Lantz Fleming Miller

In environmental ethics a debate has arisen over the extent to which the individual should make changes in personal lifestyle in a long-term program of ameliorating environmental degradation, as opposed to directing energies toward public-policy change. In opposition are the facts that an individual’s contribution to environmental degradation can only have a negligible effect. Public policy offers the only real hope for such massive coordinated effort, and environmental degradation is only one of many global problems to which ethi­cally oriented people must focus their attentions and energies. So far, the pro-personal responsibility side has urged that personal lifestyle changes are necessary for moral coher­ence, thus in turn for integrity of character, and lifestyle changes can affect others in a kind of chain reaction because humans are socially submerged beings. The stalemate here can only stymies the needed coordinated effort toward ameliorating environmental degradation. Further, moral concerns need to be brought into this issue; namely, the ramifications of pursuing a policy-only approach, emphasizing policy as the sole (or even primary) means of ameliorating environmental degradation, implicitly undercuts the role of individual agents in morality in general, in terms of (1) individual responsibility, (2) autonomy, and (3) creativity in solving problems. All these problems not only bear on the program to reverse environmental degradation, but undermine other widely held moral values. Emphasizing personal lifestyle responsibility is not only the most moral alternative but is also the most assured way to affect long-term changes and the better way to make policy changes credible and sufficiently substantive for change.

Abstract   The ethics of technology use has tended to arise from the theory of the role of technology in human life and society and thus introduces a bias into moral assessment of such use. I propose a dialectical method of morally assessing a technology use without such a preset notion. Instead the assumption is that the moral agent is as responsible for use of a technology as for any other moral action of the agent, that is, the individual’s use of a technology is a moral action that can be morally assessed. I apply this outlook to automobile use, weighing its moral pros and cons, such as in terms of autonomy, environmental degradation, land use, health hazards, and other moral drawbacks arising from the technology’s use or non-use. Although the conclusion leaves the final moral assessment undecided, the method points to a way fairly to assess morally the use of technologies in terms of human betterment and environmental and health concerns, minimizing biases from assumptions of the role or nature of technologies. Content Type Journal Article Category Articles Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9320-8 Authors Lantz Miller, CUNY, New York, NY, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863

This book is at once incisive and exploratory, interpretive and historic scholarship. It appeals to both general and specialized readers. It uniquely takes a common philosophical theme, the meaning of life, and traces it through many philosophers’ and novelists' works. Sometimes the theme is buried and implicit, and offers a plausible distillation of each author's view. The result is a title that may sound like a self-help book’s—except the contents expand in manifold directions rather than narrow to easy advice. The reader, not spoon fed, is provided only one advice: Read these, and decide for onerself, especially if none of them answers sufficiently for each reader. Philosophers represnted include Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard. Nietzche, James, Wittgenstein, Novelists include Melville, Tolstoy, Proust, and Camus.

Camus considered the most crucial philosophical problem to be that of suicide—whether to discontinue your existence by endingit. Alternatively, a most crucial philosophical problem may be procreation—whether to continue human existence by making new humans. The topic has spurred an increasing amount of debate over the past decade, with marked diversion with Anscomb’s comment that it makes no moral sense to inquire whether one should reproduce. One might as well ask why digest food or why should the wind blow. This article reviews some of the most recent literature on this topic, which shows little resemblance to Anscomb’s remark.

Which types of group-typing amounts to racism? The answer seemingly has to do with deeper physical or cultural traits over which an agent has no deliberate control but which are formative of the agent. In this article, I look to the cultural or ethnic bases of division of humans into races, albeit of a specific type: a basis that sees humanity climbing in a certain, presumably improving, direction. Those ethnicities that appear not to opt for this climb are commonly presumed – if tacitly – inferior. This outlook is so common, particularly in industrial, governmental, economic-developmental, academic and other intellectual and influential, high-profile institutional settings, it is hard to descry. This article aims to bring this racism, referred to as ‘pan-institutional’ because it extends from local to national and international institutions, into fuller light. The article argues that prominent pan-institutions, including government, academia and industry, work together to propagate this racism, even while these institutions aver they are spreading benevolence to less fortunate cultures, in the cause of cultural, economic and social globalization. In this way, these pan-institutions follow precisely in step with earlier colonialism and missionarism. The article ethically assesses this covert racist pan-institutional movement, reveals the quandaries that many indigenous cultures, especially foragers, face as this movement encroaches on them, and analyses how it is best understood as a refurbishing of colonialism in the name of benevolence. The argument ends by describing how such benevolent globalization builds upon misanthropy and it analyses the moral implications and why this most covert and widespread movement is, like more visible and standard racisms, wrong-headed, unethical, fatal, misanthropist and perhaps self-hating.

Philip Ball brings a cognitive-scientific perspective to the breadth of music theory in his work The Music Instinct. Whether or not music is a universal language, it is a cultural phenomenon found universally in the human population. In the debate as to whether humans evolved this tendency to make music as an essential adaptation or as non-adaptive “spandrel,” Ball maintains that music is crucial to what it means to be human. Without definitively explaining just how humans developed music, delimiting that “instinct” or saying such instinct dictates what kind of music answers to it, he explains how the many different aspects of musical structure—and indeed much music theory, Western or Eastern—may have correlates in cognitive structures. The predominant step and half-step tonal progression in melodies, the role of the octave, underlying rhythm, all such appear to have cognitive explanation. The problem, Ball brings out, is that whatever the cognitive musical structures may be are far from clear. Perhaps many kinds of music do appeal to these cognitive structures, but must all music meet even a certain minimum of them? Based on current cognitive knowledge, cases against modernist Western music are hard to make soundly.

Two Socratic dialogues often considered “comic”—Ion and Hippias Major—have also been contested as to their Platonic authenticity. Plato’s dialogues; while certainly engaging, can also seem grim in their philosophical intensity: At least one author has contended that the dialogue more firmly established as genuinely by Plato, Symposium; has some comic elements: This article goes a step further in suggesting that this dialogue does not merely have comic elements but is in fact a comedy. It draws on several texts in the literature on Greek comedy over the past century and suggests that; although the dialogue sets itself serious philosophical challenges, its structure; style; and method are deeply steeped in comedic modes from around Plato’s day. This is not to presume whether Plato was deliberately writing a comedy. In general, writers are often strongly influenced by literary fashions of the day, so it would not be far stretching the matter to understand the work as comedic. Thereby, the article offers, via textual analysis, an argument for how the dialogue is a comedy along withcounter-arguments against such a notion. In the end, indeed, acknowledging it is a comedy promises to open up new angles on interpreting that dialogue

After much of the 20th Century, when morals were widely considered little more than mere emotional responses, a range of writers, such as Haidt, Prinz, and Patricia Churchland, have been restoring the emotions’ respectable roles in human cognition and morality. Nussbaum in her Upheavals of Thought showed how important emotions are for human cognitive life, so there is no clear distinction between their “irrationality” and the cerebral cortex’s supposed “rationality.” In Political Emotions, Nussbaum asks readers to look into how pivotally emotions affect political life, especially how we may best gear our emotions for political liberalism. As she convincingly urges, politics depend upon our emotions; we neglect them to our detriment lest demagogues commandeer them. She argues a hazardous case, and by the end anyone who cares about liberal democracy should accede to emotions’ centrality in it.Nussbaum builds her case upon what she deems partially failed models for a civic religion as pro ..

Common philosophical discussions concerning the ethics of human interaction with the biosphere and universe have been significantly informed by certain presuppositions: nature is conquerable; human cultural and social progress is somewhat like a thing, beyond human control, and is inevitable and benevolent; and Homo sapiens is the superior life-form. Although arguments, such as whether humans should conquer nature, founded upon these presuppositions have sometimes been challenged, each of these three presuppositions wants direct analysis. The three have become so ingrained in professional and everyday discourse that they have mythic proportions, as though beyond question. Because of the weightiness of the relevant philosophical issues, they merit overt analysis. Although they are independent and may be analyzed separately, this article treats them as whole, as they often work together in arguments. After finding substantial problems, the article suggests alternative ways of building sustainable presuppositions in similar territory.

The increasing proliferation of the automobile is one of the hardest practical and ethical problems contemporary societies face, in terms of technology production and use. Nuclear weaponry may be our number one threat, but it is in the hands of a very few, almost inaccessible people. Nanotechology may tum the planet into a "gray goo," in Bill Joy's famous terms; and "superintelligent" machines and "uploaded minds" may engender megalomaniacal power-seekers; but such technologies remain highly speculative. Yet, the automobile is both very real and at hand, as well as in the hands—and daily options—of cotnmon persons who can choose not to use it each time they step into the driver's seat. These daily choices are precisely what Calkins's "automobile proponents' strategies," as if one monohthic force, aim on controlling. He marshals impressive and sobering statistics and evidence to show that not only are the numbers of automobiles in China and India rising astronomically, but a few key persons and agencies are pushing this increase and thus—in full awareness—altering these countries' habitability. It is this full awareness that forms the basis of the book's ethical criticism.

Is the Kantian basis of valuing in humanity sufficient or sound enough to account for all valuing? At least two other such bases have been proposed across the ages, that of the sentiments and the valuing of life itself. This article focuses on the Kantian view, the first of these three possible bases of valuing. The concern is: by which criteria can we assess whether a given theory of or approach to basing a value is in fact usable and optimal, that is can in fact explain why a value can be assuredly based on a theory of value. That is, can a possible theory of value indeed explain all other values? That is, it seems a “meta” analysis of the situation is due. The article looks to five perspectives on the Kantian concept of humanity to determine if that humanity, as a theory of all valuing’s bases, is at least supportable / sustainable, if not yet sufficiently fleshed out. The article concludes that these five perspective may each and severally leave some cogent doubt of humanity as the basis of all other value, while leaving unsettled the possibility the perspective is flawed or is not thorough enough for due criticism of humanity as basis.

This article serves as either an addendum or as an expansion of ideas and work developed in my 2023 book, The Rationality Project: Across the Millennia, issued by Palgrave Macmillan. The book explores 21 potential theories for explaining rationality in terms of why and how one among these can serve in the position of explanatory power. The book does not fully explain all of these candidate theories, assigning that complete role to this addendum or work-in-progress. The main reason for this abbreviation in assessing all the theories in the book is that the complete coverage—which this addendum allows—of all 21 theories would become too detailed for some philosophical readers. This addendum; one may consider, is then for the more technically minded reader—although certainly not-too-technically minded readers are welcome to explore it. If it becomes too bogged in detail for those latter kinds of readers, they may end up skimming the material in this addendum, trying at least to get the general idea of how these addendum sections fit into the book”s goals.