In this book, Peter Wenz addresses the major issues and thinkers in environmental ethics. His style is accessible, even journalistic at times, featuring current facts, real controversies, and a vivid narrative, while preserving rigorous philosophical content.theories and methods are introduced, not for their own sake, but to help the reader understand and solve environmental problems.

Concentrating on the views of Christopher Stone, who advocates moral pluralism, and J. Baird Callicott, who criticizes Stone’s views, I argue that the debate has been confused by a conflation of three different positions, here called minimal, moderate, and extreme moral pluralism. Minimal pluralism is uncontroversial because all known moral theories are minimally pluralistic. Extreme pluralism is defective in the ways that Callicott alleges and, moreover, is inconsistent with integrity in the moral life. However, moderate pluralism of the sort that (...) I advance in Environmental Justice is distinct from extreme pluralism and free of its defects. It is also consistent with Callicott’s version of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, which is itself moderately pluralistic. (shrink)

Bryan Norton advocates using the perspectives and methods of American pragmatism in environmental philosophy. J. Baird Callicott criticizes Norton’s view as unproductive anti-philosophy. I find worth and deficiencies in both sides. On the one hand, I support the pragmatic approach, illustrating its use in an argument for sustainable agriculture. On the other hand, I take issue with Norton’s claim that pragmatists should confine themselves to anthrpocentric arguments. Here I agree with Callicott’s inclusion of nonanthropocentric consideration. However, I reject Callicott’s moral (...) monism. In sum, I support pragmatic moral pluralism that includes nonanthropocentric values. (shrink)

In Democracy and the Claims of Nature, the leading thinkers in the fields of environmental, political, and social theory come together to discuss the tensions and sympathies of democratic ideals and environmental values. The prominent contributors reflect upon where we stand in our understanding of the relationship between democracy and the claims of nature. Democracy and the Claims of Nature bridges the gap between the often competing ideals of the two fields, leading to a greater understanding of each for the (...) other. (shrink)

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 106-125 [Access article in PDF] Leopold's NovelThe Land Ethic in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer Peter S. Wenz Introduction Like many good novels, Prodigal Summer's 1 account of love, tragedy, conflict, and choice in human relationships conveys an overall message about how life should be lived. In this case the message corresponds to Aldo Leopold's call for "a land ethic [that] changes the role (...) of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it." People should "respect... fellow-members and also... the community as such." 2 Barbara Kingsolver explains Leopold's key ideas and updates the Land Ethic by showing how it might guide people today. The present paper selectively displays this relationship, and then suggests some pedagogical advantages of fiction.Prodigal Summer tells three interconnected stories that take place from May through July one year in contemporary rural Kentucky. One story features Deanna Wolfe, who has spent the last 25 months working for the U.S. Forest Service in a wilderness area on Zebulon Mountain where she restores trails and impedes illegal hunting. She has just discovered that coyotes have arrived, but so has Eddie Bondo, a handsome man from the West who hates coyotes because they sometimes kill livestock. [End Page 106]Another story features Lusa Landowski and her husband Cole Widener. Lusa is an entomologist who taught at the University of Kentucky before marrying Cole and moving to his family's tobacco farm that adjoins the national forest where Deanna works. Cole dies early in the novel and Lusa tries to save the family farm.Finally, Nannie Rawley is a senior citizen who grows organic apples nearby and has conflicts with her more senior neighbor, Garnett Walker, who wants to kill weeds with chemicals to keep his property looking neat. Garnett's goal is to cross-fertilize chestnut trees to create an American chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight. Ecocentrism, Hunting, the Biotic Pyramid, and Exotic Species Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic is famously holistic and ecocentric. The ecosystem, a holistic entity, has value over and above, and in most cases more than, the value of its individual components. This ecocentric perspective is summed up in the maxim: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (1970, 262).Ecocentrism explains Leopold's attitude toward hunting. In many passages, such as the October account of hunting ruffed grouse (58-62) and partridge (62-69), Leopold describes the hunt with approval. However, he disapproves of programs to eradicate keystone predators because their elimination impoverishes ecosystems. His classic account, "Thinking Like a Mountain," concerns wolf eradication. He writes, "I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise" (138). But he found that wolf eradication harms mountains, that is, ecosystems. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle horn.... In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers. (139-40) Leopold's concept of a biotic pyramid explains why wolf eradication harms ecosystems. According to Leopold, the energy that plants absorb from the sun: [End Page 107]... flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through the various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.... Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical... (shrink)

George Orwell wrote to Roger Senhouse upon completion of 1984 that the work was designed in part “to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism.” The implications for social and political philosophy have furnished a generation of readers with frightening realizations. I will attempt in what follows to show that the implications for epistemology and metaphysics are equally central to the book’s message, and equally discomfitting to philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. The book connects totalitarianism with the entire (...) British empiricist tradition from George Berkeley to A. J. Ayer, primarily by disclosing the totalitarian implications of Berkeley’s philosophy. The result is a vision of empiricism as the intellectual foundation for totalitarianism. (shrink)

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

Utilitarians believe that personal decisions and public policies should be made so as to maximize the public good, or, as Jeremy Bentham put it, to produce the greatest good of the greatest number. Bentham identified the public good with the maximization of happiness, and believed that many traditional practices were inimical to the production of happiness. So in the name of maximizing the public good, Bentham advocated, for example, extending the franchise, reforming the criminal code and re-designing prisons. People's prejudices (...) and traditional habits of thought must yield in the face of utilitarian-inspired reforms. (shrink)

On any given night cable TV news will tell us how polarized American politics is: Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Canada. But in fact, writes Peter Wenz in _Beyond Red and Blue_, Americans do not divide neatly into two ideological camps of red/blue, Republican/Democrat, right/left. In real life, as Wenz shows, different ideologies can converge on certain issues; people from the right and left can support the same policy for different reasons. Thus, for example, libertarian-leaning Republicans can oppose (...) the Patriot Act's encroachment on personal freedom and social conservatives can support gay marriage on the grounds that it strengthens the institution of marriage. Wenz maps out twelve political philosophies--ranging from theocracy and free-market conservatism to feminism and cosmopolitanism--on which Americans draw when taking political positions. He then turns his focus to some of America's most controversial issues and shows how ideologically diverse coalitions can emerge on such hot-button topics as extending life by artificial means, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, affirmative action, abortion, same-sex marriage, health care, immigration, and globalization. Awareness of these twelve political philosophies, Wenz argues, can help activists enlist allies, citizens better understand politics and elections, and all of us define our own political identities. (shrink)

In my paper, "berkeley's christian neo-Platonism" ("journal of the history of ideas", July, 1976) I had maintained that george berkeley was a christian neo-Platonist who believed that abstract ideas exist in the mind of god, And that God used these ideas as archetypes during creation. Robert mckim commented that berkeley considered abstract ideas to be logical impossibilities, And therefore did not believe them to exist in god's mind. My reply is that berkeley employs two different concepts of impossibility for two (...) different kinds of abstract ideas, Those that are logically impossible, And others that are impossible for humans to perceive due to limitations peculiar to the human mind. (shrink)

Developing ideas first put forth in my Abortion Rights as Religious Freedom, I argue against Ronald Dworkin's liberal view of constitutional interpretation while rejecting the originalism of Justices Scalia and Bork. I champion the view that Justice Black presents in his dissent in Griswold v. Connecticut.

Environmentalists can convince others to adopt nature-friendly policies through appeal to commonly-held values. Efficiency and justice are such values in industrial societies, but these values are often considered at odds with each other and with policies that preserve land and reduce pollution. The present paper analyses the notion of efficiency and argues that transportation policies that environmentalists favour – substitution of intercity rail and urban mass transit for most automotive forms of transport – are both efficient and just.

Some anthropocentrists, such as Bryan Norton, claim that intergenerational anthropocentrism provides the best rationale for protecting biodiversity. Some nonanthropocentrists, such as J. Baird Callicott and Eric Katz, disagree. In the present paper, I analyze different varieties of anthropocentrism, argue for adopting what is here called multicultural anthropocentrism, and then advance the following thesis of environmental synergism: combining multicultural anthropocentrism with nonanthropocentrism enables synergists to argue more cogently and effectively than either anthropocentrists or previous nonanthropocentrists for policies that both protect biodiversity (...) and maximize long-term welfare for human beings as a group. (shrink)

This book explores the author's intellectual journey from an upbringing in Reform Judaism to a deep engagement with science, which they initially believed would answer the ultimate questions of existence. Raised with a secular view of God, the author sought to replace religious explanations with scientific ones, expecting that modern theories like Relativity and Quantum Mechanics would clarify the mysteries of the universe. However, through their studies, they discovered that science also leaves many profound questions unanswered, especially about the origins (...) of the universe and the nature of consciousness and free will. Although the author remains an atheist, they are humbled by the realization that their secular worldview is, in many ways, a form of faith, no more fully justified than religious belief. This book is a reflection on their shifting perspective, exploring the limits of both science and religion in answering life's deepest questions. (shrink)

Midcentury America was governed from the center, a bipartisan consensus of politicians and public opinion that supported government spending on education, the construction of a vast network of interstate highways, healthcare for senior citizens, and environmental protection. These projects were paid for by a steeply progressive tax code, with a top tax rate at one point during the Republican Eisenhower administration of 91 percent. Today, a similar agenda of government action would be portrayed as dangerously left wing. At the same (...) time, radically anti-government and anti-tax opinions are considered part of the mainstream. In _Take Back the Center_, Peter Wenz makes the case for a sane, reality-based politics that reclaims the center for progressive policies. The key, he argues, is taxing the wealthy at higher rates. The tax rate for the wealthiest Americans has declined from the mid-twentieth-century high of 91 percent to a twenty-first-century low of 36 percent--even as social programs are gutted and the gap betweeen rich and poor widens dramatically. Ever since Ronald Reagan famously declared that government was the problem and not the solution, conservatives have had an all-purpose answer to any question: smaller government and lower taxes. Wenz offers an impassioned counterargument. He explains the justice of raising the top tax rates significantly, making a case for less income inequality, and he offers suggestions for how to spend the increased tax revenues: K-12 education, tuition relief, transportation and energy infrastructure, and universal health care. Armed with Wenz's evidence-driven arguments, progressives can position themselves where they belong: in the mainstream of American politics and at the center of American political conversations, helping their country address a precipitous decline in equality and quality of life. (shrink)

Bernard williams' monograph in "utilitarianism: for and against" contains an argument that utilitarianism is incompatible with personal integrity. though his argument is fatally flawed, its conclusion is supported in the present paper, which argues that the act utilitarianism (au) defended by j j c smart in "utilitarianism: for and against" tends to deprive its adherents of moral integrity. after briefly reviewing smart's version of au, i recount williams' argument and carr's reply concerning a link between au and a loss of (...) integrity. i then present and discuss two examples. these serve to highlight features of au which, it is then shown, cause au to jeopardize the integrity of its adherents. (shrink)