Virtue ethics is now widely recognized as an alternative to Kantian and consequentialist ethical theories. However, moral philosophers have been slow to bring virtue ethics to bear on topics in applied ethics. Moreover, environmental virtue ethics is an underdeveloped area of environmental ethics. Although environmental ethicists often employ virtue-oriented evaluation and appeal to role models for guidance, environmental ethics has not been well informed by contemporary work on virtue ethics. With _Character and Environment_, Ronald Sandler remedies each of these (...) deficiencies by bringing together contemporary work on virtue ethics with contemporary work on environmental ethics. He demonstrates the many ways that any ethic of character can and should be informed by environmental considerations. He also develops a pluralistic virtue-oriented environmental ethic that accommodates the richness and complexity of our relationship with the natural environment and provides effective and nuanced guidance on environmental issues. These projects have implications not only for environmental ethics and virtue ethics but also for moral philosophy more broadly. Ethical theories must be assessed on their theoretical and practical adequacy with respect to all aspects of the human ethical situation: personal, interpersonal, and environmental. To the extent that virtue-oriented ethical theory in general, and Sandler's version of it in particular, provides a superior environmental ethic to other ethical theories, it is to be preferred not just as an environmental ethic but also as an ethical theory. _Character and Environment_ will engage any reader with an interest in environmental ethics, virtue ethics, or moral philosophy. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. The value of species; 3. The conservation biology dilemma; 4. Assisted colonization; 5. Shifting goals and changing strategies; 6. The (in)significance of species boundaries; 7. Homo sapiens in particular; 8. Artifactual species; 9. Conclusion.

We are causing species to go extinct at extraordinary rates, altering existing species in unprecedented ways and creating entirely new species. More than ever before, we require an ethic of species to guide our interactions with them. In this book, Ronald L. Sandler examines the value of species and the ethical significance of species boundaries and discusses what these mean for species preservation in the light of global climate change, species engineering and human enhancement. He argues that species possess (...) several varieties of value, but they are not sacred. It is sometimes permissible to alter species, let them go extinct and invent new ones. Philosophically rigorous, accessible and illustrated with examples drawn from contemporary science, this book will be of interest to students of philosophy, bioethics, environmental ethics and conservation biology. (shrink)

Some have suggested that there is no fact to the matter as to whether or not a particular physical system relaizes a particular computational description. This suggestion has been taken to imply that computational states are not real, and cannot, for example, provide a foundation for the cognitive sciences. In particular, Putnam has argued that every ordinary open physical system realizes every abstract finite automaton, implying that the fact that a particular computational characterization applies to a physical system does not (...) tell oneanything about the nature of that system. Putnam''s argument is scrutinized, and found inadequate because, among other things, it employs a notion of causation that is too weak. I argue that if one''s view of computation involves embeddedness (inputs and outputs) and full causality, one can avoid the universal realizability results. Therefore, the fact that a particular system realizes a particular automaton is not a vacuous one, and is often explanatory. Furthermore, I claim that computation would not necessarily be an explanatorily vacuous notion even if it were universally realizable. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is now widely recognized as an alternative to Kantian and consequentialist ethical theories. However, moral philosophers have been slow to bring virtue ethics to bear on topics in applied ethics. Moreover, environmental virtue ethics is an underdeveloped area of environmental ethics. Although environmental ethicists often employ virtue-oriented evaluation (such as respect, care, and love for nature) and appeal to role models (such as Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson) for guidance, environmental ethics has not been well informed (...) by contemporary work on virtue ethics. With _Character and Environment_, Ronald Sandler remedies each of these deficiencies by bringing together contemporary work on virtue ethics with contemporary work on environmental ethics. He demonstrates the many ways that any ethic of character can and should be informed by environmental considerations. He also develops a pluralistic virtue-oriented environmental ethic that accommodates the richness and complexity of our relationship with the natural environment and provides effective and nuanced guidance on environmental issues. These projects have implications not only for environmental ethics and virtue ethics but also for moral philosophy more broadly. Ethical theories must be assessed on their theoretical and practical adequacy with respect to all aspects of the human ethical situation: personal, interpersonal, and environmental. To the extent that virtue-oriented ethical theory in general, and Sandler's version of it in particular, provides a superior environmental ethic to other ethical theories, it is to be preferred not just as an environmental ethic but also as an ethical theory. _Character and Environment_ will engage any reader with an interest in environmental ethics, virtue ethics, or moral philosophy. (shrink)

Environmental ethics (see Environmental Ethics) is the study of the ethical relationships between human beings and the natural environment, including the nonhuman individuals that populate and constitute it. It involves developing a proper understanding of the human–nature relationship, identifying the goods and values that are part of or emerge from that relationship, determining the norms (rules/principles) that those goods and values justify, and applying those norms to generate guidance on environmental issues and interactions. Environmental virtue ethics is that part of (...) environmental ethics that concerns character (see Virtue Ethics). The core questions of environmental virtue ethics are these. (shrink)

In this essay I argue: that Sartre's account of freedom falls back into the Cartesian problems it is explicitly designed to escape ; that Sartre simply pushes the old Cartesian problem of how a spontaneity can act on an object back to the level of pre-reflective original freedom, without solving it; that Merleau-Ponty's account does indeed move us beyond the Cartesian dilemmas by rooting freedom in its pre-reflective ground of meaning, which, in essence, is the body's pre-reflective relationality to the (...) world; and that Sartre's account of freedom rests only on the obstacle/task dialectic while Merleau-Ponty's account seems to rest on the richer dialectics of both obstacle/task and giving/receiving. (shrink)

This book explores aspects of William H. Poteat’s philosophical anthropology, which proposes a post-critical alternative to the prevailing dualistic conception of the person and opens a path to recovery of the pre-reflective ontological ground of the person where our personhood can be recovered and re-appropriated.

An accessible yet rigorous introduction to the field, Environmental Ethics: Theory in Practice helps students develop the analytical skills to effectively identify and evaluate the social and ethical dimensions of environmental issues. Covering a wide variety of theories and critical perspectives, author Ronald Sandler considers their strengths and weaknesses, emphasizes their practical importance, and grounds the discussions in a multitude of both classic and contemporary cases and examples. FEATURES * Discusses a wide range of theories of environmental ethics, representing (...) their strengths and weaknesses as charitably as possible without advocating for any particular theory, thereby encouraging students to think critically about which views are well justified and which are not * Extensive use of cases and examples links theoretical and practical issues and shows how environmental issues have both social and ecological components; issues covered include climate change, species conservation, ecological economics, consumption, environmental justice, intergenerational justice, genetically modified crops, animal agriculture, population, environmental rights, and food security, among many others * Incorporates both classic and cutting-edge cases and examples; iconic cases include the spotted owl, Bhopal chemical link, and Hetch Hetchy controversies, while contemporary cases include lead contamination of Flint, Michigan's water supply and innovations is conservation genetics, including conservation cloning, deextinction, and gene drives * Covers food ethics--addressing such topics as genetic engineering, food systems, food waste, and eating animals--and technology ethics, reflecting on technological power and the role of technology in creating and responding to environmental issues * Emphasizes the social justice dimensions of environmental problems with chapters on environmental justice, food security, ecofeminism, and more * Includes text boxes that provide extended discussions of cases; thought experiments; additional coverage of theoretical issues discussed in the main text; and exercises that ask students to apply theories or reflect on how theoretical issues intersect with practical problems * Provides numerous pedagogical aids including review questions, discussion questions, key terms and additional reading lists at the end of each chapter, extensive internal cross-referencing, a glossary of key terms and concepts, and more than thirty images, illustrations, tables, and graphs. (shrink)

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859, was a revolutionary attempt “to overthrow the dogma of separate creations,” a declaration that provoked different reactions among the religious, ranging from mild enthusiasm to anger. Christians sympathetic to Darwin's effort sought to make Darwinism appear compatible with their religious beliefs. Two of Darwin's most prominent defenders in the United States were the Calvinists Asa Gray, a Harvard botanist, and George Frederick Wright, a cleric-geologist. Gray, who long favored a “special origination” in (...) connection with the evolution of humans and questioned whether natural selection can account for the formation of organs, the making of eyes, etc., embraced natural selection as the primary mechanism underlying the production of most species. He also went so far as to invoke divine providence, rather than randomness, to explain the variations on which natural selection acted. This chapter discusses creationism, intelligent design, and modern biology. (shrink)

This book brings together the ideas of a number of contemporary modernist and liberal Muslim thinkers, exposing an important intellectual current in Islamic thought which will be new to many Western readers. Responding to the challenges brought by colonialism and modernization, the contributors propose new conceptions and interpretations of Islam consonant with the age. Although their specific concerns and emphases vary, they all reconsider the relation between religion and politics and the incorporation of modern Western ideas.

Like other English-speaking peoples around the world, New Zealanders began debating Darwinism in the early 1860s, shortly after the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Despite the opposition of some religious and political leaders – and even the odd scientist – biological evolution made deep inroads in a culture that increasingly identified itself as secular. The introduction of pro-evolution curricula and radio broadcasts provoked occasional antievolution outbursts, but creationism remained more an object of ridicule than a threat until the (...) last decades of the twentieth century, when first American and then Australian creationists began fomenting antievolutionism among New Zealanders. Although Stephen Jay Gould assured them in 1986 that they had little to fear from so-called scientific creationism, because it was a ‘peculiarly American’ phenomenon, scientific creationism by the mid-1990s had captured the allegiance of an estimated five per cent of the country and proved especially attractive to Maori and Pacific Islanders. In 1992 New Zealand creationists formed their own antievolution society, Creation Science. (shrink)

As the crusade to outlaw the teaching of evolution changed to a battle for equal time for creationism, the ideological defenses of that doctrine also shifted from primarily biblical to more scientific grounds. This essay describes the historical development of “scientific creationism” from a variety of late–nineteenth– and early–twentieth–century creationist reactions to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, through the Scopes trial and the 1960s revival of creationism, to the current spread of strict creationism around the world.

If one's political engagement is to be shaped fundamentally by the Scriptures, it means developing a biblical understanding on a given issue by means of a process vastly more complex than selecting a few isolated proof-texts related to it.

Some have suggested that there is no fact to the matter as to whether or not a particular physical system relaizes a particular computational description. This suggestion has been taken to imply that computational states are not real, and cannot, for example, provide a foundation for the cognitive sciences. In particular, Putnam has argued that every ordinary open physical system realizes every abstract finite automaton, implying that the fact that a particular computational characterization applies to a physical system does not (...) tell oneanything about the nature of that system. Putnam''s argument is scrutinized, and found inadequate because, among other things, it employs a notion of causation that is too weak. I argue that if one''s view of computation involves embeddedness (inputs and outputs) and full causality, one can avoid the universal realizability results. Therefore, the fact that a particular system realizes a particular automaton is not a vacuous one, and is often explanatory. Furthermore, I claim that computation would not necessarily be an explanatorily vacuous notion even if it were universally realizable. (shrink)

We describe some of the ways that the field of content analysis is being transformed in an Era of Big Data. We argue that content analysis, from its beginning, has been concerned with extracting the main meanings of a text and mapping those meanings onto the space of a textual corpus. In contrast, we suggest that the emergence of new styles of text mining tools is creating an opportunity to develop a different kind of content analysis that we describe as (...) a computational hermeneutics. Here the goal is to go beyond a mapping of the main meaning of a text to mimic the kinds of questions and concerns that have traditionally been the focus of a hermeneutically grounded close reading, a reading that focuses on what Kenneth Burke described as the poetic meanings of a text. We illustrate this approach by referring to our own work concerning the rhetorical character of US National Security Strategy documents. (shrink)

This article addresses the implications of rapid and uncertain ecological change, and global climate change in particular, for reserve oriented and restoration oriented ecosystem management. I argue for the following conclusions: (1) rapid and uncertain ecological change undermines traditional justifications for reserve oriented and restoration oriented ecosystem management strategies; (2) it requires rethinking ecosystem management goals, not just developing novel strategies (such as assisted colonization) to accomplish traditional goals; (3) species preservation ought to be deemphasized as an ecosystem management goal; (...) (4) reserve oriented ecosystem management remains well justified, but the goals for it must be revised. (shrink)

The companion volume to Arnold Come's Kierkegaard as Humanist, Kierkegaard as Theologian is an exploration of Søren Kierkegaard's deliberately Christian writings, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1846) to For Self-Examination (1851). In his later writings Kierkegaard sought to "get further forward in the direction of discovering the Christianity of the New Testament" to resolve his own spiritual crisis. His struggle to understand how authentic theologizing relates to the spiritual struggles of personal faith led him to a discussion of the (...) three basic foci of his theologizing: the self as gift, that is, a creation "out of nothing" from God; the self as failure, which brings on a state of despair; and the self redeemed by God's love and healing compassion. Come probes some of the problematic aspects of Kierkegaard's theology. He addresses the question of whether God's high intentions and demands for human achievement of selfhood and spirituality justify the unspeakable sufferings entailed in human failures to fulfil those demands. He also explores the puzzling relation between Kierkegaard's seeming assignment of exclusivity to the Christian understanding and experiences of both sin and salvation as well as his assumption of the capacity of humans to recognize the need to turn to the eternal that is immanent in every human consciousness - so-called Religiousness A. (shrink)

Ronald Weed's book offers a fresh investigation of political conflict in Aristotle's Politics. While there have been a number of studies on stasis or factional conflict, few provide a thorough analysis of its intractable character dimensions. Weed presents a highly original and provocative analysis of the moral psychology of factional conflict in the middle books of the Politics, arguing that the character deficiencies of a citizenry are the central causes of stasis and indispensable for understanding both the nature of (...) these conflicts and their remedies. In Weed's view, Aristotle contends that stasis can be greatly limited without greatly reducing bad character, so long as the vices that breed it most are limited. Weed presents a novel and detailed explanation of how Aristotle's institutional remedies, such as the selective distribution of honor and wealth, may bypass circumstances that provoke stasis, if they account for what vices are triggered under those circumstances. Weed advances an understanding of Aristotle's practical thought that captures Aristotle's penetrating realism about political breakdown and pathology, while also preserving the robust and irreducible essence of his theory of character and rational choice. (shrink)

Summary. A distinction is made between two senses of the claim “cognition is computation”. One sense, the opaque reading, takes computation to be whatever is described by our current computational theory and claims that cognition is best understood in terms of that theory. The transparent reading, which has its primary allegiance to the phenomenon of computation, rather than to any particular theory of it, is the claim that the best account of cognition will be given by whatever theory turns out (...) to be the best account of the phenomenon of computation. The distinction is clarified and defended against charges of circularity and changing the subject. Several well-known objections to computationalism are then reviewed, and for each the question of whether the transparent reading of the computationalist claim can provide a response is considered. (shrink)

Editorial preface vol. 70.2 Content Type Journal Article Category Editorial Pages 1-2 DOI 10.1007/s11153-011-9321-6 Authors Ronald L. Hall, Department of Philosophy, Stetson University, DeLand, FL, USA Journal International Journal for Philosophy of Religion Online ISSN 1572-8684 Print ISSN 0020-7047.

One can learn a great deal about the relative priorities in any moral theory by understanding how these priorities are conveyed in the perpetually vexing challenge of moral education. Rousseau and Kant are two thinkers whose distinctly modern retrieval of classical virtue was animated by overlapping yet diverging grievances with classical philosophy. One common enemy of Rousseauian and Kantian virtue found in classical thought is the moral vice of envy. This essay argues that whereas Rousseau chastises the vice of envy, (...) replacing it with the central virtue of pity, Kant redirects the vice of envy towards the more salutary virtue of magnanimity during adolescence and beneficence in the adult. The consideration of sympathy in its full moral and educational context in Kant-over and against Rousseau’s emphasis on pity as the central corrective to the vice of envy-underscores the extent of the differences between Rousseau and Kant on this issue. The common criticism of Rousseau and Kant on the problem of envy is animated by some common concerns, but their understandings of it as a problem require responses that are deceptively different in their substance. (shrink)

Technology shapes every aspect of human experience and it is the primary driver of social and ecological change. Given this, it is surprising that we spend so little time studying, analyzing, and evaluating new technologies. Occasionally, an issue grabs public attention--for example, the use of human embryonic stem cells in medical research or online file sharing of music and movies. However, these are the exceptions. For the most part, we enthusiastically embrace each new technology and application with little critical reflection (...) on how it will impact our lives and our world. What is more, when an issue raised by an emerging technology is attended to, we often lack the language, concepts, and critical perspectives to thoroughly address it. The aim of this textbook is to introduce students and other readers to the ethical issues associated with a broad array of emerging technologies--including nanotechnology, synthetic genomics, robotics, genetic engineering, geoengineering, synthetic meat, virtual reality, information technologies, sex selection, and many more--and to help them develop analytical skills and perspectives for effectively evaluating novel technologies and applications. (shrink)

Over the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. For example, biology has been used to justify eugenic programs, forced sterilization, human experimentation, and death camps—all in an attempt to support notions of racial superiority. By investigating the past, the contributors to _Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins_ hope to better prepare us to discern ideological abuse of science when it occurs in the future. Denis R. Alexander (...) and Ronald L. Numbers bring together fourteen experts to examine the varied ways science has been used and abused for nonscientific purposes from the fifteenth century to the present day. Featuring an essay on eugenics from Edward J. Larson and an examination of the progress of evolution by Michael J. Ruse, _Biology and Ideology_ examines uses both benign and sinister, ultimately reminding us that ideological extrapolation continues today. An accessible survey, this collection will enlighten historians of science, their students, practicing scientists, and anyone interested in the relationship between science and culture. (shrink)

By means of a Kierkegaardian critique of postmodernism, Ronald L. Hall argues that the postmodernist flirtation with Kierkegaard ignores the existential import of his thought. Word and Spirit offers a novel interpretation of Kierkegaard's conception of the self, according to which spirit is essentially linked to the speech act. In an extended interpretation of Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Hall uses insights from Austin, Wittgenstein, Polanyi, and Poteat to fill out and explicate Kierkegaard's views in the context of modern language philosophy. The (...) enriched concept of the speech act represented by the Hebrew idea of dabhar frames Hall's critique of irony, romanticism, Don Giovanni, Faust, the demonic, music, and ultimately, postmodernisim in a Kierkegaardian mode. The result of the modern suspicion of speech, Hall concludes, is a demonic, musical spiritlessness. (shrink)