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)

Environmental protection isn't what it used to be. During the 1960s and 1970s, environmentalists enacted a legislative agenda that seems like a dream today: statutes like the Clean Air and Clean Wa...

The trend in environmental management toward more adaptive, community-based, and holistic approaches will require new approaches to environmental valuation. In this paper, we offer a new valuation approach, one that embodies the core principles of adaptive management, which is experimental, multi-scalar, and place-based. In addition, we use hierarchy theory to incorporate spatial and temporal variability of natural systems into a multi-scalar management model. Our approach results in the consideration of multiple values within community-based ecosystem management, rather than an attempt to (...) maximise a single variable such as economic efficiency. We then offer two heuristics – one procedural and one evaluative – to guide a community toward shared goals, and to develop indicators to measure progress toward these goals. We illustrate our approach by application to environmental and developmental decisions in the Southern Appalachians. (shrink)

The assumption that environmental ethics must be nonanthropocentric in order to be adequate is mistaken. There are two forms of anthropocentrism, weak and strong, and weak anthropocentrism is adequate to support an environmental ethic. Environmental ethics is, however, distinctive vis-a-vis standard British and American ethical systems because, in order to be adequate, it must be nonindividualistic.Environmental ethics involves decisions on two levels, one kind of which differs from usual decisions affecting individual fairness while the other does not. The latter, called (...) allocational decisions, are not reducible to the former and govern the use of resources across extended time. Weak anthropocentrism provides a basis for criticizing individual, consumptive needs and can provide the basis for adjudicatingbetween these levels, thereby providing an adequate basis for environmental ethics without the questionable ontological commitments made by nonanthropocentrists in attributing intrinsie value to nature. (shrink)

The widely-heralded arrival of the “Anthropocene” era seems to call the existence and value of the natural world into question. Is the world prior to human alteration of it something worth preserving? Can and should we attempt to restore ecological conditions prior to human disturbance? Ecological restoration has traditionally used the past as a reference point in establishing standards and assessing the value of restored landscapes. In many landscapes, however, the traditional notion of historical fidelity provides inadequate guidance because contemporary (...) and future social, ecological, or climate contexts differ, or will differ, radically from those that historically prevailed. Thus, some scholars recommend that we move toward restoration that looks to the future instead of the past. Others propose a “narrative ethics” that accounts for the past while allowing a place to evolve in ways that fit its unfolding story. Both futuristic and narrative approaches to restoration accommodate change and acknowledge a role for social values. However, both have been criticized as overly anthropocentric, and neither is strongly action guiding. Using examples of restoration at former military sites, I consider how we might develop an ethics of ecological restoration that acknowledges change while taking account of the past. (shrink)

Value claims about ecological entities, their functionality, and properties take center stage in so-called “ecological” ethical and aesthetic theories. For example, the claim that the biodiversity in an old-growth forest imbues it with “value in and for itself” is an explicit value claim about an ecological property. And the claim that one can study “the aesthetics of nature, including natural objects...such as ecosystems” presupposes that natural instances of a type of ecological entity exist and can be regarded as more or (...) less aesthetically valuable. My discussion below will bear wide implications for how claims like... (shrink)

Biologists in the last 50 years have increasingly emphasized the role of historical contingency in explaining the distribution and dynamics of biological systems. However, recent work in philosophy of biology has shown that historical contingency carries various interpretations and that we are still lacking a general understanding of historicity, i.e., a framework from which to interpret why and to what extent history matters in biological processes. Building from examples and analyses of the long-term experimental evolution (LTEE) project, this paper argues (...) that historicity possess three essential conditions: (1) multiple possible pasts, (2) multiple possible outcomes at a given instant, and (3) a relationship of causal dependence between these two sets. These criteria can be further specified in two general forms of historicity: dependence on initial conditions and path dependence. More attention is devoted to developing a rigorous account of the latter, which captures the type of historicity displayed by stochastic processes. This paper also highlights that it is often more productive to adopt an instant-relative approach and think in terms of degree of historicity instead of trying to maintain a rigid and absolute dichotomy between historical and ahistorical (completely convergent) processes. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the relevance and interconnection of two forms of historicity in ecological restoration, namely historical fidelity and path dependence. Historical fidelity is the practice of attempting to restore an ecological system to some sort of idealized past condition. Path dependence occurs when a system can evolve in alternative local equilibria, and that the order and timing of the events that follow from the initial state influence which equilibrium is reached. Using theoretical examples and case studies, the following analysis (...) shows that path dependence can seriously impinge the feasibility of historical fidelity, thus reinforcing the idea that restoration ecology needs to move away from a rigid reliance on historical fidelity and is sometimes justified to endorse an interventionist agenda. Yet, contra recent criticisms, I argue that ecological restoration, directed by prudential and evidence-based reasoning, should maintain historical fidelity as one of its guiding objectives. (shrink)

Presents the major issues in Aristotle's writings on Friendship.

What Is Biodiversity? is a theoretical and conceptual exploration of the biological world and how diversity is valued. Maclaurin and Sterelny explore not only the origins of the concept of biodiversity, but also how that concept has been shaped by ecology and more recently by conservation biology. They explain the different types of biodiversity important in evolutionary theory, developmental biology, ecology, morphology and taxonomy and conclude that biological heritage is rich in not just one biodiversity but many. Maclaurin and Sterelny (...) also explore the case for the conservation of these biodiversities using option value theory, a tool borrowed from economics. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemological and ethical issues at the foundations of environmental philosophy, emphasising the conservation of biodiversity. Sahota Sarkar criticises attempts to attribute intrinsic value to nature and defends an anthropocentric position on biodiversity conservation based on an untraditional concept of transformative value. Unlike other studies in the field of environmental philosophy, this book is as much concerned with epistemological issues as with environmental ethics. It covers a broad range of topics, including problems of explanation and prediction in (...) traditional ecology and how individual-based models and Geographic Information Systems technology is transforming ecology. Introducing a brief history of conservation biology, Sarkar analyses the consensus framework for conservation planning through adaptive management. He concludes with a discussion of directions for theoretical research in conservation biology and environmental philosophy. (shrink)

NEITHER in the scholarly nor in the philosophical literature on Aristotle does his account of friendship occupy a very prominent place. I suppose this is partly, though certainly not wholly, to be explained by the fact that the modern ethical theories with which Aristotle’s might demand comparison hardly make room for the discussion of any parallel phenomenon. Whatever else friendship is, it is, at least typically, a personal relationship freely, even spontaneously, entered into, and ethics, as modern theorists tend to (...) conceive it, deals rather with the ways in which people are required to regard, and behave toward, one another, than with the organization of their private affairs. To the extent, then, that one shares this modern outlook one will tend to neglect, or treat merely as an historical curiosity, Aristotle’s efforts to define friendship and to place it within the framework of human eudaimonia, the theory of which is central to moral philosophy as he understands it. Yet in the Nicomachean Ethics the two books on φιλία make up nearly a fifth of the whole, and this seems to me a fair measure of the importance of this subject to the complete understanding both of Aristotle’s overall moral theory and even of many of the more circumscribed topics to which so much scholarly and philosophical attention has been devoted. If, as I suggest, the failure of commentators to appreciate its importance is partly the effect of distortions produced by the moral outlook that has predominated in modern moral philosophy, the careful study of these books may help to free us from constricting prejudices and perhaps even make it possible to discover in Aristotle a plausible and suggestive alternative to the theories constructed on the narrower base characteristic of recent times. (shrink)

The assumption that environmental ethics must be nonanthropocentric in order to be adequate is mistaken. There are two forms of anthropocentrism, weak and strong, and weak anthropocentrism is adequate to support an environmental ethic. Environmental ethics is, however, distinctive vis-a-vis standard British and American ethical systems because, in order to be adequate, it must be nonindividualistic.Environmental ethics involves decisions on two levels, one kind of which differs from usual decisions affecting individual fairness while the other does not. The latter, called (...) allocational decisions, are not reducible to the former and govern the use of resources across extended time. Weak anthropocentrism provides a basis for criticizing individual, consumptive needs and can provide the basis for adjudicatingbetween these levels, thereby providing an adequate basis for environmental ethics without the questionable ontological commitments made by nonanthropocentrists in attributing intrinsie value to nature. (shrink)

A community, for ecologists, is a unit for discussing collections of organisms. It refers to collections of populations, which consist (by definition) of individuals of a single species. This is straightforward. But communities are unusual kinds of objects, if they are objects at all. They are collections consisting of other diverse, scattered, partly-autonomous, dynamic entities (that is, animals, plants, and other organisms). They often lack obvious boundaries or stable memberships, as their constituent populations not only change but also move in (...) and out of areas, and in and out of relationships with other populations. Familiar objects have identifiable boundaries, for example, and if communities do not, maybe they are not objects. Maybe they do not exist at all. The question this possibility suggests, of what criteria there might be for identifying communities, and for determining whether such communities exist at all, has long been discussed by ecologists. This essay addresses this question as it has recently been taken up by philosophers of science, by examining answers to it which appeared a century ago and which have framed the continuing discussion. (shrink)