•  219
    The ethics of species extinctions
    Cambridge Prisms: Extinction 1 (e23). 2023.
    This review provides an overview of the ethics of extinctions with a focus on the Western analytical environmental ethics literature. It thereby gives special attention to the possible philosophical grounds for Michael Soulé’s assertion that the untimely ‘extinction of populations and species is bad’. Illustrating such debates in environmental ethics, the guiding question for this review concerns why – or when – anthropogenic extinctions are bad or wrong, which also includes the question of when…Read more
  •  172
    Biological conservation practices and approaches take many forms. Conservation projects do not only differ in their aims and methods, but also concerning their conceptual and normative background assumptions and their underlying motivations and objectives. We draw on philosophical distinctions from the ethics of conservation to explain variances of different positions on conservation projects along six dimensions: (1) conservation ideals, (2) intervention intuitions, (3) the moral considerabilit…Read more
  •  15
  •  250
    While in the humanities and social sciences at large we can observe posthumanist developments that engage with the microbiome, microbes are still not a major topic of discussion within environmental ethics. That the environmental ethics literature has not engaged extensively with this topic is surprising considering the range of theoretical challenges (and opportunities) it poses for environmental theorising. So, this paper is ‘looking through the microscope’ from an environmental ethics angle i…Read more
  •  28
    Otherness-based Reasons for the Protection of (Bio)Diversity
    with Anna Deplazes Zemp
    Environmental Ethics (2): 161-184. 2022.
    Different arguments in favor of the moral relevance of the concept of biodiversity (e.g., in terms of its intrinsic or instrumental value) face a range of serious difficulties, despite that biodiversity constitutes a central tenet of many environmentalist practices and beliefs. That discrepancy is considerable for the debate on potential moral reasons for protecting biodiversity. This paper adds a new angle by focusing on the potential of the concept of natural otherness—specifically individual …Read more
  •  41
    The concept of natural otherness can be found throughout the environmental ethics literature. Drawing on this concept, this article pursues two aims. For one, it argues for an account of individual natural otherness as stable difference as opposed to accounts of natural otherness that put more emphasis on independence for the purpose of differentiating individual natural otherness from the concept of wildness. Secondly, this account of natural otherness is engaged to argue for a particular way o…Read more
  •  34
    In any proposal for specicide, as represented by mosquito eradication, one must acknowledge that this involves a complex set of moral trade-offs. Taking it as given that the health burden of vector-borne diseases has to be reduced drastically, this chapter lays out the landscape of normative arguments that can be brought in the mosquito’s defence. These, in turn, should be involved in deliberations about whether such large-scale eradication practices can be morally justified. In favour of mosqui…Read more
  •  16
    Treves et al.’sarticleis an important contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary literature onwhat constitutes a viable and just response to the current biodiversity crisis. Mycommentary addresses three interrelated themes: (1) overcoming divisions, (2) hierarchies of moral worth and (3) ‘multispecies justice’inthe broader contextof justice.
  •  869
    This book defends an account of justice to nonhuman beings – i.e., to animals, plants etc. – also known as ecological or interspecies justice, and which lies in the intersection of environmental political theory and environmental ethics. More specifically, against the background of the current extinction crisis this book defends a global non-ranking biocentric theory of distributive ecological/interspecies justice to wild nonhuman beings, because the extinction crisis does not only need practica…Read more
  •  1
    Life in Common: Distributive Ecological Justice on a Shared Earth
    Dissertation, University of Manchester. 2018.
    This thesis lies in the overlap of environmental political theory and environmental ethics. More specifically, it focuses on the intersection between distributive ecological justice (justice to nature), and environmental justice (distributing environmental goods between humans). Against the backdrop of the current sixth extinction crisis, I address the question of what constitutes a just usage of ecological space. I define ecological space as encompassing environmental resources, benefits provid…Read more
  •  12
    Half-earth: our planet’s fight for life, by Edward O. Wilson (review)
    Environmental Politics 25 (6): 1162-1164. 2016.
  •  32
    Situating the Half-Earth proposal in distributive justice: Conditions for just conservation
    Biological Conservation 228 (December 2018): 44-51. 2018.
    The Half-Earth proposal (or ‘Nature Needs Half’) was put forward as an answer to the current sixth mass extinction crisis on Earth and sparked a debate with disagreement on empirical and normative questions. In this paper I focus on the so far undertheorised normative debate and will provide some conditions that would need to be fulfilled in order for the Half-Earth proposal to serve justice. As I will illustrate, to even begin with situating the Half-Earth proposal within an account of justice …Read more
  •  45
    Sharing the Earth: A Biocentric Account of Ecological Justice
    Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 30 (3): 367-385. 2017.
    Although ethical and justice arguments operate in two distinct levels—justice being a more specific concept—they can easily be conflated. A robust justification of ecological justice requires starting at the roots of justice, rather than merely giving, for example, an argument for why certain non-human beings have moral standing of some kind. Thus, I propose that a theory of ecological justice can benefit from a four-step justification for the inclusion of non-human beings into the community of …Read more