Abstract

The science of ecology has sensitized us to the intricate causal chains in nature and to the threat to the life system posed by environmental misuse. Responding to the data provided by environmental science, some philosophers have called for fundamentally new ethical principles—a recognition of nonhuman values and an extension of rights not only to animals but to inanimate parts of nature. These attempts to develop an ecological ethic call for radical conceptual revision of the way in which most persons perceive man and the world. This paper explicates those revisions and points to some philosophical difficulties which confront them.