Environmental Ethics: Nature, Suffering, and Moral Value
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What are our moral duties to the natural world, and what is the basis of those duties? What constitutes a natural space? Should we respect the interests of individual animals, or favor the preservation of whole species and ecosystems? What implications do these questions have for contemporary environmental movements?
By popular demand, we will be exploring this topic again at the next meeting of Silicon Valley Socratic Society. Everyone of any background or level of experience is welcome to join and share their thoughts.
No prior reading will be needed, but if you would like to explore this topic in advance, here are some resources:
- Thought experiments: https://bit.ly/3daNVok
- SEP: Environmental Ethics (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental/)
- Values in and Duties to the Natural World (http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/RolstonEnvEth.html)
- The Moral Problem of Predation (http://jeffersonmcmahan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/The-Moral-Problem-of-Predation.pdf)
- Animal Liberation, A Triangular Affair (http://faculty.smu.edu/jkazez/ar13/callicott.pdf)
- The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic (https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/texts/425/Callicott,%20Conceptual%20Foundations.pdf)