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10.1 Apology for Environmental Anthropocentrism

- Prof. Hwang, Kyung-sig
Department of Philosophy
Seoul National University
Korea

1. Three Views of Environmental Ethics

Environmental concern is now commonplace. Yet environmental ethics is still far from clear. Most people would agree that polluting rivers to the extent that we kill all the fish in them is bad. But is it immoral or unethical to do so? And if it is, is it because the fish we kill have a right to life that we violate, because fish and rivers deserve respect, have intrinsic value that is incompatible with our polluting them, because we indirectly cause harm to people by polluting rivers or for some other reason?[1]

There are three kinds of views concerning environmental ethics or ecological morality. One general view is that ecology and awareness of nature, its constituents and their interdependence necessitate the development of a fundamentally new ethics, a new non-human-centered, nature-centered morality (ecocentrism). A second and less radical view is that the findings of ecology make it necessary to develop a new ethic, but one that is new in a less radical sense, namely in the sense that it is ecologically oriented, ecologically aware, a normative ethic that enlarges the circle of moral community, that is animal-centered or life-centered morality (biocentrism), The third kind of view, and the one that I want to defend in this paper is that the findings of ecology do not necessitate a basic revolution in ethics but simply a more informed, more accurate thinking out of our moral obligations and moral rights, we can call this kind of view, a careful, considerate and rational human-centered ethics (anthropocentrism).[2]

The view that a new ecological ethic that explains as not man-dependent, one that fully and adequately indicates the values and valuable in nature, that brings out that natural phenomena and not simply man demand respect and which explains man's duties regarding himself and his environment is one that is more commonly alluded to than set out and defended in a developed, worked-out form. Indeed, while many write as if such an ethic exists and is the true ethic, it would seem that no moral philosopher has yet succeeded in either stating or defending it in a systematic way. Nonetheless, it is a view explicitly espoused by R. Routley and V. Routley in various articles; it is also a view to which Aldo Leopold gave voice when he claimed that we need a Land Ethic, a conservation ethic, one that enlarges the membership of the moral community by including all the constituents of nature.

The second, less radical, approach is that of developing a new normative ethic by way of modifying and correcting the traditional ethical theories so as to acknowledge new, specifically ecological values and duties. Not surprisingly, this approach is often run together and confused with the first, more radical approach so that it is not always easy to determine in which sense a specific writer is intending to insist on the need for new ethic.[3] The two distinct claims, the one that certain animals (usually identified as sentient animals) possess moral rights, and the other that living organisms and even natural phenomena should be accorded legal rights, are associated, on occasion, sometimes with the more radical claim that a new distinctively ecological ethic possible, necessary, and such as can be formulated, sometimes with the less radical view that traditional ethics simply needs to be supplemented by reference to ecological values, among which some list animal moral rights, others those features of natural phenomena and living organisms which provide a basis for according then legal rights.

The third view, which will be defended here, is that there is no need for a specifically ecological ethic to explain our obligations toward nature, that our moral rights and duties can satisfactorily be explained in terms of traditional, human-centered ethical theory.[4] In terms of this view, ecology bears on ethics and morality in that it brings out the far-reaching, extremely important effects of man's actions, that much that seemed simply to happen-extinction of species, depletion of resources, pollution, over rapid growth of population, undesirable, harmful, dangerous, and damaging uses of technology and science - is due to human actions that are controllable, preventable, by men and hence such that men can be held accountable for what occurs.

Ecology brings out that, often acting from the best motives, however, simply from short-sighted self-interest without regard for others living today and for those yet to be born, brings about very damaging and often irreversible changes in the environment, changes such as the extinction of plant and animal species, destruction of wilderness and valuable natural phenomena such as forests, lakes, rivers, seas. Many reproduce at a rate with which their environment cannot cope, so that damage is done, to and at the same time, those who are born are ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-sheltered, ill-educated.

Moralists concerned with the environment have pressed the need for a basic rethinking of the nature of our moral obligations in the light of the knowledge provided by ecology on the basis of personal, social, and species prudence, as well as on general moral grounds in terms of hitherto unrecognized and neglected duties in respect of other people, people now living and persons yet to be born, those of the third world, and those of future generation, and also in respect of preservation of natural species, wilderness, and valuable natural phenomena. Hence we find ecological moralists who adopt this third approach, writing to the effect that concern for our duties entail concern for our environment and the ecosystems it contains.

Environmental ethics is concerned with the moral relation that holds between humans and the natural world, the ethical principles governing those relations determine our duties, obligations, and responsibilities with regard to the earth's natural environment and all the animals and plants inhabit it. A human-centered theory of environmental ethics holds that our moral duties with respect to the natural world are all ultimately derived from the duties we owe to one another as human beings. It is because we should respect the human rights, or should protect and promote the well being of humans, that we must place certain constraints on our treatment of the earth's environment and its non-human habitants.[5]

In this paper, I want to defend an anthropocentric theory of environmental ethics. I am going to propose two theses for anthropocentrism. The first one is that anthropocentrism is more acceptable and justifiable than other view in the theoretical point of view. And I will argue for the first thesis (theoretical justifiability) in terms of intrinsic value and moral rights. The second one is that anthropocentrism is more applicable and workable than other theories in practical point of view or at least practically equivalent to other theories, if we reconstruct and apply anthropocentrism in a more rational, considerate and careful way. I am going to argue for the second thesis (practical workability or practical equivalence) in terms of obligations for future generations and humble ignorance.

2. The thesis on Theoretical Justifiability

1) Argument from Intrinsic Value
Galileo's astronomy forced us to convert a literal to a perspective understanding of the claim that the sun is setting. His physics gave us the distinction, elaborated by John Locke, between primary and secondary qualities. A secondary quality is observer dependent, manufactured out of the primary motions of matter. Color is an experiential conversion of photon radiation; taste and smell are molecular operations. Coached by these theories, what is then to be said of value? If the sunset is not literally a setting sun, not even red, then surely it is not literally beautiful. Samuel Alexander proposed that values were tertiary qualities. Humans agree about redness, owing to their having the same organs, but value appraisals require an interpretive judgment twice removed from the qualities actually there.

By this account, we have no organs to taste, touch, see or smell value. So it must originate at a deeper mental level. We have no options in judging length or redness. Such experiences happen to us without any liberty to refuse them. The primary and secondary qualities are always there in the scope of consciousness. They perhaps fall into the background, but they never turn off during perception. Value judgments, by contrast, have to be decided. Beauty and utility are things we must attend to. When our minds turn aside to other thoughts, though still perceiving the object, such values entirely disappear from consciousness. Both primary and secondary qualities are in this sense empirical or natural. But finding nothing that produces consensus or proves researchable, most judges become convinced that these tertiary qualities are overlays, not really they're in the natural world. They are observer-dependent, gifts of the spectator's mind.[6]

But I don't want to say I am radical subjectivist in value theory. Rather I agreed with an admirable account of C. I. Lewis. He hedges, and grants that natural objects carry, objectively extrinsic value, in effect, the standing possibility of valuation. They actually have a potential for value, even if this forever remains inexperienced or is mistakenly experienced. When an experience arrives, such objects do not refer us away from themselves, but we enjoy them for what they are. Nevertheless, they cannot own any intrinsic value. No objective existent has strictly intrinsic value; all values in objects are extrinsic only. The Goodness of good objects consists in the possibility of their leading to some realization of directly experienced goodness.[7]

Indeed, it is so narrow to deny value to all nonhuman elements of nature. The sheer exploitation of nature based on insensitivity to the ecological interrelatedness of life systems is mistaken. But this does not rule out the view that other things in nature are valuable, as W. H. Murdy states, "as instruments to man's survival or well-being". In fact as acknowledgement of our dependent relationships with nature grows, he writes, we place instrumental value on an ever-greater variety of things.[8] We value the ozone shield more highly when we realize it protects us from excessive radiation. We value phytoplankton in the oceans when we recognize that these organisms provide much of the earth's free oxygen, and so on. Greater sensitivity to the causal chains in nature will make us acknowledge an enormous range of instrumental value that other parts of the biosphere process. But for me, that is all part and parcel of a sophisticated anthropocentrism.

2) Argument from Moral Rights
Historically we know that the members included in the moral community have grown over the ages. In ancient Greece, it covered male freeman. Slowly it was extended to include woman and then all human beings. Should we further extend the moral community to animals, to mountains, to ecosystems, to nature as a whole? Some like Peter Singer advocate animal rights, some like Aldo Leopold propose a land ethic, some like Christopher Stone argue that even trees should have standing. Those who argue in these ways in the West belong to something of a counter-culture, since they implicitly attack the view of nature upon which modern sciences built, and hence modern science itself.[9]

The traditional Western ethic refuses to extend the moral community to animals, trees, or nature. There has been much philosophical writing concerning moral rights during the past twenty years. One of the most discussed topics relates to who or what can be a possessor of a moral right, the concern of most writers being with the question of whether animals, and not simply human beings, can possess rights. Initially it was those who wished to develop more powerful arguments in support of condemnation and even out-lawing or cruelty to animals that explored this approach. More recently, environmentalists who hope to find in theories of moral rights new and powerful arguments for respect for nature and its constituent animals and plants have joined them.

Much of the writing confuses the case for according legal rights to nonhumans, to animals, plants, mountains, and ascribing moral rights to such things. There is clearly a great difference between arguing that animals, trees, mountains possess moral rights and that it is morally desirable and expedient to accord them legal rights. This confusion has detracted a great deal from the force of many of the relevant arguments. Clearly it is nonsense to suggest that inanimate beings, buildings, works of art, mountains possess moral rights. It is not absurd, if they are valued and valuable, and if they are threatened, to argue that they ought to be accorded legal rights and that certain persons be given standing, and thereby be empowered to take legal action to protect them by protecting their legal rights.[10]

Many who are concerned about the welfare of animals and who have sought a charter of rights for animals, have claimed and even believed themselves to be arguing that animals possess moral rights, when in fact their arguments simply relate to the case for legally protecting animals from abuses by according animals legal rights. This, I think, is possible position to adopt. It is quite distinct from the view that animals do in fact possess moral rights. Since the most promising although not the only, way of arguing for legal rights for animals is that they possess moral rights. We might usefully first consider the question: who or what may be the possessor of a moral right?

There seems to be no problem at all about ascribing rights to persons. To my knowledge, the only philosophers who question whether rational adult persons can and do possess rights are those who reject the concept of a moral right, and hence the whole theory of moral rights. All who talk about moral rights as things that are of moral importance accept that human persons are paradigm cases of possessors of rights. Doubts arise in respect of very mentally defective human beings, "human vegetables" who are incapable of self-consciousness, even if consciousness.

Some, including myself, argue that such beings cannot possess moral rights, that they have no selves, no personalities, actually or potentially, and cannot claim or come to claim any rights they might be said to possess. Others contend, against this, that since they are human, they must possess moral rights that can be claimed on their behalf by others who act as their guardians or representatives. This has led others again to maintain that, if such human beings can possess moral rights, then animals with similar attributes can also possess moral rights. Hence it is further argued that the class of beings that may possess moral rights is not that of persons, nor that of human beings, but that of sentient beings. Such ad hominem argumentation is obviously of very limited value.

Of course, animals and plants may have interests. But interests cannot provide a basis for making off possible possessors of rights from these beings and things that cannot possess rights. Rights and interests are distinct, and it is very serious error to confuse that, which is in a being or thing's interests and that to which a being or a thing has a right.[11] The being or thing may be incapable of possessing moral rights; and where the being can do so, it may have no right to pursue its interests. To represent a person and protect his interests is very different from representing and protecting his moral rights. Paternalists, as liberals frequently note, infringe upon people's rights for the sake of protecting their interests. The liberal demands the rights to exercise his moral rights even in ways that are damaging to his interests.

Moral rights typically can be waived, forgone, insisted upon, exercised in or contrary to one's interests. For possession of a moral right to be meaningful, the possessor or his/her representative must be able to claim, exercised or the like. Consider here a legal right that no one could legally exercise, and which no one could claim or exercise on the possessor's behalf. It would be empty talk to claim that any legal right existed under such circumstances. The same thing holds of moral rights. Yet this is the situation that would prevail if animals were to be attributed rights. We can plausibly claim to have some idea of what is in the interests of an animal. We can have no knowledge concerning how it would exercise its moral rights, if it possessed any. This is because it has no capacity to exercise them, while a capacity to do so, actually or potentially, is presupposed by talk about moral rights.

In brief, a consideration of why paradigm cases of possessors of rights, persons, rational, morally autonomous beings, are such, and why the exercising of rights by the possessor of the right or a representative is so centered to the concept of right brings out that it is capacity for moral autonomy, for moral self direction and self-determination, that is basic to the possibility of possessing a right. To show that animals do not, cannot possess moral rights is distinct from claiming that we have no duties in respect of animals. Clearly we have many important duties in the treatment and care of animals. The claim about rights is simply that the duties we have are not and cannot be based on the possession of rights by animals.

The Thesis on Practical Equivalence

1) Arguments from Future Generations
What I mean by thesis on practical equivalence is that if we reconstruct anthropocentrism in a more careful, considerate and rational way, anthropocentrism is practically equivalent to more radical form of environmental ethics, that is, animal-centered ethics, life-centered ethics, even ecocentric ethics. I think there can be many considerations to defend this thesis. But in this paper, I want to focus especially on two points. One is argument from future generations and the other one is from humble ignorance. These two considerations may be not sufficient but enough, I think, to make anthropocentrism more acceptable and more applicable than other ethics or at least practically equivalent to other ethics.

The most obvious reason for raising the question about our obligations to future generations stems from a simple perception: that what we do now will have consequences, good or ill, for those who come after us. Just as the actions, choices and thinking of our ancestors, close and distant, influence the way we live our lives, what we do influences the lives of those for whom we will be ancestors.[12] That we do not know how or by what particular chain of events this influence will exert or express itself, or a thousand or ten thousand years from now is beside the point for the moment. What matters at the outset is to recognize that there will be some influences.

The first argument, which is an argument from future generations, may sound almost like a confession and avoidance - a confession that argument for ecocentrism cannot be made and its avoidance diverting through the anticipated interests of future generations.[13] Even if rivers lack interests, future humans may have interests in at least some rivers. Pursuing such a line of thought, one might suppose it no trick to derive a present reason for modifying contemporary conduct affecting at least some non-personal being, even if doing so does not serve our welfare. From our perspective alone, the benefits from concerning some endangered species may not be worth the sacrifices. But when we pool with our own interests, the interests of the unborn, and recalculate, the new majority may favor conservation.

A typical human-centered argument, which I want to defend, goes as follows. Future generations of people have as much right to live a physically secure and healthy life as those of the present generation. Each of us is therefore under an obligation not to allow the natural environment to deteriorate to such an extent that the survival and well being of later human inhabitants of the earth are jeopardized. We also have a duty to consume natural resources so that future generations will be able to enjoy their fair share of benefits derived from those resources. Even our present responsibility to protect endangered species of wild life is linked to human values. We also have a duty, the argument continues, to preserve the beauty of wild nature so that those of future generations can have as much opportunity to experience and appreciate it as we do. It would be unfair of us to destroy the world's natural wonders and leave only ugly trash heaps for others to contemplate.[14] Thus a whole system of standards and rules governing our present conduct in relation to the ethic's natural environment can be grounded on human needs and interests alone.

Moreover, if we take human-centered ethics more seriously in the perspective of not only anthropocentric realism but also anthropocentric idealism,[15] it is very difficult to find any reason to blame anthropocentrism for its narrowness or imprudence. As I have indicated, what makes the future-generations arguments appealing is that it appears to retain human wants as the touchstone of moral analysis. But surely wants are not the only data on which moral reflection can be based. Historically few moral theories have accepted what one wants as either given or good without qualification. More commonly, what we instinctively desire is regarded as a variable, subject to - indeed, the precise target of - some disciplining virtues. The self-interest, on which the rational person acts, if it must be put that way, is our moral self.

Of course, to make some place in moral philosophy for human ideals does not in itself place our conduct toward non-persons on a moral footing. Our strategy can take two distinct routes. The first is to adopt the position that to conceive of everything outside one as mere resource for one's own gratification, whether it be a woman, a slave, or a river, distorts and constricts what is worthy in human character. Sheer immoderate use of other things is akin to avarice, gluttony, and lust. The other route is to hold that there are specific virtues for the attainment of what some specific non-persons are instrumental they give us pleasure as such, but because they instill a character-leavening sense of majesty and awe.[16] Either way a moral reason for the protection of non-persons is provided, although we must make the protection, while not instrumental to human virtue and in that sense very much human-centered.

2) Argument from humble ignorance
Some of the difficulties of relying the preferences of future generations stem from our present ignorance particularly as we project to futures that are increasingly remote, we do not know what effect our actions will have on them, or even how they will care.[17] Even if we set aside such factual ignorance, serious problems of value remain. Obligations to future generations are essentially an obligation to produce a desirable state of affairs for the community of the future to promote conditions of good living for future generations. But is our conception of the good life for man relevant to future generation?

While our ability to affect the future is immense, our ability to foresee the results of our environmental interventions is not. I think that our moral responsibility grows with foresight. And yet, paradoxically in some cases grave moral responsibility is entailed by the fact of one's ignorance. If the planetary life-support system appears to be complex and mysterious, humble ignorance should indicate respect and restraint. However, as many life scientists have complained, these virtues have not been apparent in these generations. Instead they point out, we have boldly marched ahead, shredding delicate ecosystems and obliterating countless species, and with them the unique genetic codes that evolved through millions of years; we have altered the climate and even the chemistry of the atmosphere, and as a result of all this-what?[18]

A few results are immediately to our benefit; more energy, more mineral resources, more cropland, convenient waste disposal. Indeed, these short-term payoffs motivated us to alter our natural environment. But by far the larger and more significant results, the permanent results, are unknown and perhaps unknowable. Nature, says poet, Nancy Newhall, "holds answers to more questions than we know how to ask." And we have scarcely bothered to ask.[19] Year and year, the natural habitants diminish and the species disappear, and thus our planetary ecosystem (our household) is forever impoverished.

It is awareness of ecological crisis that has led to the now common claim that we need transvaluation of value, new values, a new ethic, and an ethic that is essentially and not simply contingently new and ecological. Closer inspection usually reveals that the writer who states this does not really mean to advance such a radical thesis, that all he is arguing for is the application of old, recognized, ethical values of the kind noted under the characterization of respect for persons, justice, honesty, promotion of good, where pleasure and happiness are seen as goods.

Thus, although W. T. Blackstone writes; "we do not need the kind of transvaluation that Nietzsche wanted, but we do need that for which ecologists are calling, that is, basic changes in man's attitude toward nature and man's place in nature, toward population growth, toward the use of technology, and toward the production and distribution of goods and services." We need to develop what I call the ecological attitude. The transvaluation of values, which is needed, will require fundamental changes in the social, legal, political and economic institutions that embody our values. He concludes his article by explicitly noting that he does not really demand a new ethic, or a transvaluation of values.

A human being is a hierarchical system and a component of super-individual, hierarchical system of sets. What is needed is not the denial of anthropocentrism, the placing of the highest value on humans and their ends and the conceiving of the rest of the nature as an instrument for those ends. Rather what is needed is the explicit recognition of these hierarchical systems and an ecological approach to science and the accumulation of scientific knowledge in which the myriad casual relationships between different hierarchical systems are recognized and put to the use of humanity.

The freedom to use the environment must be restricted to rational and human use. If there is irrational use - pollution, overpopulation, crowding, a growth in poverty, and so on - people may wipe out hierarchies of life related to their own survival and to the quality of their own lives. This sort of anthropocentrism is essential even to human survival and a radical biotic egalitarianism would undermine conditions for that survival.[20] Rational anthropocentrism, one that recognizes the value of human life "transcends our individual life" and one in which we form a collective bond of identity with the future generations is essential is the process of human evolution.

4. Environmental Ethics or Environmental Management?

Given the preceding arguments, we can say the following. The possibilities of developing a genuine environment-based account of the value of the environment depend on us making sense of the idea that the environment possesses a value over and above its human or sentience-based value. It requires, that is, that we make sense of the idea that the environment possesses what is often referred to as intrinsic value (including moral rights). If we cannot make sense of this idea, or of the notion of intrinsic value, which underlies it, then there seems to be no room for an environment-based environmental ethic.

If environmental value reduced to human based value, then environmental ethics would be restricted to human centered approach. It would be restricted, that is, developing a prudential account of how human being can best use the environment to further their own purposes. If environmental value reduced to sentience based value, and then environmental ethics would effectively collapse into a case for the moral entitlements of sentient creatures, coupled with an account of how the environment is best used to further the interests of such creatures.

Neither of these projects, however, provides a genuine ethics of the environment. At most they provide an ethics for environmental use or ethic of environmental management. That is, they do not provide an account of how our treatment of the environment should be constrained by, and reflect, the value that it possesses in and of itself. Rather they would provide an account simply of how the environment is to be best used to further the interests, needs and purposes of human and other sentient creatures. For a genuine ethics of the environment, it seems, we need the claim that the environment has intrinsic value. But what does this claim mean?[21]

In fact, it is possible to discern at least three distinct concepts of intrinsic value. The first sense of intrinsic value identifies intrinsic value with the value that an object possesses in virtue of its intrinsic properties or features. And a property is said to be intrinsic to an object if it is non-relational property of that object. The second sense of intrinsic value should be understood as non-instrumental value. And on this construal, an object has intrinsic value in so far as it is an end in itself. The third sense of the notion of intrinsic value understands this as value that is objective in the sense of not being dependent of its existence on the opinions, feelings or attitudes of sentient creatures.

Firstly, adopting the concept of intrinsic value, as non-instrumental value seems an absolute requirement of the attempt to develop an environment centered ethic. If the only value nature has is instrumental in character, and then no matter how objective this instrumental value is, the value of nature will depend solely on the role it plays in furthering human or sentient interests. In this case all substantive moral issues concerning the environment can be dealt with in terms of a shallow ecological ethics, an ethic of environmental management, either for the benefit of human or to that of all sentient creatures.[22]

However, while the claim that at least some of the value of the natural environment is not instrumental in character seems to be necessary for a deep ecological ethic, it does not seem to be sufficient. For if we were to claim that the value of nature, while non-instrumental, is nevertheless subjective, then it seems that we would also very quickly be led back to a sentience-based ethic. Therefore, it seems that the project of developing a genuine environment centered ethic requires the claim that nature has value that is both non-instrumental and objective and also requires an objectivist account of intrinsic value.

Anyway, it is very difficult for us to deny that we philosophers live in a humanistic age. The dominant philosophical doctrine of our time, today's intellectual Zeitgeist, is that the world is a world structured by us and forged by the architectural propensities of our mind. This is the Kantian turn in philosophy. Reality as it is in itself, noumenal reality, is essentially unknowable, and philosophy, accordingly, shifts from the study of being- qua-being to the study of being-qua-known. Philosophy as first philosophy is the study of the structuring activities of the human mind and the philosophy of thought. This much has been the orthodoxy ever since Kant. Just think how much of philosophy in the twentieth century has been shaped by, and makes little sense without, this tenet.[23]

The so called linguistic turn, until quite recently, dominated philosophy in the Anglo-American world, was essentially a linguistic form of Kantianism, constituted by appending to the Kantian turn one of the two claims; either the structure of language determines the structure of cognition, or the structure of language mirrors the structure of cognition. In a similar view, much of the twentieth century Philosophy of Science has been exercised by the question of the so-called theory impregnation of observation. And, in accordance with the Kantian spirit of our time, this claim about the content of observation becomes translated into a claim about the content of reality. It is not just observation but the reality observed that is laden with theory.

And if we switch from so called Analytic Philosophy to the allegedly antagonistic continental alternative, the essentially Kantian organizing vision remains. Even Heidegger, who is in many respects a very unKantian thinker, and who in fact explicitly describes his position as anti-humanist, tells us that man is the lightening up place of being, the place where beings come to be. And in the structuralist and post- structuralist tradition, one could say, without an inordinate amount of oversimplification, that the role played by the mind in Kant's worldview is played by 'the text'.[24]

The term 'humanism', we may say, denotes the neo-Kantian, neo-idealist, view that the world depends for its existence, nature and properties on the human mind. A typical accompaniment is this claim of ontological dependence, an accompaniment clearly expressed in Kant's conception of philosophy as the philosophy of the thought is that the world is epistemologically dependent on human consciousness. If we want to know philosophically the world, we must study the products of this consciousness - language, theory, text or whatever that constitutes it as such.

But if the world is ontologically and epistemologically dependent on human consciousness, then it is very difficult to see how it can be anything other than axiologically depends on this consciousness also. If the world dependents its reality on the activities of human consciousness, then it must almost certainly depend for its worth on human consciousness too. Hence, here is the dilemma of environmental philosophy. Environmental philosophy is the branch of philosophy concerned with the worth, the value, of the environment.[25]

But the destiny of 2000 years and counting of philosophy is that environment can have no value, or whatever value it has derives exclusively from the activities of the human mind. As we stand at the dawn of a new millennium, it is surely time to ask ourselves: Environmental Ethics or Environmental Management? That is the question. If Environmental Ethics, where is the way out from Humanism? [26]




[1] Richard T. De George, eEthics and the Environment: The Anthropocentric Predicament', presented in Philosophical Conference in Korea, 1991, p.1

[2] H. J. McClosky, Ecological Ethics and Politics, Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, New Jersey, 1993, p. 29

[3] Ibid., p. 30

[4] Ibid., p. 31

[5] Ibid., p. 32

[6] Holme Rolston, eValues in and Duties to the Natural World' in Ecology, Economics, Ethics, Yale University Press, New Heaven, London, 1991, ‡W

[7] Ibid., ‡W

[8] William Blackstone, eThe Search for an Environmental Ethics', Matters of Life and Death(ed.), Tom Regan, Randomhouse, New York 1980, p. 314

[9] De George, op. cit.

[10] H. J. McClosky, op. cit., p. 62

[11] Ibid., p. 66

[12] Ernst Partridge, Responsibilities to Future Generatioins, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York, Introduction

[13] Christopher Stone, Earth and Other Ethics, Harper & Row, New York, 1987, p. 85

[14] Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature, A Theory of Environmental Ethics, Princeton University Press, p. 11

[15] Christopher Stone, op. cit., p. 89

[16] Ibid., p. 90

[17] Ibid., p. 85

[18] Ernst Partridge, op. cit., Introduction

[19] Ibid., p. 2

[20] William Blackstone, op. cit., p. 316

[21] Mark Rowlands, The Environmental Crisis, Understanding the Value of Nature, Macmillan Press Ltd., 2000, pp. 28-29

[22] Ibid., p. 29

[23] Ibid., p. 91

[24] Ibid., p. 92

[25] Ibid., p. 93

[26] Ernst Callenbach and Fritjof Capra(eds), EcoManagement, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 1993, Preface

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