0000000000026618
AUTHOR
Marcello Di Paola
Virtues for the Anthropocene
The paper discusses some difficulties that life in Anthropocene poses to our ethical thinking. It describes the sort of ethical task that individuals find themselves confronting when dealing with the planetary environmental quandaries that characterise the new epoch. It then asks what, given the situation, would count as environmentally virtuous ways of looking at and going about our lives, and how relevant virtues can be developed. It is argued that the practice of gardening is distinctively conducive to that objective. Finally, some garden virtues that will be of special importance in the Anthropocene, but have so far been largely neglected by environmental ethicists, are listed and descr…
La Terra reinventata. Etica dell’ambiente e Antropocene
Reinventing Earth. Environmental Ethics and Anthropocene This article considers two issues concerning Anthropocene – first, Anthropocene as a puzzling notion, second, the possibilty of an environmental ethics of the Anthropocene. Definitions, narratives of, and reactions to Anthropocene are presented in paragraph 2. A view of the value of hybrid nature in Anthropocene is sketched in paragraph 3.
Sospensione riproduttiva temporanea: etica delle popolazioni e cambiamento climatico
The article defends a proposal of demographic self-limitation that should be realized by the citizens of industrialized countries as a contribution to the reduction of global emissions, for the benefit of future generations and emerging countries. It will also argue that many of the practical objections to the feasibility of this kind of voluntary choice are surmountable, as are some moral objections raised in the name of reproductive freedom and the value of future lives that would not be lived as a result of this choice.
The Climatic Challenge to Global Justice
How should we think of justice when the evil we can do to one another is not visible nor immediate, but rather impalpable and causally, spatially and temporally dispersed? What does justice demand, when our actions and institutions do not directly sabotage the life prospects of others but rather do so derivatively, by sabotaging the very eco-systems in which such lives are or will be lived? In a globalized, resource-depleted, overpopulated, rapidly changing, ecologically deteriorating world, what is owed to the billions of spatiotemporally distant people who are paying or shall pay the costs of the last 200 years of heavy industry, globalized trade and enthusiastic economic growth? And is t…
Climate Change and Global Justice: New Problem, Old Paradigm?
In this paper, we focus on the conceptualization of climate change as an issue of global justice. While we do not deny that climate change raises fundamental and dramatic issues of justice among peoples as well as generations, our claim is that the language of global justice can obscure the fact that problems provoked by climate change lack some characteristic features of problems of global justice, while possessing others that are not characteristic of such problems. We begin by describing briefly how we got to where we are, climatically speaking; we go on to show why it is plausible to think of climate change as provoking problems of global justice; point out four respects in which this d…
When Ethics and Aesthetics Are One and the Same: A Wittgensteinian Perspective on Natural Value
Many environmental philosophers have held naturalness to be a primary source of nature’s value. Seen this way, the nature that is most valuable is wild nature, and ‘wild’ is that which is unmodiled by human activity. However, accounts of our attributions of value to the wild often have an aura of elusiveness to them, as if what really matters about nature being wild could not ultimately be captured by words. In an attempt to account for what really matters, I relate our fascination with wild nature to a famous Wittgensteinian quote—‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one and the same’ (Tractatus 2006a: 28, §6.421)—and inspect the ways in which important dimensions of our attributions of value to wil…
The Disorienting Aesthetics of Mashed-Up Anthropocene Environments
This paper describes the disorienting aesthetics of some environments that are characteristic of the Anthropocene. We refer to these environments as 'mashed-up' and present three dimensions - phenomenological, epistemological and narrative - of the aesthetic disorientation they can trigger. We then advance the suggestion that a rich, nuanced and meaningful aesthetic experience of mashed-up Anthropocene environments (MAEs) calls for a mode of appreciation grounded on performative practices of aesthetic familiarisation with particular MAEs and entities and processes thereof. Familiarisation with MAEs, we further note, can have disorienting codas of its own. It can reveal and highlight, rather…
Environmental Stewardship, Moral Psychology and Gardens
Vast and pervasive environmental problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss call every individual to active stewardship. Their magnitude and causal and strategic structures, however, pose powerful challenges to our moral psychology. Stewardship may feel overburdening, and appear hopeless. This may lead to widespread moral and political disengagement. This article proposes a resolve to garden practices as a way out of that danger, and describes the ways in which it will motivate individuals to so act as to coordinate on behavioural patterns that will significantly alleviate grave, but seemingly distant and intractable environmental quandaries.
Climate Change and Anti-Meaning
AbstractIn this paper, we propose meaningfulness as one important evaluative criterion in individual climate ethics and suggest that most of our greenhouse gas emitting actions, behaviours, and lives are the opposite of meaningful: anti-meaningful. We explain why such actions etc. score negatively on three important dimensions of the meaningfulness scale, which we call the agential, narrative, and generative dimensions. We suggest that thinking about individual climate ethics also in terms of (anti-) meaningfulness illuminates important aspects of our troubled ethical involvement with CC and can make a fresh and fruitful contribution to existing discussions, which tend to focus on moral res…