•  226
    Do non-native species threaten the natural environment?
    Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 18 (3): 215-236. 2005.
    Conservation biologists and other environmentalists confront five obstacles in building support for regulatory policies that seek to exclude or remove introduced plants and other non-native species that threaten to harm natural areas or the natural environment. First, the concept of “harm to the natural environment” is nebulous and undefined. Second, ecologists cannot predict how introduced species will behave in natural ecosystems. If biologists cannot define “harm” or predict the behavior of i…Read more
  •  166
    The aesthetic status of forgeries
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35 (2): 169-180. 1976.
    Original paintings and forgeries are not sufficiently the same sort of thing to have many comparable aesthetic qualities. 1) many aesthetic quality predicates have the form of attributives: they are two-place relations between an object and a class of objects and have a semantic account which requires that the object belongs to the class to which it is related; 2) there is no useful semantic class which contains an original and its forgery and 3) therefore these paintings are not to be compared …Read more
  •  166
    On the aesthetic and economic value of art
    British Journal of Aesthetics 21 (4): 318-329. 1981.
  •  166
    Science, Religion and the Environment
    Journal of Catholic Social Thought 4 (2): 313-330. 2007.
  •  154
    Environmental harm: Political not biological
    Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 22 (1): 81-88. 2009.
    In their fine paper, Evans et al. discuss the proposition that invasive non-native species are harmful. The question to ask is, “Harmful to whom?” Pathogens that make people sick and pests that damage their property—crops, for example—cause harms of kinds long understood in common law and recognized by public agencies. The concept of “ harm to the environment,” in contrast, has no standing in common law or legislation, no meaning for any empirical science, and no basis in a political consensus o…Read more
  •  130
    On restoring and reproducing art
    Journal of Philosophy 75 (9): 453-470. 1978.
  •  106
    Some problems with environmental economics
    Environmental Ethics 10 (1): 55-74. 1988.
    In this essay I criticize the contigent valuation method in resource economics and the concepts of utility and efficiency upon which it is based. I consider an example of this method and argue that it cannot-as it pretends-substitute for public education and political deliberation.
  •  101
    Who is the Invader? Alien Species, Property Rights, and the Police Power
    Social Philosophy and Policy 26 (2): 26-52. 2009.
    This paper argues that the occurrence of a non-native species, such as purple loosestrife, on one's property does not constitute a nuisance in the context of background principles of common law. No one is injured by it. The control of non-native species, such as purple loosestrife, does not constitute a compelling public interest, moreover, but represents primarily the concern of an epistemic community of conservation biologists and ecologists. This paper describes a history of cases in agricult…Read more
  •  101
  •  85
    Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World, by John Broome (review)
    Mind 123 (489): 194-197. 2014.
    Review of John Broome's overview of climate ethics.
  •  83
    Do We Consume Too Much?
    The Ruffin Series of the Society for Business Ethics 2 53-74. 2000.
  •  71
    On the Economic Value of Ecosystem Services
    Environmental Values 17 (2): 239-257. 2008.
    The productive services of nature, such as the ability of fertile soil to grow crops, receive low market prices not because markets fail but because many natural resources, such as good cropland, are abundant relative to effective demand. Even when one pays nothing for a service such as that the wind provides in pollinating crops, this is its 'correct' market price if the supply is adequate and free. The paper argues that ecological services are either too 'lumpy' to price in incremental units, …Read more
  •  63
    Free‐market versus libertarian environmentalism
    Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 6 (2-3): 211-230. 1992.
    Libertarians favor a free market for intrinsic reasons: it embodies liberty, accountability, consent, cooperation, and other virtues. Additionally, if property rights against trespasses such as pollution are enforced and if public lands are transferred as private property to environmental groups, a free market may also protect the environment. In contrast, Terry Anderson and Donald Leal's Free Market Environmentalism favors a free market solely on instrumental grounds: markets allocate resources…Read more
  •  60
    In this paper, I adopt the view that if general forces or processes can be detected in ecology, then the principles or models that represent them should provide predictions that are approximately correct and, when not, should lead to the sorts of intervening factors that usually make trouble. I argue that Lotka–Volterra principles do not meet this standard; in both their simple “strategic” and their complex “tactical” forms they are not approximately correct of the findings of the laboratory exp…Read more
  •  54
    On teaching a course on ethics, agriculture, and the environment
    Journal of Agricultural Ethics 1 (1): 69-84. 1988.
  •  47
    The plaza and the pendulum: two concepts of ecological science
    Biology and Philosophy 18 (4): 529-552. 2003.
    This essay explores two strategies of inquiryin ecological science. Ecologists may regardthe sites they study either as contingentcollections of plants and animals, therelations of which are place-specific andidiosyncratic, or as structured systems andcommunites that are governed by general rules,forces, or principles. Ecologists who take thefirst approach rely on observation, induction,and experiment – a case-study or historicalmethod – to determine the causes of particularevents. Ecologists wh…Read more
  •  44
    Paternalism and the Regulation of Drugs
    International Journal of Applied Philosophy 2 (2): 43-57. 1984.
  •  42
  •  41
    Intellectual property and products of nature
    American Journal of Bioethics 2 (3). 2002.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  39
  •  39
    Fact and value in ecological science
    Environmental Ethics 7 (2): 99-116. 1985.
    Ecologists may apply their science either to manage ecosystems to increase the long-run benefits nature offers man or to protect ecosystems from anthropogenie insults and injuries. Popular reasons for supposing that these two tasks (management and protection) are complementary turn out not to be supported by the evidence. Nevertheless, society recognizes the protection of the “health” and “integrity” of ecosystems to be an important ethical and cultural goal even if it cannot be backed in detail…Read more
  •  35
    Art and Authenticity: A Reply to Jaworski
    Journal of Value Inquiry 48 (3): 503-515. 2014.
    In a thoughtful paper, Peter Martin Jaworski has written, “The debate over originals, authenticity, fakes, duplicates, and forgery got its start in the mid-60s and then continued until the ‘80s.”Peter Martin Jaworski. “In Defense of Fakes and Artistic Treason: Why Visually-Indistinguishable Duplicates Are as Good as the Originals.” Journal of Value Inquiry (2013), pp. 391–405. Quotation at p. 392. The debate, at least insofar as I participated in it, questioned whether original paintings and for…Read more
  •  35
    The Economy of the Earth
    Law and Philosophy 9 (2): 217-221. 1990.
  •  34
    Further thoughts about the human neuron mouse
    American Journal of Bioethics 7 (5). 2007.
    When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son was born, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse. (E. B. White, 1945, 1.) In every somatic and morphological detail Stuart Little was...
  •  33
    Environmentalism vs. value subjectivism: Rejoinder to Anderson and Leal
    Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 8 (3): 467-473. 1994.
    (1994). Environmentalism vs. value subjectivism: Rejoinder to Anderson and Leal. Critical Review: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 467-473. doi: 10.1080/08913819408443353
  •  32
    What Does Environmental Protection Protect?
    Ethics, Policy and Environment 16 (3): 239-257. 2013.
    Environmental protection isn't what it used to be. During the 1960s and 1970s, environmentalists enacted a legislative agenda that seems like a dream today: statutes like the Clean Air and Clean Wa...
  •  31
    On the Definition of Ecology
    Biological Theory 12 (2): 85-98. 2017.
    In this article I discuss the proposition that ecologists may place restrictions on the kinds of plants and animals and on the kinds of systems they consider relevant to assessing the resiliency of ecological generalizations. I argue that to restrict the extension of ecological science and its concepts in order to exclude cultivated plants, captive animals, and domesticated environments ecologists must appeal either to the boundaries of their discipline; to the idea that the effects of human act…Read more
  •  28
    When is it co-evolution? A reply to Steen and co-authors
    Biology and Philosophy 34 (1): 10. 2019.
    David Steen and co-authors in this journal offer a philosophical argument to support an “Evolutionary Community Concept” to identify what they call “evolutionary communities.” They describe these as “unique collections of species that interact and have co-evolved in a given geographic area” and that include “co-evolved dependencies between different parts of a community.” Steen et al. refer to the coevolution of assemblages, collections, communities, dependencies, interspecific and abiotic inter…Read more