What is the significance of the wicked problems framework for environmental philosophy? In response to wicked problems, environmental scientists are starting to welcome the participation of social scientists, humanists, and the creative arts. We argue that the need for interdisciplinary approaches to wicked problems opens up a number of tasks that environmental philosophers have every right to undertake. The first task is for philosophers to explore new and promising ways of initiating philosophical research through conducting collaborative learning processes on environmental (...) issues. The second task is for philosophers to recognize the value of philosophical skills in their engagements with members of other disciplines and walks of life in addressing wicked problems. The wicked problems framework should be seen as an important guide for facilitating philosophical research that is of relevance to problems like climate change and sustainable agriculture. Content Type Journal Article Category Articles Pages 1-14 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9344-0 Authors Paul B. Thompson, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Kyle Powys Whyte, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863. (shrink)

The Spirit of the Soil was updated for its 2nd edition in 2017. Three comments on the update are addressed here. First, productionism was not intended as a explanation of farm management decision m...

Clark WolfDepartment of Philosophy & Religious Studies,Iowa State UniversityPaul Thompson’s Spirit of the Soil was groundbreaking when it appeared in 1995, and has aged remarkably well. The substan...

The wicked problems that constitute sustainability require students to learn a different set of ethical skills than is ordinarily required by professional ethics. The focus for sustainability ethics must be redirected towards: (1) reasoning rather than rules, and (2) groups rather than individuals. This need for a different skill set presents several pedagogical challenges to traditional programs of ethics education that emphasize abstraction and reflection at the expense of experimentation and experience. This paper describes a novel pedagogy of sustainability ethics (...) that is based on noncooperative, game-theoretic problems that cause students to confront two salient questions: “What are my obligations to others?” and “What am I willing to risk in my own well-being to meet those obligations?” In comparison to traditional professional ethics education, the game-based pedagogy moves the learning experience from: passive to active, apathetic to emotionally invested, narratively closed to experimentally open, and from predictable to surprising. In the context of game play, where players must make decisions that can adversely impact classmates, students typically discover a significant gap between their moral aspirations and their moral actions. When the games are delivered sequentially as part of a full course in Sustainability Ethics, students may experience a moral identity crisis as they reflect upon the incongruity of their self-understanding and their behavior. Repeated play allows students to reconcile this discrepancy through group deliberation that coordinates individual decisions to achieve collective outcomes. It is our experience that students gradually progress through increased levels of group tacit knowledge as they encounter increasingly complex game situations. (shrink)

Environmental problems often outstrip the abilities of any single scientist to understand, much less address them. As a result, collaborations within, across, and beyond the environmental sciences are an increasingly important part of the environmental science landscape. Here, we explore an insufficiently recognized and particularly challenging barrier to collaborative environmental science: value pluralism, the presence of non-trivial differences in the values that collaborators bring to bear on project decisions. We argue that resolving the obstacles posed by value pluralism to collaborative (...) environmental science requires detecting and coordinating the underlying problematic value differences. We identify five ways that a team might coordinate their problematic value differences and argue that, whichever mode is adopted, it ought to be governed by participatory virtues, pragmatic resolve, and moral concern. Relying on our experiences with the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, as well as with other dialogical approaches that support team inquiry, we defend the claim that philosophical dialogue among collaborators can go a long way towards helping teams of environmental scientists and fellow travelers detect their problematic value differences. Where dialogical approaches fare less well is in helping teams coordinate these differences. We close by describing several principles for augmenting philosophical dialogue with other methods, and we list several of these methods in an appendix with brief descriptions and links for further learning. Overall, the article makes three main contributions to the research collaboration and values in science literatures: It deepens our understanding of problematic value pluralism in team science; It provides actionable guidance and methods for improving values-oriented philosophical dialogue interventions; and It demonstrates one way of doing engaged philosophy. (shrink)

Traditional, theoretical pedagogical practices based in disciplinary expertise generally fail to prepare students for high-stakes, public problems. In contrast, “Wicked Problems of Sustainability” is an undergraduate course designed to provide students with the opportunity to redress complex, local problems through an experiential, community-engaged model. By implementing pedagogy developed through the integration of a feminist pragmatist framework with the literature on wicked problems, this course offers opportunities to impact real problems, develop skills, and foster virtues necessary for tackling public problems. Given (...) the value of this work, but also the difficulties, this article highlights the potential pitfalls of community work on wicked problems in addition to providing a series of recommendations for a pragmatic, community-based, experiential pedagogy in a “wicked” world. (shrink)

Among the options of government for reducing negative environmental externalities from agriculture is the institution of a polluter statutory liability. An environmental duty of care imposes a statutory liability on agents who interact with the environment to avoid causing environmental harm. This paper documents environmental duty of care provisions governing landholders in Queensland, Australia, with specific reference to the 2007 Queensland State Rural Leasehold Land Strategy. The paper reports on a positive response by a group of leaseholders within the Northern (...) Gulf Region in Queensland who developed a prototype environmental code of practice for grazing—a land use not previously covered by such an institution in Australia. The paper concludes that (1) a statutory environmental duty of care and specific forms of leasehold tenure are elements of an effective strategy for implementing an agricultural environmental ethics in north Australia’s rangelands and (2) a grazing industry code of practice is a practical and important tool for the grazing industry to safeguard its social licence to operate. (shrink)

The straw man fallacy consists in inappropriately constructing or selecting weak versions of the opposition’s arguments. We will survey the three forms of straw men recognized in the literature, the straw, weak, and hollow man. We will then make the case that there are examples of inappropriately reconstructing stronger versions of the opposition’s arguments. Such cases we will call iron man fallacies. The difference between appropriate and inappropriate iron manning clarifies the limits of the virtue of open-mindedness.