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399How Harmful Are the Average American's Greenhouse Gas Emissions?Ethics, Policy and Environment 14 (1): 3-10. 2011.It has sometimes been claimed (usually without evidence) that the harm caused by an individual's participation in a greenhouse-gas-intensive economy is negligible. Using data from several contemporary sources, this paper attempts to estimate the harm done by an average American. This estimate is crude, and further refinements are surely needed. But the upshot is that the average American is responsible, through his/her greenhouse gas emissions, for the suffering and/or deaths of one or two futur…Read more
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264The Move from Good to Ought in Environmental EthicsEnvironmental Ethics 28 (4): 355-374. 2006.The move from good to ought, a premise form found in many justifications of environmental ethics, is itself in need of justification. Of the potential moves from good to ought surveyed, some have considerable promise and others less or none. Those without much promise include extrapolations of obligations based on human goods to nonsentient natural entities, appeals to educated judgment, precautionary arguments, humanistic consequentialist arguments, and justifications that assert that our oblig…Read more
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133An argument for metaphysical realismJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 35 (1): 71-90. 2004.This paper presents an argument for metaphysical realism, understood as the claim that the world has structure that would exist even if our cognitive activities never did. The argument is based on the existence of a structured world at a time when it was still possible that we would never evolve. But the interpretation of its premises introduces subtleties: whether, for example, these premises are to be understood as assertions about the world or about our evidence, internally or externally, via…Read more
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69Casualties as a Moral Measure of Climate ChangeClimatic Change 130 (3). 2015.Climate change will cause large numbers of casualties, perhaps extending over thousands of years. Casualties have a clear moral significance that economic and other technical measures of harm tend to mask. They are, moreover, universally understood, whereas other measures of harm are not. Therefore, the harms of climate change should regularly be expressed in terms of casualties by such agencies such as IPCC’s Working Group III, in addition to whatever other measures are used. Casualty estimates…Read more
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65Replies to Critics of 'How Harmful are the Average American's Greenhouse Gas Emissions?'Ethics, Policy and Environment 16 (1): 111-119. 2013.I am grateful to all the respondents to ‘How harmful are the average American's greenhouse gas emissions?’. Their comments were individually and collectively very rich. Since there is...
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65The Move from Good to Ought in Environmental EthicsEnvironmental Ethics 28 (4): 355-374. 2006.The move from good to ought, a premise form found in many justifications of environmental ethics, is itself in need of justification. Of the potential moves from good to ought surveyed, some have considerable promise and others less or none. Those without much promise include extrapolations of obligations based on human goods to nonsentient natural entities, appeals to educated judgment, precautionary arguments, humanistic consequentialist arguments, and justifications that assert that our oblig…Read more
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63Hope, self-transcendence and environmental ethicsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (2). 2010.Environmental ethicists often hold that organisms, species, ecosystems, and the like have goods of their own. But, even given that such goods exist, whether we ought to value them is controversial. Hence an environmental philosophy needs, in addition to an account of what sorts of values there are, an explanation what, how and why we morally ought to value—that is, an account of moral valuing. This paper presents one such an account. Specifically, I aim to show that unless there are eternal good…Read more
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61Reference and perspective in intuitionistic logicsJournal of Logic, Language and Information 16 (1): 91-115. 2006.What an intuitionist may refer to with respect to a given epistemic state depends not only on that epistemic state itself but on whether it is viewed concurrently from within, in the hindsight of some later state, or ideally from a standpoint “beyond” all epistemic states (though the latter perspective is no longer strictly intuitionistic). Each of these three perspectives has a different—and, in the last two cases, a novel—logic and semantics. This paper explains these logics and their semantic…Read more
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50Anthropocentrism and EgoismEnvironmental Values 22 (4): 441-459. 2013.Concern with ethical anthropocentrism has largely been confined to debates in animal and environmental ethics. Philosophers generally have shown little interest in it. Ethical egoism, by contrast, though usually rejected, has sparked wide philosophical interest. This is surprising, for the two are akin; anthropocentrism is egoism writ large - the egoism of the human species. This paper explains the kinship by articulating this analogy, shows that the analogy provides for each argument for or aga…Read more
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48The Move from Is to Good in Environmental EthicsEnvironmental Ethics 31 (2): 135-154. 2009.Moves from is to good—that is, principles that link fact to value—are fundamental to environmental ethics. The upshot is fourfold: (1) for nonanthropogenic goods, only those moves from is to good are defensible which conceive goodness as goodness for biotic entities; (2) goodness for nonsentient biotic entities is contribution to their autopoietic functioning; (3) biotic entities also function “exopoietically” to benefit related entities, and these exopoietic benefits are on average greater than…Read more
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36Review of Samuel Alexander and Amanda McLeod (eds.), Simple Living in History: Pioneers of the Deep Future (review)Environmental Values 24 (5): 692-694. 2015.
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35Domination across Space and Time: Smallpox, Relativity, and Climate EthicsEthics, Policy and Environment 22 (2): 172-183. 2019.In the age of exploration western Eurasia came to dominate much of the world, in part unintentionally, via the medium of smallpox. This was domination across great spatial distances. Analogously, w...
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33The Individual’s Obligation to Relinquish Unnecessary Greenhouse Gas-Emitting DevicesPhilosophy and Public Issues - Filosofia E Questioni Pubbliche 3 (1): 1. 2013.download
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31The Move from Is to Good in Environmental EthicsEnvironmental Ethics 31 (2): 135-154. 2009.Moves from is to good—that is, principles that link fact to value—are fundamental to environmental ethics. The upshot is fourfold: (1) for nonanthropogenic goods, only those moves from is to good are defensible which conceive goodness as goodness for biotic entities; (2) goodness for nonsentient biotic entities is contribution to their autopoietic functioning; (3) biotic entities also function “exopoietically” to benefit related entities, and these exopoietic benefits are on average greater than…Read more
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30Are There Infinite Welfare Differences among Living Things?Environmental Values 26 (1): 73-89. 2017.Suppose, as biocentrists do, that even microorganisms have a good of their own - that is, some objective form of welfare. Still, human welfare is vastly greater and more valuable. If it were infinitely greater, individualistic biocentrism would be pointless. But consideration of the facts of evolutionary history and of the conceptual relations between infinity and incommensurability reveals that there are no infinite welfare differences among living things. It follows, in particular, that there …Read more
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26Anger, Despondence, and NonviolenceThe Acorn 17 (1): 53-60. 2017.Reflections on anger, despondence, and nonviolence are prompted by student responses to the 2016 election, especially given the likely implications for climate change policy. The author reflects on the value of nonviolence, environmental activism, and participation in a national climate march.
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23Anger, Despondence, and NonviolenceThe Acorn 17 (1): 53-60. 2017.Reflections on anger, despondence, and nonviolence are prompted by student responses to the 2016 election, especially given the likely implications for climate change policy. The author reflects on the value of nonviolence, environmental activism, and participation in a national climate march.
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23Marion Hourdequin, Environmental Ethics: From Theory to PracticeEnvironmental Values 25 (4): 485-487. 2016.
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21Comparing Suffering Across SpeciesBetween the Species 16 (1): 8. 2013.Moral life often presents us with trade-offs between the sufferings of some individuals and the sufferings of others. Researchers may need to consider, for example, whether the suffering imposed on animals by a certain line of medical experimentation justifies the relief that the resulting discoveries may bring to others. Often in such cases, the suffering of some individuals is incomparable with—that is neither greater than nor less than nor equal to—the suffering of others. While this complica…Read more
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20Environmental Ethics for the Long Term: An IntroductionRoutledge. 2014.Broad in scope, this introduction to environmental ethics considers both contemporary issues and the extent of humanity’s responsibility for distant future life. John Nolt, a logician and environmental ethicist, interweaves contemporary science, logical analysis, and ethical theory into the story of the expansion of ethics beyond the human species and into the far future. Informed by contemporary environmental science, the book deduces concrete policy recommendations from carefully justified eth…Read more