Tag Archives: morality

“Elysium”

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CITATION:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 1997.  Part IV, Letter XI (pp. 386-401) of Julie, or the New Heloise. Tr. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché. In Collected Writings of Rousseau (Volume 6). Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
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ABSTRACT:
Julie is an epistolary novel set in mid-eighteenth century Switzerland. The plot involves the relationship between St. Preux, a young man who is hired as a tutor to the title character. They become lovers, but he is Continue reading →

A moral cartography for the Anthropocene

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We welcome Manuel Arias Maldonado, of the University of Malága, as a guest on the blog . . . click for his bio, or go to the “Who we are” tab. This post summarizes an argument in his recent book Environment & Society: Socionatural Relations in the Anthropocene (Springer, 2015).

If the Anthropocene were just a scientific category dealing with natural phenomena, we would not feel so concerned about it. But, as Mike Ellis and Zev Trachtenberg have rightly argued, the Anthropocene is not Continue reading →

“The Global Carbon Cycle: A Test of Our Knowledge of Earth as a System”

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CITATION:
P. Falkowski et al. 2000. Science, vol. 290, pp. 291-296.
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ABSTRACT:
Motivated by the rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 due to human activities since the Industrial Revolution, several international scientific research programs have analyzed the role of Continue reading →

“The Story of Big History”

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CITATION:
Ian Hesketh. 2014. History of the Present, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 171-202.
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ABSTRACT:
Currently, a group of historians is claiming that it might be history that provides the framework for a scientific and evolutionary account of everything. Big History, so named by its foremost practitioner, David Christian, seeks to Continue reading →

“Justice and the Environment in Nussbaum’s ‘Capabilities Approach’: Why Sustainable Ecological Capacity Is a Meta-Capability”

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CITATION:
Breena Holland. 2008. Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 2, pp. 319-332.
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ABSTRACT:
What principles should guide how society distributes environmental benefits and burdens? Like many liberal theories of justice, Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach” does not adequately address this question. The author argues that the capabilities approach should be extended to Continue reading →

Advancing equity and going beyond basic survival

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THIS POST IS PART OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE ANTHROPOCENE PROJECT—SEE THIS DESCRIPTION OF OUR SUBMISSION.
 

In my earlier post I raised the question of how equity issues fit with the concept of habitability in the Anthropocene. This topic perhaps leads us into the muck of the impacts humans cause when Continue reading →

Toward an ethics of niche construction

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THIS POST IS PART OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE ANTHROPOCENE PROJECT—SEE THIS DESCRIPTION OF OUR SUBMISSION.
 

Human beings are niche constructors par excellence—posts by Kiza and Ingo have presented this fact of nature. But what are the moral implications of that fact, if any? Continue reading →

“Of property”

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THIS POST IS PART OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE ANTHROPOCENE PROJECT—SEE THIS DESCRIPTION OF OUR SUBMISSION.

CITATION:
John Locke. 1689. Chapter 5, Second Treatise of Civil Government.
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ABSTRACT:
Locke assumes that, as a matter of God’s grant of Creation to it, humanity as a species has a general right to everything on the Earth—Locke interprets this grant as intended to provide for humanity’s survival. However, Continue reading →

“The onset of the Anthropocene”

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CITATION:
Bruce D. Smith and Melinda A. Zeder. 2013. Anthropocene, Vol. 4, pp. 8-13.
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ABSTRACT:
A number of different starting dates for the Anthropocene epoch have been proposed, reflecting different Continue reading →

“Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change”

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CITATION:
Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2012. New Literary History, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 1-18.
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ABSTRACT:
This article begins by describing how the figure of the human has been thought in anticolonial and postcolonial writing—as that of the Continue reading →

“Why ‘Nature’ Has No Place in Environmental Philosophy”

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CITATION:
 Steven Vogel. 2011. In The Ideal of Nature: Debates About Biotechnology and the Environment, ed. Gregory E. Kaebnick, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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ABSTRACT:
Vogel holds it is essential to develop a “postnaturalist” environmental philosophy—an environmental philosophy after Continue reading →