Allen Thompson

Virtue and respect for nature: Ronald Sandler's character and environment

Ron Sandler’s Character and Environment is a very welcome addition to the growing literature on virtue-based (or as he would put it, virtue-oriented) approaches to environmental ethics. In the book, he both lays out the theoretical groundwork for a virtue ethics appropriate to environmental concerns and shows how a virtue-based approach could be employed to yield actual recommendations about how to handle environmental problems. Both aspects of this project are, I think, long overdue in discussions of virtue-ethical approaches to environmental ethics. Sandler’s book advances the discussion of these issues significantly, and for this reason, I think it is a tremendous contribution to the literature in environmental ethics and virtue ethics. In these comments, I will address the first part of Sandler’s project, formulating a theoretical groundwork for a virtue-based approach to environmental ethics, and in particular the aspect of this project that I find most promising, namely its attempt to secure a place for noneudaimonistic ends in the account of environmental virtue. As Sandler puts it, the view he argues for in this book is one that is pluralistic

Environmentalism, Moral Responsibility, and the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing

In ‘Doing and Allowing’, Samuel Scheffler argues that if a person sees herself as subject to norms of individual moral responsibility, then the content of her first-order substantive norms of individual moral responsibility must attribute greater responsibility to what one does than to what one could, but fails, to prevent. This paper is about how a morally responsible agent could deny the doctrine of doing and allowing, why an environmentalist should, and what this means for environmental ethical theory.

Development Ethics and the Copenhagen Accord: How Important Are the Global Poor?

As human activity continues to change the global climate, serious harms befall and will increasingly continue to befall the world’s most vulnerable people. Whether one measures human development by economic growth, human rights, or (as the United Nations does) by human capabilities, global climate change is and will likely continue to be an enormous tragedy. Rising sea levels, increased drought, desertification and other phenomena connected with climate change will significantly hinder efforts to improve human well-being, to realize human potential in safe and clean environments, to provide economic and political freedoms, to create fair and just forms of governance, and to allow people to lead dignified and fulfilling lives. The poor in developing nations will suffer first and will likely suffer the most, especially if developing nations also face restrictive limits on their greenhouse gas emissions. Yet these nations lack historic responsibility for global warming or the present capability to mitigate damages or adapt to impending changes. Climate change materially diminishes the prospects for advancing human development and this fact is morally significant, but what role should the plight of the world’s most vulnerable people play in the ethical evaluation of international climate policy? Donald Brown, of Pennsylvania State University’s Rock Ethics Institute, has written a number of papers arguing for the importance that ethical criteria, in general, should be given in the negotiation and appraisal of international climate policies. Consistently, Brown’s analysis gives prominence to a conception of moral duty and obligations owed by developed countries to the world’s most vulnerable, claims grounded on particular conceptions of justice and responsibility. Specifically, in his ‘‘comprehensive ethical analysis of the Copenhagen Accord’’ Brown appeals to three ethical criteria, the ‘‘sufficiency criteria’’, the ‘‘equity criteria’’, and the ‘‘just adaptation criteria,’’ [sic] when he argues that we must view the Accord as an ethical failure.

'Understanding Environmental Philosophy', by Andrew Brennan and Y. S. Lo

Brennan, Andrew and Y. S. Lo, Understanding Environmental Philosophy, Durham: Acumen Publishing Limited, 2010, pp. vi + 234, £14.99 (paperback). Brennan and Los book meets well the aims of the ser...