Often assumed to induce fatalism, empirical evidence shows that environmental apocalypticism is frequently associated with activism. I suggest this is the case because the notion of imminent catastrophe reveals a moral to the environmental story, and in so doing furnishes a point of view from which people can determine what constitutes environmentally ethical behavior. Insofar as it guides behavior, this apocalyptic moral reasoning can be usefully understood as a folk version of consequentialism. Further research on how people put environmental ethics (...) into practice would complement the significant advances environmental ethicists have made in the areas of normative and meta-ethics over the past several decades. (shrink)

The environmental degradation caused by industrial agriculture, as well as the resulting social and health consequences, creates an urgency to rethink food production by expanding the moral imagination to include agricultural practices. Agricultural practices presume human use of the earth and acknowledge human dependence on the biotic community, and these relations mean that agriculture presents a separate set of considerations in the broader field of environmental ethics. Many scholars and activists have argued persuasively that we need new stories to rethink (...) agricultural practice, however, the link—the story that does and can shape agricultural practice—has not yet been fully articulated in environmental discourse. My analysis explores how language has shaped existing agricultural models and, more important, the potential of story to influence agricultural practice. To do this, I draw upon cognitive theory to illustrate how metaphoric and narrative language structures thought and influences practice, beginning with my contention that industrial agriculture relies on a discourse of mechanistic relations between humans and a passive earth, language that has naturalized the chemically intensive monocultures prevalent in much of the American Midwest. However, alternative agricultures, including organic agriculture, agro-ecology, and ecological agriculture, emphasize qualities such as interdependence and reciprocity and do so as a deliberate response to the perceived inadequacies of industrial agriculture and its governing narrative. Exploring the different discourses of agricultural systems can help us think through different modalities for human relations with the biotic community and demonstrate story’s potential role in altering practice. (shrink)

Recognition of intentionality and the possibility of agency in nonhuman others is a prerequisite for a process of mutual adjustment and dialogue that could replace current reductive and dualistic human-centred theories. John Andrews' article in this issue of Environmental Values is criticised for misattributing to me the view that intentionality could be a sole criterion for moral worth - a view which I reject as unacceptably hierarchical and human-centred. To clarify my position, the values and limitations of different kinds of (...) ranking are discussed; and the concept of intentionality is explored, with particular reference to apparently purposeful machines and to Dennett's theory of consciousness. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study conducts a textual analysis of Thomas French’s longform journalistic work Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives as an example of how narrative might foster a nuanced understanding of environmental conservation and its complexities. It draws on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre to argue for a virtue-based mediated conservation ethic that ties media producers, audiences, and the shared environment to narratives of human experience. Specifically, narrative offers a means to deconstruct false dualisms, to overcome the limitations of (...) deontological and teleological approaches, and to see ourselves as part of the larger shared story of the natural world. (shrink)

Recently in environmental ethics some theorists have advocated narrative accounts of value, according to which the value of environmental goods is given by the role that they play in our narratives. I first sketch the basic theoretical features of a narrative accounts of value and then go on to raise some problems for such views. I claim that they require an evaluative standard in order to distinguish the valuable from the merely valued and that the project of constructing such a (...) standard faces significant problems. I conclude by questioning whether narrative accounts of value really offer advantages over other pluralistic and context-sensitive accounts of value. (shrink)

. The use of narrative to communicate and convey particular points of view in society has increasingly become the focus of academic attention in recent years. In particular, MacIntyre. (1985, 1988, 1990, 1999) has paid attention to the role of narrative in the conflict between different traditions when developing his virtue approach to ethics. Whilst there has been continued debate about the application of virtue approaches, some arguing that it is incompatible with business, I disagree and have already argued for (...) a form of virtue that will focus business on society’s needs rather than better business itself. Here I continue to develop the argument in two ways. First, I will explore the predominant business narrative and offer some comment on the ‘virtues’ that it promotes. However, rather than accepting this narrative, I want to challenge it with a narrative from the environmental tradition. I consider how adopting the virtues promoted by an environmental narrative it would shape business practices and challenge current business conventions. As a second step, I will focus on how we can change managers’ perceptions of business to reflect these environmentally based virtues. (shrink)

Critics point to four issues as presenting barriers to the use of virtue in the context of business. They focus on the relationship between management and practice, the potential for virtuous behaviour in a competitive environment, the ability to develop a reflexive critique of management that can be acted on, and the differentiation between work and wider social roles and people's propensity to take responsibility for them. In this paper we propose a solution to criticisms levelled at the use of (...) virtue within Business Ethics. We examine the critiques of management in the context of Virtue Ethics and the application of these to business. In arguing for a role for business in being virtuous and promoting virtue we accept that the concept of management that is based on the type of liberalism founded on personal preference and benefit is deeply problematic and that management that is driven solely by profit is not compatible with the development of practice based virtue. However, we argue that to exclude those activities in which management is involved as a result would be wrong and dangerous. Instead we see the great advantage of a Virtue Ethic is that it conjures up an alternative vision to the dominant practice, and such an alternative vision is urgently needed in business today. (shrink)

Some philosophers contend that to effectively address problems such our global environmental crisis, humans must collectively embrace a polyphonic, environmentalist grand narrative, very different from the narratives accepted by modernists. Cultural theorists who write about metamodernism likewise discuss the recent return to a belief in narratives, and contend that our society’s current approach to narratives is very different from that of the modernists. In this paper, I articulate these philosophers’ and cultural theorists’ positions, and I highlight and explore interconnections between (...) them. Additionally, I argue that if the authors I discuss are correct, then we morally ought to embrace a metamodernist, polyphonic, environmentalist grand narrative, in order to effectively address an array of global crises. Such a grand narrative is a necessary ingredient of an adequate global ethics. (shrink)