An unsustainable modernity: Democracy, the global climate emergency, and environmental ethics

Here I argue that the hyper-individualistic and rationalistic ethical paradigms – originating in the late eighteenth century and dominating moral philosophy, in various permutations, ever since – cannot capture the moral concerns evoked by the prospect of global climate change. Those paradigms are undone by the temporal and spatial scales of climate change. To press my argument, I deploy two famous philosophical tropes – John Rawls's notion of the original position and Derek Parfit's paradox – and another that promises to become famous: Dale Jamieson's six little ditties about Jack and Jill. I then go on to argue that the spatial and especially the temporal scales of global climate change demand a shift in moral philosophy from a hyper-individualistic ontology to a thoroughly holistic ontology. It also demands a shift from a reason-based to a sentiment-based moral psychology. Holism in environmental ethics is usually coupled with non-anthropocentrism in theories constructed to provide moral considerability for transorganismic entities – such as species, biotic communities, and ecosystems. The spatial and temporal scales of climate, however, render non-anthropocentric environmental ethics otiose, as I more fully explain. Thus the environmental ethic here proposed to meet the moral challenge of global climate change is holistic but anthropocentric. I start with Jamieson's six little ditties about Jack and Jill.

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Conservation refugees and environmental dispossession in 21st century critical Geography

Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles ◽

10.21138/bage.2895 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Scott William Hoefle

Keyword(s):

Political Ecology ◽

Environmental History ◽

Environmental Ethics ◽

Global Climate Change ◽

Nature Reserve ◽

Global Climate ◽

Conservation Strategies ◽

Critical Geography ◽

Conservation Units

This study explores the relevance of the concepts of conservation refugees and environmental dispossession for steering a middle course between unjust bio-centric conservation and anti-environmentalism of extreme right “populism”. Historical geographers have recently taken up these concepts from contemporary Environmental History, and when with allied to the concepts of environmental ethics from Radical Ecology and Environmental Studies and nature enclosures from Political Ecology, a novel critique is produced of the role of full conservation units in debates surrounding global climate change. This kind of nature reserve is steeped in bio-centric environmental ethics which distill nature and dispossess native peoples and poor peasants. The latter are considered to be anthropic agents who are criminalized, removed and turned into conservation refugees in order to cleanse the landscape of (poor rural) human presence. Drawing on research undertaken on nature enclosures in three threatened biomes of Brazil, hybrid views of society-nature and actor-network assembly from Relational Geography are used to interpret specific cases involving successful resistance to environmental dispossession in which local people forced a change in mentality of nature reserve administrators, turned foe into ally and built socially inclusive conservation strategies.

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Introducing Contemporary Environmental Ethics

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199941339.013.1 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Stephen M. Gardiner ◽

Allen Thompson

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Environmental Ethics ◽

Global Climate Change ◽

Aquatic Ecosystems ◽

Global Climate ◽

Human Beings ◽

History Analysis ◽

The World ◽

Broad Variety ◽

Species Extinctions

Today humanity faces radical global climate change, mass species extinctions, and unprecedented transformations to both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems across the globe. Environmental ethics is an academic subfield of philosophy concerned with normative and evaluative propositions about the world of nature and, perhaps more generally, the moral fabric of relations between human beings and the world we occupy. This Handbook contains 45 newly commissioned essays written by leading experts and emerging voices and represent some of the best and most contemporary thinking in environmental ethics. The chapters range over a broad variety of issues, concepts, and perspectives that are both central to and characteristic of the field, thus providing an authoritative but accessible account of the history, analysis, and prospect of ideas that are essential to contemporary environmental ethics.

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