What is environmental virtue? Is developing good habits enough? What does climate justice require? Is ecological restoration just another form of the human domination of nature? Exploring these questions and more, this book provides an up-to-date and balanced introduction to environmental ethics. It first examines ethical theory, then ties theory to practice, showing how values guide environmental policies, but also how policies and institutions shape environmental values. Updated and expanded to engage with the latest scholarship, scientific findings, and societal challenges, this 2nd edition features: New sections on food ethics, multispecies justice, intergenerational ethics, and the Anthropocene Contemporary case studies focusing on the rights of nature, the use of biotechnology in ecological restoration, and just climate transitions Expanded coverage of diverse philosophical traditions, including Confucian, Daoist, and Indigenous ethical perspectives Updated discussion questions, further reading sections, and online resources Exploring the possibilities and limitations inherent in both classical ethical models and modern theoretical approaches to the environment, this is a key resource for teaching students to think ethically about the world we live in.
Humanity takes up space. Human beings, like many other species, also transform spaces. What is perhaps uniquely human is the disposition to qualitatively transform spaces into places that are charged with distinctive kinds of intergenerational significance. There is a profound, felt difference between a house as domestic space and a home as familial place or between the summit of a mountain one has climbed for the first time and the “same” rock pinnacle celebrated in ancestral narratives. Contemporary philosophical uses of the word “place” often pivot on the distinction between “space” and “place” formalized by geographer-philosopher Yi-fu Tuan, who suggested that places incorporate the experiences and aspirations of a people over the course of their moral and aesthetic engagement with sites and locations. While spaces afford possibilities for different kinds of presence—physical, emotional, cognitive, dramatic, spiritual—places emerge as different ways of being present, fuse over time, and saturate a locale with distinctively collaborative patterns of significance. This approach to issues of place, however, is emblematic of what Edward S. Casey has argued are convictions about the primacy of absolute space and time that evolved along with the progressive dominance of the scientific imagination and modern imaginations of the universal. The recent reappearance of place in Western philosophy represents a turn away from abstract and a priori reasoning and back toward phenomenal experience and the primacy of embodied and emplaced intelligence. Places are enacted through the sustainably shared practices of mutually-responsive and mutually-vulnerable agents and are as numerous in kind as we are divergent in the patterns of values and intentions. The contributors to this volume draw on resources from Asian, European, and North American traditions of thought to engage in intercultural reflection on the significance of place in philosophy and of the place of philosophy itself in the cultural, social, economic, and political domains of contemporary life. The conversation of place that results explores the meaning of intercultural philosophy, the critical interplay of place and personal identity, the meaning of appropriate emplacement, the shared place of politics and religion, and the nature of the emotionally emplaced body.
On my view, the descriptive and prescriptive---or nature and normativity---are interdependent. What we ought to do, as human beings, is contingent on our biological and cultural backgrounds. However we are not slaves to biology or to culture because we can reflectively assess and modify our ends.
What is environmental virtue? Is developing good habits enough? What does climate justice require? Is ecological restoration just another form of the human domination of nature? Exploring these questions and more, this book provides an up-to-date and balanced introduction to environmental ethics. It first examines ethical theory, then ties theory to practice, showing how values guide environmental policies, but also how policies and institutions shape environmental values. Updated and expanded to engage with the latest scholarship, scientific findings, and societal challenges, this 2nd edition features: New sections on food ethics, multispecies justice, intergenerational ethics, and the Anthropocene Contemporary case studies focusing on the rights of nature, the use of biotechnology in ecological restoration, and just climate transitions Expanded coverage of diverse philosophical traditions, including Confucian, Daoist, and Indigenous ethical perspectives Updated discussion questions, further reading sections, and online resources Exploring the possibilities and limitations inherent in both classical ethical models and modern theoretical approaches to the environment, this is a key resource for teaching students to think ethically about the world we live in.
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