Environmental ethicists have been arguing for decades that swift action to protect our natural environment is morally paramount, and that our concern for the environment should go beyond its importance for human welfare. It might be thought that the widespread acceptance of moral anti-realism would undermine the aims of environmental ethicists. One reason is that recent empirical studies purport to show that moral realists are more likely to act on the basis of their ethical convictions than anti-realists. In addition, it (...) is sometimes argued that only moral realists can countenance the claim that nature is intrinsically valuable. Against this, we argue that the acceptance of moral anti-realism is no threat to the environmentalist cause. We argue, further, that the acceptance of moral realism is potentially an obstacle to delivering on a third core environmental ethicist demand: namely, that successful action on climate change and environmental destruction requires us to change some of our commonly-held ethical views and to achieve a workable consensus. (shrink)

This article draws together research from various sub-disciplines of philosophy to offer an overview of recent philosophical work on the ethics of historic preservation. I discuss how philosophers writing about art, culture, and the environment have appealed to historical significance in crafting arguments about the preservation of objects, practices, and places. By demonstrating how it relates to core themes in moral and political philosophy, I argue that historic preservation is essentially concerned with ethical issues.

Deliberative processes provide an important alternative input to environmental politics as they may, in contrast to often used market simulations, provide an arena for 1) discussion of lay participants’ values, 2) articulating arguments grounded in other values than consequentialistic, and 3) capturing weakly comparable values. A case study of a Citizens’ Jury (CJ) on genetically modified plants was used to investigate how the framing of the process affected the attitude formation among the citizens. The formal set up of this specific (...) CJ made value discussions less relevant. While it opened for value plurality, it failed to facilitate the articulation of weakly comparable values. (shrink)

Abstract Everyday inanimate things such as stones, teapots and bicycles are not objects to which moral agents could have direct duties; they do not have moral status. It is usually assumed that there is therefore no reason to think that a morally good person would, on account of her goodness, be disposed to treat them well for their own sakes. I challenge this assumption. I begin by showing that to act for the sake of an entity need not be to (...) suppose that it has moral status, but simply to regard it as an end in itself. Having done this, I argue that it is not, as is conventionally assumed, implausible to suppose that to be morally good is to be disposed to treat at least some inanimate things gently, and to do so, moreover, for the sake of those things, rather than for some other reason. (shrink)

It is argued that the social significance of nanotechnologies should be understood in terms of the politics and ethics of uncertainty. This means that the uncertainties surrounding the present and future development of nanotechnologies should not be interpreted, first and foremost, in terms of concepts of risk. It is argued that risk, as a way of managing uncertain futures, has a particular historical genealogy, and as such implies a specific politics and ethics. It is proposed, instead, that the concepts of (...) contingency and of finitude must be central to any understanding of the ethical significance of nanotechnologies, as these concepts can be used to understand the basis of recent work in science and technology studies, and the sociology of knowledge more widely, which details the multi-dimensional social nature of technological uncertainty. (shrink)

The impacts of the activities of technological societies extends further into the future than their capacity to predict and control these impacts. Some have argued that the repercussions of this deficiency of knowledge cause fatal difficulties for both consequentialist and deontological accounts of future oriented obligations. Increasingly, international politics encompasses issues where this problem looms large: the connection between energy production and consumption and climate change provides an excellent example. As the reach of technologically-mediated social action increases, it is necessary (...) to ask whether a political imaginary that extends itself to match this reach requires new concepts, and how far they should displace traditional political concepts of obligation, based on reciprocity and harm avoidance. This paper draws on recent scholarship on the role of concepts of care in political philosophy, bringing together phenomenological and feminist concepts of care in contributing to a positive concept of non-reciprocal intergenerational obligation that defends a constitutive connection between care and justice. (shrink)

Climate change presents urgent ethical challenges. It causes us to revisit what it means to ‘do’ professionalism and invites us to enter what Fisher described as the ‘forgotten zone’ of human-nature relationships, posing the troubling question of whether we can continue to valorise a version of being human on the same terms as before.This article begins by considering the relevance of global warming to professional practice, foregrounding the commitment to do no harm. It poses as problematic the manner in which (...) climate change knowledges have been taken up by the ‘psy subject’. It concludes by considering how we might story different versions of being alive in, and to, the natural world. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change poses a direct and imminent threat to the stability of modern society. Recent reports of the probable consequences of climate change paint a grim picture; they describe a world environmentally much less stable than the world to which we have become accustomed. As we begin to adapt to our changing climate, we will need to identify new sources for the stability necessary for a flourishing society. I suggest that this stability should come from the ideals of the (...) good life we seek to promote when we focus on capabilities, on the substantial freedoms humans need to flourish. These ideals serve as a stable foundation for well-being in a time of great environmental and social instability; they should serve as guides for our policies, practices and institutions. I conclude by appealing to capabilities as a means of integrating well-being into our adaptation strategies, and show how doing so may well provide a way of formulating a powerful moral justification for adaptation strategies appropriate for both the developed and the developing world. (shrink)

The terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ have become established in the popular vernacular in the 25 years or so since the publication of the report of the Brundtland Commission. Often, ‘sustainability’ is thought to represent some long-term goal and ‘sustainable development’ a means or process by which to achieve it. Two fundamental and conflicting philosophical positions underlying these terms are identified. In particular, the commonly held notion that sustainable development can be a pathway to sustainability is challenged, and the expedient (...) view that both terms ultimately serve holistic development is questioned. Furthermore, it is argued that perpetuating the unclear and misleading distinction between the two positions will limit the development of efficacious policy, as it will not resonate with the broadest possible gamut of beliefs and value systems. (shrink)

Local perceptions of protected areas are important for conservation and the sustainability of protected areas. We undertook qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork to explore relationships between people and protected areas in the Blouberg mountain range, South Africa. The history of land use and current relationships with protected areas reveal legacies of marginalisation and immiseration, giving credence to a theory of traumatic nature. The impacts of traumatic nature manifest themselves in local discourses and narratives of nature, protected areas and conservation.

Urban street trees (USTs) have a range of values – some of which are easier to quantify than others. Focusing specifically on the UK context and using the Sheffield Tree Protests (2012–) as a case study, whilst confirming existing research as to the variety of values associated with their specifically ‘cultural’ services, the article argues that USTs have an additional potential form – what I call ‘civic-transformative value’. This form of value has at least three key characteristics. Firstly, it is (...) place-based and communal; second, its form is ‘relational’; and finally, as intrinsically contingent, it is pluralistic in the sense that its civic-transformative potential is dependent on successfully integrating a range of other values. The article emphasises both the possibility and necessity of ‘convergence’ – that is, a pluralistic and pragmatic alliance of values which might help protect not only USTs, but other embattled sites of nature. (shrink)

Even though artists and philosophers sometimes succeed in finding words for the meaning that places can have for us, we can never fully identify the meaning that places have for us. Nicole Note is right in arguing (using the work of Arnold Burms) that the ineffable plays a key role in the meaningful relations we have with the world, and that the experience of meaning can only emerge if there is a real risk that it fails to appear. Therefore, meaning (...) cannot be ‘produced’. I have argued, however, that we can be confronted with a far more radical loss of meaning when most at first meaningful interpretations of place turn out to be consciously produced by marketeers and lobbyists. Yet, even this very feeling of estrangement can lead us to a sensitivity for the otherness of nature as a transcendental source of meaning. (shrink)

Climate change will have highly significant and largely negative effects on human societies into the foreseeable future, effects that are already generating ethical and policy dilemmas of unprecedented scope, scale, and complexity. One important group of ethical and policy issues raised here concerns what I callenvironmentalvalues. By this I do not mean the impact that climate change will have on the environment as a valuable human resource, nor am I referring to the changing climate as a threat to humans in (...) terms of floods, storms, and droughts, important as these are. Rather, I am concerned with the way climate change—and the policies that may be adopted to respond to it—threatens both things we value and, potentially, some of our environmental values themselves. (shrink)

The distinction between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric theories, together with the more fine-grained distinction between anthropocentrism, biocentrism and ecocentrism, are probably two of the most frequently occurring distinctions in the environmental ethics literature. In this essay I draw attention to some problematic aspects of the terminology used to draw these distinctions: the ‘centrism-terminology’. I argue that this terminology is ambiguous and misleading, and therefore confusing. Furthermore, depending on which interpretation it is given, it is also either asymmetric and non-inclusive, or superfluous. (...) Although I find it unlikely that the centrism-terminology will be abandoned, I end the essay by providing a suggestion for an alternative way to categorise theories in environmental ethics. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed a revival of scientific, political and philosophical discourse concerning the notion of ecological limits. This article provides a conceptual overview of descriptive ecological limit claims—i.e. claims that there are real, biophysical limits—and reviews work in political and social philosophy in which such claims form the basis of proposals for normative limits. The latter are classified in terms of three broad types of normative theorising: distributive justice, institutional/legal reform, and the good life. Within these three categories, the (...) article reviews normative proposals for limits on both aggregate‐level and individual‐level ecological exploitation. It also considers the relevance of political and ideological facts to the normative analysis of ecological limits, raising methodological questions about how normative theorists should respond to a world facing escalating ecological challenges. (shrink)

Mark Sagoff claims that if we are to explain what moves people to protect the natural world, we will need to refer to their ‘cultural, aesthetic, and moral ties’ to the ‘places they cherish or love...