2011 Fall Proseminar Class Notes B
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This is the main page for posting information relevant to our Seminar Sessions. You should post for the Tuesday evening seminar by Sunday night.
Contents
November 1, 2011
Husserl
Student Research Notes
Rachel Ku
Mental Illness/Health, Memory in Philosophy
November 8, 2011
Dennett Chapter 1
Student Research Notes
Casey Collins- Environmental Ethics
Environmental ethics is a field of ethics that attempts to assess the moral relationship between humans and the environment as well as the value and moral status of the non-human entities in the environment.
Alan Marshall's categories of environmental ethics help lay a foundation for ways to approach the issue. There are three:
Libertarian Extension: Moral consideration ought to be extended to aspects of the environment based on innate worth. A "civil-liberty" approach to environmental ethics. Peter Singer might ring a bell.
Ecologic Extension: The moral worth of environmental components is based on the interconnection that they all share. However, the entire ecological system has intrinsic value, not its individual parts.
Conservation Ethics: The moral worth of the environment is based on its utility to humans (anthropocentric). We ought to conserve the environment because it benefits us.
Basically, what I want to investigate is the idea of inherent worth in non-human entities. The above categories are very different in terms of how the environment ought to be valued. From my experience, there is significant diversity in opinion on the inherent worth of the environment and its components.
