Dale Jamieson

Reflecting on Nature introduces readers to the fields of environmental philosophy and environmental ethics, offering both classic and current readings that focus on key themes - images of nature, ethics, justice, animals, food, climate, biodiversity, aesthetics and wilderness. It helps students to focus on fundamental issues within environmental philosophy and offers succinct readings that explore the central tensions and problems within environmental philosophy

Excerpt from: Hull, D. L.. Review: Anthony O'Hear, Beyond Evolution:\nHuman Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation. Oxford:\nClarendon Press. 1997. cloth 19.99. British Journal for the Philosophy\nof Science, 49, 511-14.

In this paper I make the following claims. In order to see anthropogenic climate change as clearly involving moral wrongs and global injustices, we will have to revise some central concepts in these domains. Moreover, climate change threatens another value that cannot easily be taken up by concerns of global justice or moral responsibility

Jan Narveson has suggested that rational egoism might provide a defensible moral perspective that would put animals out of the reach of morality without denying that they are capable of suffering. I argue that rational egoism provides a principled indifference to the fate of animals at high cost: the possibility of principled indifference to the fate of “marginal humans.”