There has been a recent spate of publications on how we should evaluate change to ecological systems, some of which have introduced the concept of 'relational values'. Environmental ethicists have, with a few exceptions, not engaged with this debate. We survey the literature on relational values, noting that most advocates of the concept introduce relational values as an additional type of value, in addition to 'instrumental' and 'intrinsic' values. In this paper, we explore the idea that all environmental values are (...) ultimately relational. We explore how such an approach can be articulated, and discuss the implications of this concept for the future of environmental ethics and value studies. One key implication is to suggest a stronger role for empirical ethnography. (shrink)

Issues of interest, identity and values intertwine in environmental conflicts, creating challenges that cannot generally be overcome using rationalities grounded in generalised argumentation and abstraction. To address the growing need to engage interests and identities along with plural values in the conservation of biodiversity and ecological systems, we introduce the concept of ‘appropriateness of actions’ and ground it in a relational understanding of environmental ethics. A determination of appropriateness for actions comes from combining outputs from value elicitation with those of (...) interest and identity negotiation in ways that are salient to specific people and their relationships to specific places. Drawing on the Blue Mountain Forest Partnership in the Pacific Northwest, we propose factors of success for supporting appropriate actions: 1) understanding context and identifying key stakeholders; 2) surfacing a diversity of interests and building system-level trust; 3) building empathy for different identities grounded in specific places; 4) eliciting diverse values and seeking to understand their links to worldviews and knowledge systems and; 5) seeking out appropriate actions. (shrink)

Two types of sustainability definitions are contrasted. ‘Social scientific’ definitions, such as that of the Brundtland Commission, treat sustainability as a relationship between present and future welfare of persons. These definitions differ from ‘ecological’ ones which explicitly require protection of ecological processes as a condition on sustainability. ‘Scientific contextualism’ does not follow mainstream economists in their efforts to express all effects as interchangeable units of individual welfare; it rather strives to express sensitivity to different types and scales of impacts that (...) present activities can exert on the future. We can therefore express the moral obligation to act sustainably as an obligation to protect the natural processes that form the context of human life and culture, emphasizing those large biotic and abiotic systems essential to human life, health, and flourishing culture. Ecosystems, which are understood as dynamic, self-organizing systems humans have evolved within, must remain ‘healthy’ if humans are to thrive. The ecological approach to sustainability therefore sets the protection of dynamic, creative systems in nature as its primary goal. (shrink)

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

Ecosystem health, as James Nelson argues, must be understood as having both descriptive and normative content; it is in this sense a 'morally thick' concept. The health analogy refers (a) at the similarities between conservation ecology and medicine or plant pathology as normative sciences, and (b) to the ability of ecosystems to 'heal' themselves in the face of disturbances. Nelson, however, goes beyond these two aspects and argues that judgements of illness in ecosystems only support moral obligations to protect them (...) if they are attributed a 'good of their own'. But this latter extension of the analogy flies in the face of ecological science, which has been forced to abandon organicism. If one separates the question of the warranted assertibility of environmentalists' goals from the question of where values in nature are located, the search for an objective realm of value realism can be seen to be unnecessary. (shrink)

German Romanticism plays a central role in Gilbert Simondon's writings. In _Mode of Existence_, Simondon draws on Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann to illustrate the tragic consequences of failing to attend to the individuated relationship between landscape and tool. While Novalis is only mentioned in passing, his work presents the most radical form of what might be called Romantic mechanology. With the stated aim of achieving the ideal of perpetual motion, Novalis's poetics highlight the central role literary experimentation plays (...) in technological thinking, revealing how Simondon may shed new light on several key aspects of romantic poetry and philosophy. (shrink)

Counterpart theorists need not posit the counterpart relation in addition to the identity relations as an Additional relation relating objects across possible worlds. Identity can be viewed as a relation applicable to individuals within possible worlds, while the counterpart relation replaces identity in translations of ordinary utterances which correlate individuals in different possible worlds and, hence, in all modal utterances. CT is, in other words, a theory of modal discourse — it proposes a way of understanding all modal predications. As (...) such, it is not to be seen as providing a second ‘looser’ sense of identity across worlds, in addition to the ‘narrow’ sense. Perhaps Lewis' original formulation encourages this misunderstanding insofar as it (see, especially, P2) denies strict identity across possible worlds. Accordingly, I have suggested a modification of CT whereby syntactic restrictions upon variables eliminates any temptation to posit two parallel relations applicable to entities existing in different possible worlds. (shrink)

I will discuss two themes that can be found in Mark Sagoff's most recent book, Price, Principle, and the Environment. Built from pieces fashioned in his entertaining and incisive critical es...