Environmental Ethics - Antecedents, The Debate Over Anthropocentrism, Value As A Feature Of Actions And Attitudes, Ethics And Environmental Policies
judge university courses
Environmental ethics emerged as a subdiscipline of philosophical ethics in the early 1970s, following the first Earth Day in 1970 and a sharply increased awareness of environmental problems at that time. Courses began appearing in university curricula, and books, articles, and journals proliferated to meet the growing interest. To judge by student demand and university courses and programs, environmental ethics is today a mature and robust subject. To judge by intellectual content, however, it is still in the early stages of development.
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The intellectual sources of environmental ethics go back at least to God's first injunction in Genesis 1:28: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Literary discussions of the value of nature in the West, having been st…
Following Leopold's suggestion, the central issue in the first quarter century of environmental ethics has been a debate about anthropocentrism and the idea of intrinsic ethical value. Traditional ethical theories are characterized as anthropocentric because they regard only humans or human experience (or reason) as having intrinsic ethical worth. Everything else is valuable only as a means…
Early in the twentieth century, G. E. Moore (1873–1958) argued that goodness was a nonnatural property that good things possessed, and although his arguments for this view have had a profound influence on the course of ethical theory, the view itself is not widely accepted (chaps. 1–3). There seems no satisfactory way to resolve disagreements over what things have this property or ho…
The appropriateness and implications of these attitudes give rise to other substantive issues in environmental ethics because they imply that it is reasonable to value different parts of nature in ways that go beyond the distinction between valuing something instrumentally and valuing it as an end. Thus, one topic in environmental ethics concerns the appropriateness of using decision-making techni…
Crocker, David A., and Toby Linden, eds. Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Devall, Bill, and George Sessions. Deep Ecology. Salt Lake City: G. M. Smith, 1985. Feinberg, Joel. "The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations." In Philosophy and Environmental Crisis, edited by William T. Blackstone, 43–…
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