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This paper focuses on evaluating Odera Oruka’s role as an expert witness in customary law for the Luo community during the Nairobi, Kenya-based trial in 1987 to decide on the place of the burial of S.M. Otieno. During that trial, an understanding of Luo burial and widow guardianship (ter) practices was essential. Odera Oruka described the practices carefully and defended them against misunderstanding and stereotype. He revisited related topics in several delivered papers, published articles, and even interviews and columns in (...) |
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A bold and original work in ecocosmology and metaphysics. |
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Engineers and scientists, whose professional responsibilities often influence the natural environment, have sought to develop an environmental ethic that will be in tune with their attitudes toward the non-human environment, and that will assist them in decision making regarding questions of environmental quality. In this paper the classical traditions in normative ethics are explored in an attempt to formulate such an environmental ethic. I conclude, however, that because the discipline of ethics is directed at person-person interactions, ethics as a scholarly (...) |
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Animal liberation ethics and environmental ethics have recently come of age. Concerning concrete moral rules considered by researchers in these areas there is much consensus. Highly general theories formulated to justify the rules are more problematic. However, the search for such theories may well be misguided. |
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Extinction is a concept of rapidly growing importance, with the world currently in the sixth mass extinction event and a biodiversity crisis. However, the concept of extinction has itself received surprisingly little attention from philosophers. I will first argue that in practice there is no single unified concept of extinction, but instead that its usage divides between descriptive, epistemic, and declarative concepts. I will then consider the epistemic challenges that arise in ascertaining whether a species has gone extinct, and how (...) |
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Ever since environmental ethics began to emerge as a philosophical discipline in the 1970s, one of the most common projects of environmental ethicists has been to formulate theories according to which nature (or some non-human natural entities) possesses intrinsic value. However, from time to time we have seen efforts to refute this project, the claim being that not only are the particular theories suggested flawed, but the very idea of intrinsic value in nature—at least in some allegedly important sense of (...) |
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Rationalism is the key to the connected oppressions of women and nature in the West. Deep ecology has failed to provide an adequate historical perspective or an adequate challenge to human/nature dualism. A relational account of self enables us to reject an instrumental view of nature and develop an alternative based on respect without denying that nature is distinct from the self. This shift of focus links feminist, environmentalist, and certain forms of socialist critiques. The critique of anthropocentrism is not (...) |
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The etiological account of function defines a part’s/trait’s function as whatever that part/trait does and was selected for doing. Some philosophers have tried to employ this as an account of biological interests, claiming that to benefit an organism is to promote its etiological functioning and to harm it is to inhibit such functioning. I argue that etiological functioning is not a good account of biological interests. I first describe the history of theories of biological interests, explaining the special role that (...) |
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The paper examines connections between ontology and finance. The ontological debates concerning the role of finance are examined between two opposing schools of thought that can be labelled, very broadly, ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘realist’. These two schools of thought have had momentous repercussions in understanding what is a good society. Each school defines Nature in particular ways which can be explored using ontology and philosophical insight. Our theoretical investigation aims to accommodate Nature in community financial deliberations. A positive role for government (...) |
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I examine the basic logical character of ‘the last man example’, as well as the logical character of one of its more important variants. Although it has one striking antecedent in recent philosophy – of which more later – it’s fair to regard it as an example first presented to a contemporary audience by Richard Routley in his 1973 paper, ‘Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?’. I want to determine exactly how the example goes and what (...) |
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In her paper, 'Two distinctions in goodness', Korsgaard points out that while a contrast is often drawn between intrinsic and instrumental value there are really two distinctions to be drawn here. One is the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value, the other is that between having value as an end and having value as a means. In this paper I apply this contrast to some issues in environmental philosophy. It has become a commonplace of environmentalism that there are intrinsic values (...) |
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While environmental philosophers have been striving to extend ethics to deal with future generations and nonhuman life forms, very little work has been undertaken to address what is perhaps a more profound deficiency in received ethical doctrines, that they have very little impact on how people live. I explore Alasdair MacIntyre’s work on narratives and traditions and defend a radicalization of his arguments as a direction for making environmental ethics efficacious. |
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The literature on Hinduism and the environment is vast, and growing quickly. It has benefitted greatly from the work of scholars in a wide range of disciplines, such as religious studies, Asian studies, history, anthropology, political science, and so on. At the same time, much of this work fails to define key terms and make fundamental assumptions explicit. Consequently, it is at least initially difficult to engage with it philosophically. In the first section of this paper, I clarify a central, (...) |
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Alan Carter's recent review in Mind of my Ethics of the Global Environment combines praise of biocentric consequentialism with criticisms that it could advocate both minimal satisfaction of human needs and the extinction of ‘inessential species’ for the sake of generating extra people; Carter also maintains that as a monistic theory it is predictably inadequate to cover the full range of ethical issues, since only a pluralistic theory has this capacity. In this reply, I explain how the counter-intuitive implications of (...) |
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After the first wave of writings in environmental philosophy in the early 1970s, which were mostly critical of anthropocentrism, a new trend emerged which sought to humanise this subject, and to revive or vindicate anthropocentric stances. Only in this way, it was held, could environmental values become human values, and ecological movements manage to become social ecology. Later writers have detected tacit anthropocentrism lurking even in Deep Ecology, or have defended ‘perspectival anthropocentrism’, as the inevitable methodology of any system of (...) |
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The paper discusses various concepts of 'species equality' and 'species superiority' and the assumptions concerning intrinsic value on which they depend. I investigate what philosophers from the traditional deontological (Taylor and Lombardi) and utilitarian (Singer and Attfield) perspectives have meant by their claims for species equality. I attempt to provide a framework of intrinsic values that justifies one sense in which members of a species can be said to be superior to members of another species. |
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This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) |
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Many contemporary authors argue that since certain Hindu texts and traditions claim that all living beings are fundamentally the same as Brahman (God), these texts and traditions provide the basis for an environmental ethic. I outline three common versions of this argument, and argue that each fails to meet at least one criterion for an environmental ethic. This doesn’t mean, however, that certain Hindu texts and traditions do not provide the basis for an environmental ethic. In the last section of (...) |
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The aim of this investigation is to answer the question of why it is prima facie morally wrong to cause or contribute to the extinction of species. The first potential answer investigated in the book is that other species are instrumentally valuable for human beings. The results of this part of the investigation are that many species are instrumentally valuable for human beings but that not all species are equally valuable in all cases. The instrumental values of different species also (...) |
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The subject-matter of this essay is the moral status of nature. This subject is dealt with in terms of normative reasons. The main question is if there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in addition to the numerous indirect normative reasons that there are for doing so. Roughly, if there is some such reason, and that reason applies to any moral agent, then nature has direct moral status as I use the phrase. I develop the notions of direct (...) |
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