PHIL 2750 Lecture Notes - Lecture 29: The Ecologist, Environmental Ethics, Holmes Rolston Iii
1 Aug 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Values in and duties to the natural world - Environmental ethics stretches classical ethics to the breaking point all ethics seeks an appropriate respect for life. Environmental ethics asks whether there can be nonhuman objects of duty. Environmental ethics must be more biologically objecive non-anthropocentric it challenges the separaion of science and ethics, trying to reform a science that inds nature value-free and an ethics that assumes that only humans county morally. Environmental ethics seeks to escape relaivism in ethics, to discover a way past culturally based ethics. All of us know that a natural world exists apart from human cultures humans interact with nature. Environmental ethics is the only ethics that breaks out of culture. It has to evaluate nature, both wild nature and the nature that mixes with culture, and to judge duty thereby. If we are to respect all life, we have sill another boundary to cross, from zoology to botany, from senient to insenient life.
