Analysis Of Andrew Light And Holmes Rolston 's Book, Environmental Ethics

Aldo Leopold is another American environmentalist who was dominant in the development of modern environmental ethics. Aldo was more for holistic ethics regarding land. According to him, “An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct.” He describes in his article that politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which free-for-all competition has been replaced by co-operative mechanism with an ethical content.” He thought that ethics direct individuals to cooperate with each other for the mutual benefit of all. Also he believes that community should be

Writer, William Blumenfield, in his Huffington Post article, “ Environmental Justice a Form of Social Justice,” details the perceptive and political fallibilities of the Republican party in regards to their courses of action towards environmental justice aims. His inclination is to convey the err in their claims and capitalistic objectives, and to promote his ideology that social justice cannot occur without there first being strives to combat against environmental degradation. He develops a strong, but misplaced, pathos throughout his article, devoid of purposeful facts, resulting in a weak argument seemingly based on his resentment towards the Republican party. Blumenfield’s argument is weak in the fact that is argues based on unapologetically tearing down the other side instead of advocating his point while respectfully pointing out the flaws of conflicting views.

My book was called Eyes Wide Open: Going Behind the Environmental Headlines by Paul Fleischman. I learned many things from this book, one of them being that companies use materials to make their products that are detrimental to the environment, and harmful to the workers or animals involved in making the product. These corporations are able to get away with it because they have a lot of money, and that means that they can pay people to release propaganda saying that their product is not harmful to anything, and advertisements saying that the people who are speaking out against their product are radical environmentalists. They can also create fake environmental groups that supposedly support the company's product. They can also influence politicians

The authors Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and Henry David Thoreau, both demonstrate similarities and differences in their works. While comparing both essays, it is evident that both authors share similar views on environmental issues, and at the same time demonstrate great emotional journeys in their works. The extraordinary beauty of nature appears frequently in both pieces. Both authors focus their personal experiences, however, within different subject matters. The way in which the authors express their beliefs and feelings is demonstrated through personal life endeavors. It is apparent that the authors are expressing their perception of the atrocities committed to the environment by humans.

Aldo Leopold is on the forefather of modern environmentalism. His book, A Sand County Almanac, is based on the notion of viewing land as a community and as a commodity. In the chapter “The Land Ethic”, Leopold invokes a rethinking of our relationships to our world and is based on the principle that ethics are “a process in ecological evolution” (238). Leopold describes the stages of ethic evolving and explains that the rules for socializing were originally defined for human beings. These rules are expanded upon in the next stage of “Ethical Sequence” (237-238), describing how humans interact toward their community. The third stage is the ethics between humans and the land. Upon analyzing “The Land Ethic” I have come to the conclusion that in order to have respect and ethic for land, or anything, one must make a personal connection.

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise,” said by none other, Aldo Leopold. In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, an American environmentalist, brought a new idea to the environmentalist’s table: “land ethic.” His idea of a land ethic is a moral responsibility of humans to the natural Earth. Leopold’s idea has been discussed since the publication by a wide variety of people, from the public to scholars. Since

Mark Sagoff, ‘Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce’, in Environmental Philosophy, edited by Michael E. Zimmerman, et al. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1993, pp. 84-94

A moral agent is “someone who can respond to moral reasons and control her behavior by means of such reasons” (268). While in the other hand a moral patient is “a being to whom we owe duties, even if that beings lacks rights or lacks cognitive powers needed to be a moral agent” (268). In others words, a moral agent is someone that is in control of making his own decisions and they have responsibilities towards those that are moral patient. Humans are moral agents and moral patients at the same time. Norcross thinks that nonhuman animals are moral patient because they are not able to make their own decisions and that we as moral agents should take care of them.

Persson and Savulescu argue that Sparrow’s objections only apply to a confident proposal of moral bioenhancements while they merely support a cautious proposal. A confident proposal claims that there are effective moral bioenhancements which when discovered and applied will, more or less by itself, solve many of the moral problems of our time. A cautious proposal claims that moral bioenhancements are possible and warns of the problems of misuse or lack of interest to develop that may arise if they are indeed discovered. Persson and Savulescu then go on to argue that Sparrow has made six mistaken claims in his article and has made a fetish out of current egalitarianism which, as we see, allows for great inequalities.

Everyday people all over the world try to improve the qualities of their lives. Nonetheless, they forget that what they do can have severe harms and damages on the environment and other organisms. In the excerpt “A Fable for Tomorrow” from the book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson describes the disastrous and horrific effects of pesticides on the environment and animals of the town. In the essay “Our Animal Rites” by Anna Quindlen, she shows the inhumanity of animal hunting by human. Furthermore, she argues how human migration is destroying the natural habitats that belong to the animals. In the excerpt “Reading the River” from the autobiographical book Life on Mississippi, Mark Twain describes how he loses the ability to perceive the

Both in and out of philosophical circle, animals have traditionally been seen as significantly different from, and inferior to, humans because they lacked a certain intangible quality – reason, moral agency, or consciousness – that made them moral agents. Recently however, society has patently begun to move beyond this strong anthropocentric notion and has begun to reach for a more adequate set of moral categories for guiding, assessing and constraining our treatment of other animals. As a growing proportion of the populations in western countries adopts the general position of animal liberation, more and more philosophers are beginning to agree that sentient creatures are of a direct moral concern to humans, though the degree of this

In Byron Williston’s essay, “Epistemic Virtue and the Ecological Crisis”, Williston examines Joel Kovel’s ideas on what it takes to get ahead in a capitalist society: “To succeed in the marketplace and to rise to the top, one needs a hard, cold, calculating mentality… None of these traits are at all correlated with ecological sensibility or caring” (Kovel, quoted in Williston, p. 250;252). Kovel’s ideal person is one that is always looking for deeds that are self-serving. Kovel is implying that to be successful in life, one must put morals as an afterthought in order to move ahead in this capitalistic society. I disagree with Kovel statement, based on how Kovel’s claims on how to be successful is not true for all professions. Furthermore, I disagree with Kovel’s statements that if someone is successful, they cannot be environmentally sensitive, or possess the trait of being caring by looking at the cases of Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

The inspiration for environmental ethics was the first Earth Day in 1970 when environmentalists started urging philosophers who were involved with environmental groups to do something about environmental ethics. An intellectual climate had developed in the last few years of the 1960s in large part because of the publication of two papers in Science: Lynn White's "The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis" (March 1967) and Garett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" (December 1968). Most influential with regard to this kind of thinking, however, was an essay in Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, "The Land Ethic," in which Leopold explicitly claimed that the roots of the ecological

All of the three approaches to environmental ethics use Kant's principle to various extents. The differences between them lie in their individual definitions of moral categories. It's like looking at the same slide under three different powers on a microscope. Each approach relies on Kant's principle to protect the interest of that which they deem worthy.

DesJardins, J. R. (2013). Environmental ethics: An introduction to environmental philosophy (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.