works provide perspectives on being in the outdoors that offer rich educative possibilities. The paper suggests that an education of the outdoors is characterised by a form of attention that opens pupils to a different way of encountering and engaging with the world that is transformative. (shrink)