Environmental pragmatism is a new strategy in environmental thought. It argues that theoretical debates are hindering the ability of the environmental movement to forge agreement on basic policy imperatives. This new direction in environmental thought moves beyond theory, advocating a serious inquiry into the merits of moral pluralism. Environmental pragmatism, as a coherent philosophical position, connects the methodology of classical American pragmatic thought to the explanation, solution and discussion of real issues. This concise, well-focused collection is the first comprehensive presentation (...) of environmental pragmatism as a new philosophical approach to environmental thought and policy. (shrink)

For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am (...) I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned citizens: equality and discrimination on the grounds of race or sex; abortion, the use of embryos for research and euthanasia; political violence and terrorism; and the preservation of our planet's environment. This book's lucid style and provocative arguments make it an ideal text for university courses and for anyone willing to think about how she or he ought to live. (shrink)

In this clear, concise and up-to-date introduction to environmental ethics, Robin Attfield guides the student through the key issues and debates in this field in ways that will also be of interest to a wide range of scholars and researchers. The book introduces environmental problems and environmental ethics and surveys theories of the sources of the problems. Attfield also puts forward his own original contribution to the debates, advocating biocentric consequentialism among theories of normative ethics and defending objectivism in meta-ethics. (...) The possibilities of ethical consumerism and investment are discussed, and the nature and basis of responsibilities for future generations in such areas as sustainable development are given detailed consideration. Attfield adopts an inclusive, cosmopolitan perspective in discussions of global ethics and citizenship, and illustrates his argument with a discussion of global warming. The text uses a range of devices to aid understanding, such as summaries of key issues, and guides to further reading and relevant websites. It has been written particularly with a view to the needs of students taking courses in environmental ethics, and will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy, ethics, geography, religion and environmental studies. (shrink)

Reexamines the Western philosophical tradition, looking at the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self.

If past is prologue, then The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand may suggest an intellectual course for the United States in the 21st century. At least Menand, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, thinks so. This enthralling study of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey shows how these four men developed a philosophy of pragmatism following the Civil War, a period Menand likens to post-cold-war ..

The focus of Norton's book is the distinction between objectives and values in developing environmental policies. Norton argues that environmentalism is a coalition of many groups working toward common objectives, but unlike other social action movements the environmental coalition does not have shared moral principles.

Pragmatism is a philosophical movement developed near the turn of the century in the of several prominent American philosophers, most notably, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Although many contemporary analytic philosophers never studied American Philosophy in graduate schoo l, analytic philosophy has been significantly shaped by philosophers strongly influenced by that tradition, most especially W. V. Quine, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. Like other philosophical movements, it developed in response to the then-dominant philosophical wisdom. What (...) unified pragmatism was its rejection of certain epistemological assumptions about the nature of truth, objectivity, and rationality. The rejection of these assumptions springs from the pragmatist's belief that practice is primary in philosophy. Meaningful inquiry originates in practice. Theorizing is valuable, for sure, but its value arises practice, is informed by practice, and, its proper aim is to clarify, coordinate, and inform practice. Theorizing divorced practice is useless. Pragmatism is at once both familiar and radical. Familiar in that it often begins with rather ordinary views; radical in that it often sees in those views insights that philosophers and lay people miss or misunderstand. A pragmatic ethic employs criteria without being criterial. It is objective without being absolutist. It acknowledges that ethical judgements are relative, without being relativistic. And it tolerates - indeed, welcomes some moral differences, without being irresolute. Precisely what each of these means, and why pragmatists hold them, emerges throughout this paper. I begin with the first since it sets the stage for introducing other pivotal pragmatic ideas. Ethical theorizing begins when we think about how we ought to live. Many people assume that means we must look for moral criteria: some list of rules or principles whereby we can distinguish good from bad and right wrong, or a list of virtues we try to inculcate.. (shrink)

Since its original publication in 1975, this groundbreaking work has awakened millions of concerned men and women to the shocking abuse of animals everywhere--inspiring a worldwide movement to eliminate much of the cruel and unnecessary laboratory animal experimentation of years past. In this newly revised and expanded edition, author Peter Singer exposes the chilling realities of today's "factory farms" and product-testing procedures--offering sound, humane solutions to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. An important (...) and persuasive appeal to conscience, fairness, decency and justice, Animal Liberation is essential reading for the supporter and the skeptic alike.--From publisher description. (shrink)

More than twenty years after its original publication, The Case for Animal Rights is an acknowledged classic of moral philosophy, and its author is recognized as the intellectual leader of the animal rights movement. In a new and fully considered preface, Regan responds to his critics and defends the book's revolutionary position.

This classic and controversial book examines the roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in modern life, and proposes a path for its recovery.

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In (...) this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language. (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 first on the topic of environmental virtue ethics, this book seeks to provide the definitive anthology that will both establish the importance of environmental virtue in environmental discourse and advance the current research on environmental virtue in interesting and original ways. The selections in this collection, consisting of ten original and four reprinted essays by leading scholars in the field, discuss the role that virtue and character have traditionally played in environmental discourse, and reflect upon the role that it (...) should play in the future. (shrink)

Building on the strengths of the highly successful first edition, the extensively updated _Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory_ presents a complete state-of-the-art survey, written by an international team of leading moral philosophers. __ A new edition of this successful and highly regarded _Guide_, now reorganized and updated with the addition of significant new material Includes 21 essays written by an international team of leading philosophers Extensive, substantive essays develop the main arguments of all the leading viewpoints in ethical theory Essays (...) new to this edition cover evolution and ethics, capability ethics, virtues and consequences, and the implausibility of virtue ethics. (shrink)

In the standard analysis of economic institutions--which include social conventions, the working rules of an economy, and entitlement regimes --economists invoke the same theories they use when analyzing individual behavior. In this profoundly innovative book, Daniel Bromley challenges these theories, arguing instead for "volitional pragmatism" as a plausible way of thinking about the evolution of economic institutions. Economies are always in the process of becoming. Here is a theory of how they become. Bromley argues that standard economic accounts see institutions (...) as mere constraints on otherwise autonomous individual action. Some approaches to institutional economics--particularly the "new" institutional economics--suggest that economic institutions emerge spontaneously from the voluntary interaction of economic agents as they go about pursuing their best advantage. He suggests that this approach misses the central fact that economic institutions are the explicit and intended result of authoritative agents--legislators, judges, administrative officers, heads of states, village leaders--who volitionally decide upon working rules and entitlement regimes whose very purpose is to induce behaviors that constitute the sufficient reasons for the institutional arrangements they create. Bromley's approach avoids the prescriptive consequentialism of contemporary economics and asks, instead, that we see these emergent and evolving institutions as the reasons for the individual and aggregate behavior their very adoption anticipates. These hoped-for outcomes comprise sufficient reasons for new laws, judicial decrees, and administrative rulings, which then become instrumental to the realization of desired individual behaviors and thus aggregate outcomes. (shrink)

The Spirit of the Soil challenges environmentalists to think more deeply and creatively about agriculture. Paul B. Thompson identifies four `worldviews' which tackle agricultural ethics according to different philosophical priorities; productionism, stewardship, economics and holism. He examines current issues such as the use of pesticides and biotechnology from these ethical perspectives. This book achieves an open-ended account of sustainability designed to minimise hubris and help us to recapture the spirit of the soil.

This book examines the social and philosophical attitudes in Western culture that relate to the environment including aesthetics, wildlife, and land use. Both the historical significance and a framework for further discussions of environmental ethics are discussed in the book.

The first on the topic of environmental virtue ethics, this book seeks to provide the definitive anthology that will both establish the importance of environmental virtue in environmental discourse and advance the current research on environmental virtue in interesting and original ways. The selections in this collection, consisting of ten original and four reprinted essays by leading scholars in the field, discuss the role that virtue and character have traditionally played in environmental discourse, and reflect upon the role that it (...) should play in the future. (shrink)

Debates over the future of agriculture in North Americaestablish a dialectical opposition between conventional,industrial agriculture and alternative, sustainable agriculture.This opposition has roots that extend back to the 18th century inthe United States, but the debate has taken a number ofsurprising turns in the 20th century. Originally articulated as aphilosophy of the left, industrial agriculture has utilitarianmoral foundations. In the US and Canada, the articulation of analternative to industrial agriculture has drawn upon threecentral themes: the belief that agriculture is, in some (...) way, tiedto democracy; the belief that complex bureaucratic organizationsare inherently opposed to human interests; and the belief thatthe family farms characteristic of 19th century North Americatend to produce people of superior moral character. It has proveddifficult to weave these themes into a coherent vision ofagriculture for the 21st century. Often, risk and health-basedconcerns are the basis for public criticism of conventionalagriculture, but these do not conflict with the utilitarianorientation of the industrial model, and are easily incorporatedinto it. If there is to be a philosophical debate over the futureof agriculture, we must find some way to rehabilitate thequasi-Aristotelean view of agriculture that emerges from thethree critical themes noted above. (shrink)

He puts the issue of animal rights in historical context, drawing parallels between animal rights activism and other social movements, including the anti-slavery movement in the nineteenth century and the gay-lesbian struggle today. He also outlines the challenges to animal rights posed by deep ecology and ecofeminism to using animals for human purposes and addresses the ethical dilemma of the animal rights advocate whose employer uses animals for research."--BOOK JACKET.

In the past thirty years environmental ethics has emerged as one of the most vibrant and exciting areas of applied philosophy. Several journals and hundreds of books testify to its growing importance inside and outside philosophical circles. But with all of this scholarly output, it is arguably the case that environmental ethics is not living up to its promise of providing a philosophical contribution to the resolution of environmental problems. This article surveys the current state of the field and offers (...) an alternative path for the future development of environmental ethics toward a more publicly engaged model of applied philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Threatened agro‐ecosystems The optimization approach Agricultural environmental ethics: a neglected topic The dogma of pristine nature The dogma of environmental impact Pristine nature and environmental impact: implications for land use The agrarian alternative Agrarian philosophy and environmental quality From agrarianism to sustainable land and water use.

Critically analyzes and revitalizes agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution. Today, most historians, philosophers, political theorists, and scholars of rural America take a dim view of the agrarian ideal that farmers and farming occupy a special moral and political status in society. Agrarian rhetoric is generally seen as special pleading on the part of farmers seeking protection from labor reform and environmental regulation while continuing to receive direct payments and subsidies from the public till. Agrarianism should not be viewed as (...) a set of immutable claims about farming and political order, but as a tradition of moral and political philosophy that has evolved and deepened over the centuries. Agrarian naturalism--the belief that culture and conduct are conditioned by nature because they are of a piece with nature--becomes pragmatic naturalism, giving way to a new set of puzzles about how we are to understand the rural landscape and our responsibilities for its use. The agrarian idea that personality and sociability are integrated with the material transformation of the landscape can serve as the basis for a new, pragmatically grounded ethic of natural resources and rural development. The essays in this volume critically analyze and revitalize agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution in the classical American philosophy of key figures such as Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey, and Royce. Three chapters address the belief that farming peoples develop moral virtue and a taste for democracy as it evolved in the American context, and four examine how a reconstitution of agrarian themes might invigorate our nation's thinking on environment, food, and rural development policy. The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism will be of broad interest to scholars of American philosophy, rural history, history of ideas, geography, and agricultural or natural resource policy. (shrink)

An original and innovative study of the pre-eminently social character of human ecological relations.

The metaphor of the “midworld” refers to Emerson's conception of the realm between the human process and nature. In his earlier writings, poetry served as a linguistic midworld that made it possible for the self to relate to the innumerable orders of nature. By the 1840's Emerson's thought had taken a much more skeptical turn and had moved decisively away from his earlier linguistic idealism. As a consequence, his conception of the nature of the midworld changed. The more humble work (...) of the farmer came to represent more clearly the actual development of the midworld. In agricultural production, the basic features of nature became more directly available to the self. By the 1870's Emerson recognized that the farmer and the poet were both representatives of the midworld that made nature actual to the human process. (shrink)

In the tradition of Walden and A River Runs Through It, this is a vivid account of the Crazy Mountains in Montana, urging us to awaken from the spell of technology.