Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Dale Jamieson NYU The Environmental Humanities in a Changing World Princeton Environment Institute Princeton University March 8, 2013
My Interest is in
The centrality of ethics in the American environmental movement The question of whether the environmental crisis requires a new ethic The viability of environmental ethics as an academic field
We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all. June 9, 1872 letter to Miss Catharine Merrill, from New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley, in Bads Life and Letters of John Muir
The greatest good for the greatest number for the longest timeW.J. McGee
Equity and scientific management There are just two things on this material Earth--people and natural resources. (1947, p. 325)
Leopold as a Moralist
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the bioethic community. It is wrong with it tends otherwise (p. 262).
No important change in ethics was every accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
Lynn White Jr. The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis (1967)
What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.
Two Possibilities
Mind-independent value
(Rolston III)
Holism
(Callicott)
What is distinctive about the field if the environmental crisis does not require a new ethic?
Slow acceptance by philosophy departments in elite institutions means lack of graduate training and agreed standards of competence
Moral and managerial approaches to environmental problems ebb, flow, conflict and complement BUT The trend across many issues is towards the dominance of the managerial though desperation often leads to the reassertion of the moral
Environmental problems such as climate change do require revisions in our morality, especially around concepts of responsibility
Today we face the possibility that the global environment may be destroyed, yet no one will be responsible. This is a new problem. Jamieson 1992
Rather than being in crisis, environmental ethics may be shape-shifting as environmental issues are taken up as subfields or dimensions of problems in a wide range of fields