Search results for "Environmental ethics"
showing 8 items of 248 documents
Conceptualizing ecosystem tipping points within a physiological framework
2017
Connecting the nonlinear and often counterintuitive physiological effects of multiple environmental drivers to the emergent impacts on ecosystems is a fundamental challenge. Unfortunately, the disconnect between the way “stressors” (e.g., warming) is considered in organismal (physiological) and ecological (community) contexts continues to hamper progress. Environmental drivers typically elicit biphasic physiological responses, where performance declines at levels above and below some optimum. It is also well understood that species exhibit highly variable response surfaces to these changes so that the optimum level of any environmental driver can vary among interacting species. Thus, specie…
Cuidado y responsabilidad: de Hans Jonas a Carol Gilligan
2019
El objetivo de este trabajo es situar la ética del cuidado en contexto de las éticas de la responsabilidad. Para ello analizamos la orientación hacia el cuidado en las éticas de la responsabilidad mostrando la transición de una responsabilidad limitada por el cálculo consecuencialista en la actividad política, a una responsabilidad integral exigida por la preservación de la naturaleza ante los desafíos de la ciencia y la técnica. Interpretamos la aportación de Carol Gilligan en términos de «provocación » a la ética contemporánea para que el cuidado no sea únicamente una categoría sentimental o afectiva sino una categoría con la que reconstruir reflexivamente la justicia social. Esta interpr…
From Scarcity to Abundance : Food Waste Themes and Virtues in Agrarian and Mature Consumer Society
2019
Uusitalo and Takala address the food waste problem as a societal phenomenon and examine ethical virtues, values linked to them and food practices in two different time periods: agrarian society (1885–1917) and mature consumer society (2008–2017), in Finland. They use data from newspapers to uncover how ethical principles can underpin understanding of the food waste phenomenon. The study shows how the virtues adopted by food chain actors guide their practices towards sustainable ways of handling excess food. While societal themes of food waste are changing, virtues and food practices are changing as well, but some deep-rooted societal virtues and values persist. The chapter concludes with re…
Sir Thomas More's Utopia : An overlooked economic classic
2019
Sir Thomas More's Utopia, published in 1516, is a classic work of how to organise a society based on common property. With a unique mix of common property, institutions and sound economic insights, we argue that More built a framework for a society that could be viable in the long run. While the conditions that make Utopia work are quite restrictive, it does provide a sketch of a society where common property may not stifle long‐term development, but is associated with productive workers and people content with their lives.
Three Halves of a Whole : Redefining East and West in UNESCO’s East-West Major Project 1957-1966
2017

 
 
 In 1946 Julian Huxley, UNESCO’s rst Director-General, suggested that two opposing philosophies of life were confronting each other from the East and the West, setting the focus on the cultural aspect of this polarisation and de ning the possibility of an East- West conflict as the main threat to world peace. A decade later, in 1957, UNESCO launched The Major Project on the Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural Values to promote its ideas of intercultural understanding as a means to maintaining peace. The core concepts of the Project, East and West, were not strictly defined. Here East and West, as concepts, fit Reinhart Koselleck’s definition of Grundbegri…
Exploring the scientific discourse on cultural sustainability
2014
Abstract There has been growing interest in policy and among scholars to consider culture as an aspect of sustainable development and even as a fourth pillar. However, until recently, the understanding of culture within the framework of sustainable development has remained vague. In this study, we investigate the scientific discourse on cultural sustainability by analyzing the diverse meanings that are applied to the concept in scientific publications. The analysis shows that the scientific discourse on cultural sustainability is organized around seven storylines: heritage, vitality, economic viability, diversity, locality, eco-cultural resilience, and eco-cultural civilization. These story…
Alarmist by bad design: Strongly popularized unsubstantiated claims undermine credibility of conservation science
2019
“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.” or “Our work reveals dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world's insect species over the next few decades.” These are verbatim conclusions of the recent paper by Sánchez-Bayoa and Wyckhuys (2019) in Biological Conservation. Because of fundamental methodological flaws, their conclusions are unsubstantiated. Like noted by The Guardian, the conclusions of the paper were set out in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper. The current case…
Is Broad the New Deep in Environmental Ethics? A Comparison of Broad Ecological Justice and Deep Ecology
2016
I argue in this article that a theory of broad ecological justice or the extended capabilities approach, an interesting approach in contemporary environmental ethics, shares many of its core ideas with deep ecology and Arne Næss’s ecosophy T. The similarities between these approaches include the ambition to address the roots of environmental problems, emphasis on recognition and the criticism of oppressive structures, and a systemic orientation. Acknowledging these similarities illustrates the contemporary value of the deep ecology movement. It also helps to develop the theory of broad ecological justice further, especially in terms of bridging the gap between movements and theoretical disc…