Robert Kirkman

This paper reports the results of an assessment project conducted in a semester-length course in environmental ethics. The first goal of the project was to measure the degree to which the course succeeded in meeting its overarching goal of enriching students’ moral imagination and its more particular objectives relating to ethics in the built environment. The second goal of the project was to contribute toward a broader effort to develop assessment tools for ethics education. Through qualitative analysis of an exit survey and of a pair of writing assignments, the study yielded some promising results, outlined here, and suggested particular ways of improving both the course and the assessment procedure.

As a contribution to an experiential approach to environmental ethics, I seek to incorporate into the experience of place a sense of the passing of time across multiple scales. This may spur the recognition that places we are pleased to experience as stable backdrops for our projects may be transitory, in the short or long term, with important consequences for ethical deliberation. The occasion for this essay is a visit to the Karori Sanctuary in Wellington, New Zealand, the site of an ambitious restoration project set against the backdrop of ongoing biogeographic upheaval.

In the debate over urban sprawl in the United States, there is serious contention concerning its origins: Does sprawl exist because of or in spite of peoples' values and choices? As the debate plays out, it becomes clear that this question has only partly to do with the historical causes of sprawl and much more to do with questions of political legitimacy in decisions about the built environment. It also becomes clear that the debate as currently framed is not very fruitful. One way of getting a better understanding of these issues is to reconsider what it means for people to make free choices in particular contexts. Doing so yields some perspective on the complexity of the causes of sprawl and on the scope and limits of reasoned deliberation in private and public decision making.

To assess ethics pedagogy in science and engineering, we developed a new tool called the Engineering and Science Issues Test (ESIT). ESIT measures moral judgment in a manner similar to the Defining Issues Test, second edition, but is built around technical dilemmas in science and engineering. We used a quasi-experimental approach with pre- and post-tests, and we compared the results to those of a control group with no overt ethics instruction. Our findings are that several (but not all) stand-alone classes showed a significant improvement compared to the control group when the metric includes multiple stages of moral development. We also found that the written test had a higher response rate and sensitivity to pedagogy than the electronic version. We do not find significant differences on pre-test scores with respect to age, education level, gender or political leanings, but we do on whether subjects were native English speakers. We did not find significant differences on pre-test scores based on whether subjects had previous ethics instruction; this could suggest a lack of a long-term effect from the instruction

One goal of environmental ethics is to recommend changes to patterns of human life so as to bring inhabited landscapes into line with a vision of the good. However, the complex intertwining of nature and culture in inhabited landscapes makes this project much more difficult, complicating ethical judgment and limiting the efficacy of ethical action. Technological momentum, a model introduced by historian Thomas P. Hughes to describe the development of complex technological systems, can shed some light on these difficulties. The process of metropolitan growth in the United States will serve to illustrate the consequences of technological momentum for environmental ethics and policy.

Ethical choice and action in the built environment are complicated by the fact that moral agents often get stuck as they pursue their goals. A common way of getting stuck has its roots in human cognition: the failure of moral imagination, which shows most clearly when moral agents stand on either side of a sharp cultural divide, like the traditional divide between city and suburb. Being stuck is akin to bad moral luck: it is a situation beyond the control of the moral agent for which that agent might nevertheless be held responsible.

On the basis of a model of the development of scientific concepts as analogous to the “adaptive radiation” of organisms, I raise questions concerning the speculative project of many environmental philosophers, especially insofar as that project reflects on the relationship between ecology (the science) and ecologism (the worldview or ideology). This relationship is often understood in terms of anopposition to the “modern” worldview, which leads to the identification of ecology as an ally or as a foe of environmental philosophy even as ecological concepts are freely appropriated to inform speculation. I argue that ecology does not fit into the intellectual framework of such an opposition and that its concepts cannot readily be made to serve purposes outside of their specialized context without a loss of meaning. Finally, I suggest that environmental thought might do well to divest itself of its ecologistic commitments, adopting instead a skeptical approach to human-environment relations.

Although debates about the shape and future of the built environment are usually cast in economic and political terms, they also have an irreducible ethical component that stands in need of careful examination. This paper is the report of an exploratory study in descriptive ethics carried out in Atlanta, Georgia. Archival sources and semi-structured interviews provide the basis for identifying and sorting the diverse value judgments and value conflicts that come into play in a rapidly growing metropolitan area. The goal of the project is to expand and refine a draft framework for grappling with the ethical complexity of the situations from which individuals and communities make important decisions about their surroundings. The success of the framework is to be measured by its usefulness in informing the judgment of professionals and citizens, and in facilitating a robust normative debate about the built environment

On the way to a phenomenology of the moral space within which people make decisions about the built environments they inhabit, I take up Bryan Norton’s proposal for a non-linear, multi-scalar approach to environmental ethics. Inspired by a recent development in ecology, hierarchy theory, Norton’s key insight is that ethical concerns play themselves out across distinct spatio-temporal scales. I adapt this insight to the context of the built environment by way of a phenomenology of constraint as a scaling criterion, then go on to specify how ethical concerns might be mapped onto the complex scalar relationships thus revealed.

Environmental philosophers should look beyond stereotypes to consider American suburbs as an environment worthy of serious philosophical scrutiny for three reasons. First, for better or worse, the suburbs are the environment of primary concern to most Americans, and suburban patterns of development have caught on elsewhere in the industrialized world. Second, the suburbs are much more of a problem than many environmental theorists suppose, in part because suburban patterns of development are entrenched and difficult to change, and in part because they pose an important challenge to the very idea of an environmental ethic. Third, the search for sound policies and practices for metropolitan growth involves two crucial tasks for which philosophers may be particularly well suited: grappling with the ethical complexity of the suburbs, and fostering a robust and nuanced normative debate about the future of the built environment

There are two distinct strands within modern philosophical ethics that are relevant to environmental philosophy: an empiricist strand that seeks a naturalist account of human conduct and a humanist strand rooted in a conception of transcendent human freedom. Each strand has its appeal, but each also raises both strategic and theoretical problems for environmental philosophers. Based on a reading of Kant's critical solution to the antinomy of freedom and nature, I recommend that environmental philosophers consider the possibility of a Darwinian humanism, through which moral agents are understood as both free and causally intertwined with the natural world

We believe that the professional responsibility of bioscience and biotechnology professionals includes a social responsibility to contribute to the resolution of ethically fraught policy problems generated by their work. It follows that educators have a professional responsibility to prepare future professionals to discharge this responsibility. This essay discusses two pilot projects in ethics pedagogy focused on particularly challenging policy problems, which we call “fractious problems”. The projects aimed to advance future professionals’ acquisition of “fractious problem navigational” skills, a set of skills designed to enable broad and deep understanding of fractious problems and the design of good policy resolutions for them. A secondary objective was to enhance future professionals’ motivation to apply these skills to help their communities resolve these problems. The projects employed “problem based learning” courses to advance these learning objectives. A new assessment instrument, “Skills for Science/Engineering Ethics Test”, was designed and administered to measure the success of the courses in doing so. This essay first discusses the rationale for the pilot projects, and then describes the design of the pilot courses and presents the results of our assessment using SkillSET in the first pilot project and the revised SkillSET 2.0 in the second pilot project. The essay concludes with discussion of observations and results.

In “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship,” Alfred Schutz offers a phenomenological description of a structure he contends is at the root not only of shared musical meaning, but of human communication and social relations as such: the “tuning-in relationship.” The aim of what follows is to establish that this same structure is at the root of ethical relationships, which may shed some light on the conditions under which it is possible to respond appropriately to ethically fraught situations. Schutz’ analysis of the play of internal and external time establishes what the tuning-in relationship must be, but not yet how it is possible. His account also points to two important preconditions of tuning in: embodiment as the middle term between internal and external time, and practices as more widely shared meaning contexts which may persist across generations. For several reasons, Schutz does not give embodiment its due in his account, though his earlier work on course-of-action types sheds some light on the nature of practices. In all, though, these amount to promising leads for further investigation.

Environmental philosophers should look beyond stereotypes to consider American suburbs as an environment worthy of serious philosophical scrutiny for three reasons. First, for better or worse, the suburbs are the environment of primary concern to most Americans, and suburban patterns of development have caught on elsewhere in the industrialized world. Second, the suburbs are much more of a problem than many environmental theorists suppose, in part because suburban patterns of development are entrenched and difficult to change, and in part because they pose an important challenge to the very idea of an environmental ethic. Third, the search for sound policies and practices for metropolitan growth involves two crucial tasks for which philosophers may be particularly well suited: grappling with the ethical complexity of the suburbs, and fostering a robust and nuanced normative debate about the future of the built environment.

In Skeptical Environmentalism, Robert Kirkman raises doubts about the speculative tendencies elaborated in environmental ethics, deep ecology, social ecology, postmodern ecology, ecofeminism, and environmental pragmatism. Drawing on skeptical principles introduced by David Hume, Kirkman takes issue with key tenets of speculative environmentalism, namely that the natural world is fundamentally relational, that humans have a moral obligation to protect the order of nature, and that understanding the relationship between nature and humankind holds the key to solving the environmental crisis. Engaging the work of Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Rousseau, and Heidegger, among others, Kirkman reveals the relational worldview as an unreliable basis for knowledge and truth claims, and, more dangerously, as harmful to the intellectual sources from which it takes inspiration. Exploring such themes as the way knowledge about nature is formulated, what characterizes an ecological worldview, how environmental worldviews become established, and how we find our place in nature, Skeptical Environmentalism advocates a shift away from the philosopher’s privileged position as truth seeker toward a more practical thinking that balances conflicts between values and worldviews.

Darwinian humanism proposes that environmental philosophers pursue their work in full recognition of an irreducible ambiguity at the heart of human experience: we may legitimately regard moral action as fully free and fully natural at the same time, since neither perspective can be taken as the whole truth. A serious objection to this proposal holds that freedom and nature may be unified as an organic whole, and their unity posited as a matter of substantive truth, by appeal to teleology. In particular, I consider Hegel's account of the emergence of Absolute Spirit, weigh its advantages and disadvantages as an approach to human moral experience and as a strategic move for environmentalists, and conclude with a refinement of Darwinian humanism and a clarification of its implications for environmental ethics

In response to the challenges of teaching a course in environmental ethics to engineering majors at a technological university, I have developed an approach that emphasizes the role of moral imagination in conjunction with systems imagination in responding to problems that arise in shared environments. The course is set out on a model of problem-based learning, conceived as a cognitive apprenticeship: by working together to understand and consider responses to problems that are of interest to them, with guidance and tools provided by the instructor, students develop their capacity to notice, respond to and think about systems and values with greater sophistication. After setting out the rationale and the design of the course, I note the challenge that remains: developing a systematic assessment of the course, which would involve detecting and tracking subtle changes in student cognition.

Political responses to metropolitan growth in the United States and elsewhere should include careful ethical deliberation, but ethical judgment and action are limited by the involvement of individual moral agents in the complex processes that give shape to the built environment. I propose that casting the built environment as a heterogeneous sociotechnical ensemble can provide useful insight into the limits of ethics, particularly through the concept of obduracy. To the extent components of an ensemble are obdurate, they can stop or deflect even well-considered actions even as they impose constraints on moral agency itself. From this possibility spring a number of worthwhile lines of inquiry at the confluence of ethics and technology studies.