PHIL448 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Naturalistic Fallacy, Emergence, Land Ethic
Document Summary
Anthropocentric ethics, environmental ethics and leopold"s land ethic . What is ethics: scientifically: an emergent behavior in social animals that constrains action by (primarily) non-violent sanction. Doesn"t count as ethics if it is forced, esp violence. Ex: hell vs. heaven, it"s unethical otherwise, reputation: philosophically: a normative system of oughts (or prescriptions and proscriptions). Has always been considered something for humans to think about. This may be due to the fact that we always think of right vs. wrong. Other animals don"t do this as far as we know. We think humans alone have free-will we can correct our behavior and change our minds we don"t rely just on instincts: this has started to come under attack more recently, often brought into a court of law. Hume"s naturalistic fallacy (the is/ought gap: relevant to enviro ethics, something (way the world) is, therefore it (the claim) ought to be this is an invalid argument even if it is factual.
