Artifacts and the Limitations of Moral Considerability

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Hoły-Łuczaj ◽  

Environmental philosophy always presents detailed distinctions concerning the kinds of natural beings that can be granted moral considerability, when discussing this issue. In contrast, artifacts, which are excluded from the scope of moral considerability, are treated as one homogenous category. This seems problematic. An attempt to introduce certain distinctions in this regard—by looking into dissimilarities between physical and digital artifacts—can change our thinking about artifacts in ethical terms, or more precisely, in environmentally ethical terms.

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene J. Klaver

Author(s):  
Paul B. Thompson ◽  
Zachary Piso

Though environmental philosophers trace the roots of environmental awareness to the decades of John Dewey’s prominence, Dewey himself was conspicuously mum about the environmental controversies of his day. A Deweyan environmental pragmatism, then, must find sustenance in less prosaically environmental themes of the American philosopher’s project. This chapter attends to Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction, which is at the core of Dewey’s understanding of experience and which informs Dewey’s philosophy from epistemology to aesthetics. The chapter stresses that Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction is an account of how organisms dynamically respond to changes in their environment. However, contrary to several misinterpretations of environmental pragmatism, this dynamic responsiveness is not a call for human control over nature. Indeed, we conclude that an environmental philosophy oriented by Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction provides promising approaches to interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and environmental justice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (5) ◽  
pp. 112-127
Author(s):  
Victoria V. Anohina

The article examines the specificity of transdisciplinary orientations in modern scientific knowledge and reveals the multidimensionality of transdisciplinarity as a phenomenon of post-nonclassical science. Since transdisciplinarity is largely formed as a response to the challenge of increasing complexity and uncertainty of the future transformations in the “nature – man – society” system, the most appropriate area of transdisciplinary research today is environmental knowledge. In the example of the Ecological Modernization Theory (EMT), we investigate the interdisciplinary structure and transdisciplinary status of contemporary social ecology. The aim of the article is to analyze the various modes of transdisciplinarity in the structure of the ecological modernization theory and to identify its role in the dynamics of modern environmentalism. The epistemological status of EMT is explicated through philosophical and methodological reflection on the alternative discourses of sustainability as well as by using the principles of a systematic approach, methods of comparative analysis and semantic interpretation. The idea of sustainable development and the values of environmentalism are considered important factors in the formation of concepts and categories of this theory, its initial postulates and principles. The article substantiates the synthetic character of this theory, which meets the requirements of the post-non-classical type of scientific rationality. A conclusion is substantiated that EMT can be classified as a post-normal science. As a result of the analysis, it is argued that environmental philosophy has a special understanding of the goals of social development, principles of justice, social harmony, and human well-being. The reinterpretation of these concepts is a basis for adoption of novel theoretical schemes and methodological orientations in the system of modern socio-environmental studies. 


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