PHI 115 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Environmental Ethics, Speciesism, Ecocentrism
Document Summary
The environment is everything around us, for example the city is our environment. It sometimes escapes our attention because humans usually think about the environment as being out there and distinct from us, that we"re not a part of it, but we actually are! Environmental ethicists say our problem with the environment is having a prejudice against it (ex: speciesism: bias/preference towards a specific species) our problems with the environment come from speciesism towards humans. Climate change: the biggest cause of this is from greenhouse gases. One of the methods they use to document greenhouse gas emissions is by using studying the rate at which artic ice caps are melting and also by taking samples of ice caps and measuring the carbon dioxide in it. Feedback loop: ice is light-colored and reflective, a large proportion of the sunlight that hits it is bounced back to space, which limits the amount of warming it causes.
