5: Order and Disorder in the Environment Flashcards
A Sand County Almanac, “The Land Ethic,”
Aldo Leopold
this is the view that all the moral duties we have towards the environment are derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants.
enlightened/ prudential anthropocentrism
is sufficient for that practical purpose, and perhaps even more effective in delivering pragmatic outcomes, in terms of policy-making
Enlightened anthropocentrism
was born in Scandinavia, the result of discussions between Næss and his colleagues Sigmund Kvaløy and Nils Faarlund
Deep ecology
the “fight against pollution and resource depletion”, the central objective of which is “the health and affluence of people in the developed countries.”
shallow ecology movement, Næss
endorses “biospheric egalitarianism”, the view that all living things are alike in having value in their own right, independent of their usefulness to others.
deep ecology movement
argued that male-dominated culture or patriarchy is supported by four interlocking pillars: sexism, racism, class exploitation, and ecological destruction.
Sheila Collins (1974)
argue that the domination of women by men is historically the original form of domination in human society, from which all other hierarchies of rank, class, and political power-flow.
Ynestra King
understand the oppression of women as only one of the many parallel forms of oppression sharing and supported by a common ideological structure, in which one party uses a number of conceptual and rhetorical devices to privilege its interests over that of the other party
Val Plumwood
there is no meaningful order of things or events outside the human domain, and there is no source of sacredness or dread of the sort felt by those who regard the natural world as peopled by divinities or demons
Disenchantment
can be regarded as attempting to re-enchant, and help to save, nature.
new animism
Who has argued that a phenomenological approach of the kind taken by Merleau-Ponty can reveal to us that we are part of the “common flesh” of the world, that we are in a sense the world thinking itself
David Abram
has tried to articulate a version of animism or panpsychism that captures ways in which the world (not just nature) contains many kinds of consciousness and sentience.
Freya Mathews
According to ________, we are meshed in communication, and potential communication, with the “One” (the greater cosmic self) and its many lesser selves
Mathews
the monistic theory that the world consists purely of matter
Materialism
Materialism (the monistic theory that the world consists purely of matter), she argues, is self-defeating by encouraging a form of ______________ that treats the world either as unknowable or as a social-construction (Mathews 2005, 12).
collective solipsism
Many of the concerns we have regarding the environment appear to be concerns precisely because of the way they affect ___________
Human Beings
____________ are the most famous proponents of the view that we should extend moral standing to other species of animal.
Peter Singer and Tom Regan
“the criterion for moral standing is sentience: the capacity to feel pleasure and pain “
Peter Singer
We cannot rely only on intuitions to decide who or what has moral standing. For this reason, a number of philosophers have come up with arguments to justify assigning moral standing to ___________
individual living organisms
claims that all living things have a “will to live”, and that humans should not interfere with or extinguish this will
Albert Schweitzer, “Reverence for Life”
demands that we stop treating the land as a mere object or resource.
Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic”
has categorized the various ways the natural environment is valued. These are the following:
Alan Marshall and Michael Smith
echoes a civil liberty approach (i.e. a commitment to extend equal rights to all members of a community).
Marshall’s Libertarian
the community is generally thought to consist of non-humans as well as humans
environmentalism
was an advocate of ecologic humanism (eco-humanism), the argument that all ontological entities, animate and in-animate, can be given ethical worth purely on the basis that they exist.
Andrew Brennan
He reasoned that the “expanding circle of moral worth” should be redrawn to include the rights of non-human animals, and to not do so would be guilty of speciesism.
Peter Singer
the argument for the intrinsic value or inherent worth of the environment - the view that it is valuable in itself. Their argument, incidentally, falls under both the libertarian extension and the ecologic extension.
deep ecology
Singer found it difficult to accept the argument from intrinsic worth of a-biotic or “non-sentient” (non-conscious) entities, and concluded in his first edition of _______ that they should not be included in the expanding circle of moral worth.
Practical Ethics
although unconvinced by deep ecology, the argument from intrinsic value of non-sentient entities is plausible, but at best problematic. Singer advocated a humanist ethics.
Practical Ethics
His category of ecologic extension places emphasis not on human rights but on the recognition of the fundamental interdependence of all biological (and some abiological) entities and their essential diversity.
Alan Marshall
can be thought of as flowing from a political reflection of the natural world
Libertarian Extension
best thought of as a scientific reflection of the natural world
ecologic extension
roughly the same classification of Smith’s eco-holism, and it argues for the intrinsic value inherent in collective ecological entities like ecosystems or the global environment as a whole entity.
Ecological Extension
the theory that the planet earth alters its geo-physiological structure over time in order to ensure the continuation of an equilibrium of evolving organic and inorganic matter.
James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis
It focuses only on the worth of the environment in terms of its utility or usefulness to humans. It contrasts the intrinsic value ideas of ‘deep ecology’, hence is often referred to as ‘shallow ecology’, and generally argues for the preservation of the environment on the basis that it has extrinsic value - instrumental to the welfare of human beings.
Conservation ethics, Marshall
the position that humans are the most important or critical element in any given situation
Anthropocentrism
argues that humans are at the center of reality and it is right for them to be so
strong anthropocentric ethic
argues that reality can only be interpreted from a human point of view, thus humans have to be at the center of reality as they see it.
Weak anthropocentrism
He said environmental ethics distinguishes between strong anthropocentrism and weak-or-extended-anthropocentrism and argues that the former must underestimate the diversity of instrumental values humans may derive from the natural world.
Bryan Norton
