Andrew Light

Contemporary Environmental Ethics From Metaethics to Public Philosophy

In the past thirty years environmental ethics has emerged as one of the most vibrant and exciting areas of applied philosophy. Several journals and hundreds of books testify to its growing importance inside and outside philosophical circles. But with all of this scholarly output, it is arguably the case that environmental ethics is not living up to its promise of providing a philosophical contribution to the resolution of environmental problems. This article surveys the current state of the field and offers an alternative path for the future development of environmental ethics toward a more publicly engaged model of applied philosophy.

Towards ethics guidelines for environmental epidemiologists

Over the past 5 years, several epidemiology organizations have published draft ethics guidelines for epidemiologists in general, without regard to sub-specialty. In this paper, we have reviewed these various guidelines. We have extracted the most salient of the principles from these guidelines and consolidated them into a unified set of ethics guidelines for environmental epidemiologists. Those guidelines found most relevant to environmental epidemiology are those from the Industrial Epidemiology Forum and those from the 1994 Ethics Workshop jointly organized by the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) and the World Health Organization (WHO). From these, core values for those specializing in the field of environmental epidemiology are presented. It is to these core values that the guidelines relate. Additional areas of concern to environmental epidemiologists are noted that guidelines have yet to address. It is emphasized that guidelines require ongoing input from members of the profession and hence are expected to be revised periodically. A discussion of the role and importance of ethics guidelines to environmental epidemiologists within their individual practices, as they relate to one another as colleagues, and as they relate to society at large is included as a preface to the guidelines themselves.

Philosophy and Design

0.1: Table of Contents. Introduction. 0.2: Peter Kroes, Andrew Light, Steven A. Moore and Pieter E. Vermaas: Design in Engineering and Architecture: Towards an Integrated Philosophical Understanding. Part I: Engineering Design. 1.1: Maarten Franssen: Design, Use, and the Physical and Intentional Aspects of Technical Artifacts. 1.2: Wybo Houkes: Designing is the Construction of Use Plans. 1.3: Don Ihde: The Designer Fallacy and Technological Imagination. 1.4: Philip Brey: Technological Design as an Evolutionary Process. 1.5: Anke van Gorp and Ibo van de Poel:Deciding on Ethical Issues in Engineering Design. 1.6: Peter-Paul Verbeek: Morality in Design: Design Ethics and the Morality of Technological Artifacts. 1.7: Patrick Feng and Andrew Feenberg:Thinking about Design: Critical Theory of Technology and the Design Process. 1.8: Kiyotaka Naoe: Design Culture and Acceptable Risk. 1.9: Paul B. Thompson: Alienability, Rivalry, and Exclusion Cost: Three Institutional Factors for Design. Part II: Emerging Engineering Design. 2.1: John P. Sullins: Friends by Design: A Design Philosophy for Personal Robotics Technology. 2.2: Bernhard Rieder and Mirko Tobias Schafer: Beyond Engineering: Software Design as Bridge over the Culture/Technology Dichotomy. 2.3: Alfred Nordmann: Technology Naturalized: A Challenge to Design for the Human Scale. 2.4: Daniela Cerqui and Kevin Warwick: Re-designing Humankind: The Rise of Cyborgs, a Desirable Goal? 2.5: Inmaculada de Melo-Martin: Designing People: A Post-Human Future? 2.6: C.T.A. Schmidt: Redesigning Man? 2.7: Kristo Miettinen: Design: Structure, Process, and Function: A Systems Methodology Perspective. 2.8: Ulrich Krohs: Co-designing Social Systems by Designing Technical Artifacts: A Conceptual Approach. 2.9: Kathryn A. Neeley and Heinz C. Luegenbiehl: Beyond Inevitability: Emphasizing the Role of Intention and Ethical Responsibility in Engineering Design. 2.10:S.D. Noam Cook: Design and Responsibility: The Interdependence of Natural, Artifactual, and Human Systems. Part III: Architectural Design. 3.1: Howard Davis: Form and Process in the Transformation of the Architects Role in Society. 3.2: Steven A. Moore and Rebecca Webber: Expert Culture, Representation, and Public Choice: Architectural Renderings as the Editing of Reality. 3.3: Ted Cavanagh: Diverse Designing: Sorting Out Function and Intention in Artifacts. 3.4: Joseph C. Pitt: Design Criteria in Architecture. 3.5: J. Craig Hanks: Cities, Aesthetics, and Human Community: Some Thoughts on the Limits of Design. 3.6: Glenn Parsons: Nature, Aesthetic Values, and Urban Design: Building the Natural City. 4.1: Index.

What is an ecological identity

Is environmentalism a form of identity politics like feminism, race‐based politics, and other political orientations at the core of the new social movements? It is argued that it can be, but that this claim to political identity has so far only been clearly available to a narrow set of environmentalists, notably deep ecologists and essentialist ecofeminists. But if it is plausible that broader forms of environmentalism can represent a political identity, then political objections to the content of environmentalism become much more salient than they might at first appear. If environmentalists decide to articulate their environmentalism as a kind of ‘ecological identity’, then this identity will encounter serious hurdles that deserve attention.

Callicott and Naess on pluralism

J. Baird Callicott has thrown down the gauntlet once again in the monism‐pluralism debate in environmental ethics. In a recent article he argues that his ‘communitarianism’ (combined with a limited intertheoretic pluralism) is sufficient to get the advantages of pluralism advocated by his critics, while at the same time retaining the framework of moral monism. Callicotts attempt to set the record straight on the monism‐pluralism debate has once again derailed us from answering the most important question in this discussion: how do we achieve a compatibilism among ethical theories which will inform better environmental practices? But if Callicott got it wrong, then who is getting it right? Arne Naess, whose work has heretofore been excluded from the mainstream discussion of this issue, has all along understood the heart of the monism‐pluralism question. This paper updates the current state of the monism‐pluralism debate, provides an answer to Callicotts latest challenge, and advances the thesis that all ...

Climate Change, Adaptation, and Climate-Ready Development Assistance

Traditional justifications for state-to-state development assistance include charity, basic rights and self-interest. Except in unusual cases such as war-reparations agreements, development assistance has typically been justified for reasons such as the above, without reference to any history of injury that holds between the states. We argue that climate change entails relationships of harm that can be cited to supplement and strengthen the traditional claims for development assistance. Finally, to demonstrate the utility of this analysis, we offer a brief application of our reasoning to the emerging conflict in the United Nations over the future post-2015 development agenda.

Not Out of the Woods: Preserving the Human in Environmental Architecture

The North American environmental movement has historically sought to redress the depletion and degradation of natural resources that has been the legacy of the industrial revolution. Predominant in this approach has been the preservation of wilderness, conservation of species biodiversity and the restoration of natural ecosystems. While the results of such activity have often been commendable, several scholars have pointed out that the environmental movement has inherited an unfortunate bias against urban environments, and consequently, a blind spot to ways in which densely populated built spaces can serve to enhance rather than degrade efforts to achieve sustainability. After exploring this concern we argue that environmental architecture can serve as a counter-balance to this bias, focused, as it is, on the ways in which the construction and organisation of built spaces for humans can help or hinder the pursuit of environmental priorities. But if environmental architecture is to take this role then it must be understood in a broader context, one which does not exclude other moral, political and aesthetic values in the production of human environments. We will highlight several examples of how environmental architecture has combined success and failure at taking a broader view of environmental questions, with a specific focus on one green skyscraper that may be good for the natural environment but not necessarily for the human environment of the city.

Ethics, Policy & Environment: A New Name and a Renewed Mission

Readers of Ethics, Place & Environment will notice at least one major change in this inaugural 2011 issue. Namely, we are no longer operating under the same name. At the Eastern Division American Philosophical Association Meeting in Boston, December 2010, we relaunched our journal under a new title, Ethics, Policy & Environment, with a small reception for any and all working in environmental philosophy. We saw many of you there. It’s a minor change of one word, but it should signal the many other modifications ‘under the hood’ which we’ve been making over the past two years. Along with the title change, we’ve altered the substantive focus of the journal more toward the intersection of the philosophical and policy communities, we’ve introduced new formats for more engaged articles, we’ve revised our editorial structure, and we’ve committed to a faster turnaround time for reviewing submissions. Ethics, Place & Environment began in 1997 as the journal Philosophy & Geography, founded by Jonathan M. Smith (Department of Geography, Texas A&MUniversity) and Andrew Light. The explicit focus of the journal was to broaden the scope of environmental philosophy, by bringing it into conversation with geographers who had long been interested in questions of space and place which had been of peripheral interest to philosophers. In 2005, Philosophy & Geography merged with Ethics, Place, Environment, another Taylor and Francis journal started primarily as a forum for geographers publishing work on ethics, furthering this legacy of expanding the bounds of theoretical environmental ethics away from an exclusive focus on questions on ‘nature’ as such. While we will continue to be interested in broader theoretical questions which have driven much of the history of environmentalism, and inspired many of the articles in the first thirteen volumes of Ethics, Place & Environment, we’ll aim now at promoting more directed work on issues at the intersection of environmental philosophy and environmental policy. In this respect we will encourage work by ethicists, and those inclined toward ethical inquiry, on the raft of environmental problems that is now buoying most other branches of environmental scholarship. Doing so will involve interdisciplinary input and collaboration—and, in fact, will demand a good deal of interrogation of practical and policy questions—but we’d hope that contributors to this journal might help refine the philosophical razor with which environmental policies are formulated, assessed, discussed, evaluated, and taught. To facilitate these ends we have rolled out a new format for our articles. Beginning in 2009, we began selecting one target article per issue—from among those submitted

On the Irreplaceability of Place

I examine a puzzle concerning the role of humans in the appreciation of place that arises in Christoph Rehmann-Sutters paper in this volume, specifically the problem of the irreplaceability of place. If places are designated as valuable in part because they are irreplaceable, and if any human can appreciate any place, then how can humans ever be part of a place if they are ultimately substitutable as agents who appreciate places? After identifying the puzzle I briefly discuss two possible ways to answerthis problem though the literature on bioregionalism. Two kinds of bioregionalism, liberal bioregionalism (LB) and communitarian bioregionalism (CB) are identified and distinguished. A brief appeal is made to embrace LB for now (which entails avoiding the irreplaceability problem by jettisoning the need to focus on the special qualities of a particular place) and to hold off on CB as a goal down the road which would re-establish the importance of specificity in the value of place.

An Ethical Agenda for the Post-Durban Climate Change Negotiations

This month, the 194 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will meet in Doha, Qatar for their annual summit. For the third time in their over 20 year history, the parties have unanimously agreed to set themselves a narrow time table to crate a new comprehensive climate agreement. The first attempt resulted in the creation of the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted by the convention in 1997 and entered into force in 2005. The second attempt started in 2007 when the climate summit was held in Bali, Indonesia and resulted in a deadlocked meeting in Copenhagen in 2009, though the following year the framework created in Copenhagen was agreed to and expanded on to form the 2010 Cancun Agreements. Last year, when the convention met in Durban, South Africa, a large package of extensions of the Kyoto Protocol and Cancun Agreements were finalized and a new process was initiated creating the new Ad-hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP or ‘‘Durban Platform’’). This year the ADP had its initial organizational meetings and now begins a process to create a new global ‘‘protocol, legal instrument, or agreed outcome with legal force’’ by 2015. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, this new agreement will be applicable to all parties equally, though some differentiation of obligations for emission reductions by different countries is expected. If the proposed agreement is finished on schedule it will be opened for ratification by member parties for implementation from 2020. The nine commentaries collected here gather a diverse set of voices from around the world, and from many disciplines, on the variety of ethical issues that will or should arise in these new post-Durban climate negotiations. For the most part, rather than taking up more abstract claims about the nature of the moral problems at the heart of global climate change, or proffering an ideal distribution of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions – as one typically sees in the philosophical literature – these short essays dig into the details of the actual issues that will be in play over the next three years of international climate policy. A broad range of problems are discussed. Three distinct groups of essays emerge. First, while all of these contributors make at least indirect suggestions for the content of the new climate treaty in the making, three offer sustained, direct arguments for the text of the ADP. Christina Voigt takes up the thorny issue of the proper legal form of the new treaty given the options agreed to in Durban of creating