ABSTRACTHans Jonas’ philosophy of responsibility is a major contribution to environmental ethics and political theory, but aspects of it have proven controversial. Jonas’ critics, in particular Richard Wolin, have argued that his thought is deeply reactionary. By contrast, Nathan Dinneen has sought to show that Jonas’ apparent eco-authoritarianism is misunderstood. I argue here that Dinneen’s interpretation is too probably too generous, but also that Wolin’s wholesale critique is fundamentally misguided. Rather, the vast majority of Jonas’ thought is of enduring value, (...) including a nascent ecological republicanism which has thus far been overlooked by commentators. (shrink)

Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus traces the life of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, whose career culminates in the compositions Apocalipsis cum figuris and The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus. Mann treats Apocalipsis as the endpoint of a dangerous modernism allied to fascism, and The Lamentation as its partial antidote. From Deleuze and Guattari's perspective, however, Apocalipsis is a positive musical becoming-other and The Lamentation a regression. Crucial to the contrasting interpretations of Apocalipsis are two very different conceptions of modernity and fascism, that (...) of Deleuze and Guattari providing a means of valorising becoming as a mode of aesthetic and political invention and redefining modernism and fascism. (shrink)

Argues that a coherent theory of ethics requires an account of selfhood.

The promotion of ‘Global Citizenship’ (GC) has emerged as a goal of schooling in many countries, symbolising a shift away from national towards more global conceptions of citizenship. It currently incorporates a proliferation of approaches and terminologies, mirroring both the diverse conceptions of its nature and the socio-politico contexts within which it is appropriated. This paper seeks to clarify this ambiguity by constructing a typology to identify and distinguish the diverse conceptions of GC. The typology is based on two general (...) forms of GC: cosmopolitan based and advocacy based. The former incorporates four distinct conceptions of GC – namely, the political, moral, economic and cultural; the latter incorporates four other conceptions – namely, the social, critical, environmental and spiritual. Subsequently, we briefly illustrate how the typology can be used to evaluate the critical features of a curriculum plan designed to promote GC in England. The typology provides a novel and powerful means to analyse the key features of the very diverse range of educational policies and programmes that promote GC. (shrink)

The deep and lasting changes to human behaviour that are required to address the global environmental crisis necessitate profound shifts in moral foundations. They amount to a change in what individuals and societies conceive of as progress. This imperative raises important questions about the justification, ends, and means of large-scale changes in people’s ethics. In this essay I will focus on the ends—the direction of moral change as prescribed by the goal of sustainable human flourishing. I shall present a meta-ethical (...) critique of anthropocentrism and propose that only an ecocentric ethic can support the sustainable flourishing of humanity. This proposition does not necessarily contradict itself. My claim will be that the values subsumed under the broad concept of anthropocentrism are categorically counterproductive, informing an undesirable concept of “progress”. I support this claim with two lines of argument. On the one hand, the end values of anthropocentrism are shallow and the “flourishing of humanity” is ill-defined. The conceptual constraints of anthropocentrism itself preclude a more concise definition which would take into account the utter dependence of the flourishing of humanity on the health of ecological support structures. On the other hand, pursuing the values that inform the actions of anthropocentrists (which may be identical with the “flourishing of humanity”) leads to unintended and undesirable outcomes, even from the view of the anthropocentrist herself. Those problems are not encountered with an ecocentric ethic, and the conceptual steps necessary to adopt it are not insurmountable. (shrink)

There are two distinct strands within modern philosophical ethics that are relevant to environmental philosophy: an empiricist strand that seeks a naturalist account of human conduct and a humanist strand rooted in a conception of transcendent human freedom. Each strand has its appeal, but each also raises both strategic and theoretical problems for environmental philosophers. Based on a reading of Kant's critical solution to the antinomy of freedom and nature, I recommend that environmental philosophers consider the possibility of a Darwinian (...) humanism, through which moral agents are understood as both free and causally intertwined with the natural world. (shrink)

Recent studies in conservation biology have provided the wilderness preservation movement with a spark. Wilderness, we are told, can no longer be seen as a scenic playground for weary humans - it is, rather, an ecological necessity for the conservation of biodiversity. This paper traces the science and political ideologies that inspire and inform this reinvigorated cadre of environmentalists. Through empirical investigations of one prominent conservation group and one conservation campaign, the author finds that this environmentalism offers simplistic and purportedly (...) self-evident solutions to the complex problems of biodiversity and wilderness conservation. (shrink)

The essay considers two sets of interrelated difficulties that follow from our kinship to animals: those that arise chronically from our individual psychologically complex and often ambivalent relations to animals, and those that reflect the intellectually and ideologically criss-crossed connections among the various discourses currently concerned with those relations, including the movement for animal rights, ecological ethics, posthumanist theory, and such fields as primatology and evolutionary psychology. I begin with some general observations on classification and then turn to the increasingly (...) complex play of claims and counter-claims regarding the so-called species barrier. (shrink)