Marion Hourdequin

Both Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Baylor Johnson hold that under current circumstances, individuals lack obligations to reduce their personal contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Johnson argues that climate change has the structure of a tragedy of the commons, and that there is no unilateral obligation to reduce emissions in a commons. Against Johnson, I articulate two rationales for an individual obligation to reduce one's greenhouse gas emissions. I first discuss moral integrity, which recommends congruence between one's actions and positions at the personal and political levels. Second, I draw on a Confucian, relational conception of persons to offer a critique of the collective action/tragedy of the commons framework itself. Under the relational conception, commons problems can be reconceptualised so as to dissolve the stark contrast between the individually and the collectively rational. This perspective can inform our approach to climate change and help reconcile individual and political action to mitigate it.

Confucius lived in a society he found morally wanting. The rituals were distorted, the government was corrupt, and the rulers lacked a Heavenly mandate. Our limited historical knowledge makes it difficult today to imagine Confucius' situation in all its rich context and detail; however, we may be able to imagine something like it, at least something like it in certain ways. We can probably imagine living in a state led by officials of questionable integrity, and many of us may feel that we in fact do live in a society that suffers some kind of serious moral deficiency.What should a person do when she finds herself in a morally compromised society? Should she try to avoid moral contamination by withdrawing into ..

One of the central worries raised in relation to ecological restoration concerns the problem of authenticity. Robert Elliot, for example, has argued that restoration “fakes nature.” On this view, restoration is like art forgery: it deceptively suggests that its product was produced in a certain way, when in fact, it was not. Restored landscapes present themselves as the product of “natural processes,” when in actuality, they have been significantly shaped by human intervention. For Elliott, there seem to be two sources of inauthenticity in ecological restoration: first, the restored landscape is inauthentic because its natural genealogy has been disrupted by the intervention of humans: it has lost its authentic natural identity; second, the restored landscape is inauthentic because it pretends to be something it is not: it obscures its own history. We argue that the first sense of authenticity is problematic; however, the second concern—about obscuring history—is important. Case studies involving the naturalization of former military lands can be used to tease out more fully the ways in which landscapes can be “inauthentic” by misleading observers about their genealogy. In such landscapes, it is not departure from “the original” per se that is the source of inauthenticity; rather, restored landscapes fail to be authentic when they deceptively obscure critical elements of their past.

Many environmental policies seem to rest on an implicit distinction between doing and allowing. For example, it is generally thought worse to drive a speciesto extinction than to fail to save a species that is declining through no fault of our own, and worse to pollute the air with chemicals that trigger asthma attacks thanto fail to remove naturally occurring allergens such as pollen and mold. The distinction between doing and allowing seems to underlie certain versions of the precautionary principle, and insofar as the precautionary principle rests on this distinction, it diverges from direct consequentialist approaches to risk management.There are two ways in which such reliance on the doing/allowing distinction may be defended: by appeal to indirect consequentialist considerations, and by appeal to deontological considerations. Neither approach is unproblematic; however, retention of a distinction between doing and allowing in environmentalpolicy is consistent with the widespread intuition that there is something prima facie valuable about the world as we find it

The philosophy of ecological restoration has focused primarily on three issues: the question of what to restore, whether and why restoration “fakes” nature, and how restoration shapes human-nature relationships. Using “M2W conversion sites” – former military lands recently redesignated as U.S. national wildlife refuges – as a case study, we examine how the restoration of these lands challenges existing philosophical frameworks for restoration. We argue that a contextual, case-based analysis best reveals the key ethical and philosophical questions related to restoration at M2W sites, and that such an approach may be useful in developing more nuanced philosophical analyses of ecological restoration more generally.

Can unilateral action be an effective response to global climate change? Baylor Johnson worries that a focus on unilateral action by individuals will detract from efforts to secure collective agreements to address the problem. Although Johnson and I agree that individuals have some obligation to reduce their personal emissions, we differ in the degree to which we see personal reductions as effective in spurring broader change. I argue that 'unilateral reductions' can have communicative value and that they can change the structure of collective action problems, making such problems easier to solve. Since collective action problems are much less tractable where individuals abide by the tenets of traditional game theory and much more tractable where individuals are oriented to cooperate and to trust that others will reciprocate, we need moral norms that promote individual restraint in exploitation of the commons, and we ought ourselves to abide by those norms

To create an ecologically literate, motivated, and engaged citizenry, environmental education must help students develop practical wisdom. We discuss three elements of teaching central to this task: first, greater emphasis on contextualized knowledge, grounded in particular places and cases; second, multi-modal learning that engages students as whole persons both cognitively and affectively; and third, stronger connections between knowing and doing, or between knowledge and responsibility. We illustrate these elements through our experience teaching field-based environmental studies courses, but also emphasize ways in which practical environmental education can be effectively incorporated into campus-based classes.