Abstract

This work examines the concept of community. It develops the "philosophical problem" of community, showing how this problem is reflected in the field of environmental ethics. It develops the concepts of the human community, the biotic community, and the "mixed" community that involves the interaction between the human and the biotic communities. The first chapter discusses the general philosophic problem of community: how to balance the needs, rights, and interests of the community as a whole with the needs, rights, and interests of the individuals who make up that community. The problem is then refined to: how to develop a mixed community that allows for human flourishing, as well as a diverse nonhuman biotic component. It then examines two initial obstacles to any discussion of community and places the problem of community into the context of a problem in the field of environmental ethics: the holism/pluralism debate. The next chapter systematically explores the concept of the human community by examining several attempts to define a human community, as well as the two major attempts to describe the nature of a human community. In the third chapter, by arguing that the concept of community needs to be expanded from the merely human perspective, the biotic community is examined. A historical account of the change in focus in ecology from populations to ecosystems is presented, ending with a presentation of a new version of a biotic community based on insights from the emerging science of complexity. ;The second part critiques the positions Aristotle and Whitehead on community, and the metaphysical concepts of humans and nature that underlie each one. Chapter four argues that Aristotle's concept of friendship can be extended through Whitehead to include nonhuman entities. Chapter five shows how Whitehead's metaphysics can serve as a foundation for a postmodern concept of community that contributes to the resolution of the problem of community. The work ends with a presentation of general features of a constructive postmodern version of community, and shows how Frederick Ferre's "personalistic organicism" provides a solution to the community problem in environmental ethics