Shane Epting

While traveling in a city is often not a cause for concern, examining outcomes in many instances over lengthy durations suggests otherwise. In reality, the driving conditions in numerous cities are toxic. Yet, there is more to this claim than a mere emotive response to traffic. This article’s purpose is to flesh out this position, revealing the conditions required for this claim to hold significance. In the course of its unpacking, the author examines the term’s usage to identify a pattern, a “received view,” which considers human-to-human relationships and human-technology relations. In turn, it exhibits what toxic mobility looks like in different scenarios, which provides insights into harmful human-machine relations. After establishing this outlook, the attention is focused on the requirements for removing toxicity from mobility systems.

This book offers an original perspective on food supply chains. It argues that the ability to trade food on a global scale could be intrinsically good aside from any instrumental value that people gain from it. While the author’s argument seems to counter wholesale anti-agribusiness views, it is consistent with the larger goals of food-justice movements. The author examines the structures of food supply chains, revealing the kinds of harm they help produce. They include slavery, abusive labor, geopolitical exploitation, ecological degradation, and public health impacts. Although the book argues that food supply chains can be collectively beneficial, eliminating their immoral features must hold steady as a continuous enterprise. Securing this outcome means that we go beyond critique. The final chapter advocates for the sustainable food label to address issues of food justice and food sovereignty. The Ethics of Agribusiness will interest researchers and advanced students working in food ethics, environmental ethics, and agricultural ethics.

This book applies the concept of moral ordering to urban affairs. It demonstrates how multi-stakeholder engagement can enhance the quality of city life while supporting ambitions such as ethical urban sustainability and human flourishing. While there is a history of philosophers viewing cities as technologies, cities’ encompassing nature inherently limits them. Urban sustainability matters often affect marginalized and vulnerable people, the public, nonhuman species, future generations, and urban artifacts. Problems can arise when stakeholders’ interests and needs appear at odds. The author argues in favor of the concept of moral ordering, a process designed to address issues involving different stakeholder groups such as municipal officials and residents. By employing moral ordering, a view comes into focus, revealing that the attention that each group receives reflects their place in the process, providing the necessary degree of moral respect. Finally, the author shows how moral ordering can lead to urban enlightenment. He examines real-world applications of moral ordering, such as New York City’s Participatory Budgeting Project, to make the case that municipalities can begin to bolster municipal-community relations in ways that promote urban enlightenment. Urban Enlightenment will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of the city, applied ethics, philosophy of technology, urban planning, environmental studies, and political science.

This book will benefit readers by revealing how urban existence is a multifaceted affair that, once examined, will forever change the way they think about their place in the city and what it means to live in one. Engaging in urban existentialism requires interrogating the idea of “The City,” delving into the facets of its conception. The lights, sounds, exquisite buildings, art, culture, and, most importantly, the endless possibilities entice people. They are where your wildest dreams of love, success, and happiness can come true. Yet, reality can stymie those aspirations. However, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. The reason is that many urban places, as hypercompetitive networks of socio-material arrangements, test you at every turn. They mold urban dwellers into adaptable beings who can survive the torment of traffic, bad weather, displeasing persons, and grueling work—all before lunch. Despite such complexity, what we want is probably simple: people to love, to be loved, a safe place to call home, good food, acceptance of oneself, and the ability to pursue a fulfilling existence through work and recreation. Like cities, nothing is that simple. Examining the built environment reveals competing interests between several stakeholder groups, and how each person relates to others remains at the center of such an enterprise. Questioning one’s place among others is at the heart of this book, and it can help you find meaning in the metropolis. Meaning in the Metropolis will interest philosophers, graduate students, maverick urban planners, and city lovers looking for meaning in the places they call home.

While there are numerous house renovation shows on several television networks, the practice of “house flipping” in real life is not glamorous. At times, remodeling specialists engage in unethical business practices to cut corners to make a quick buck, prompting legal action and reform efforts. Although these issues are of concern, other worries are lurking behind the scenes, encompassing a wide range of topics. Some problems can affect a neighborhood’s aesthetics, history, and culture. More serious matters like lead paint, asbestos, and radon can gravely impact human health. Some cities and states have proactive safety measures, but they are often ignored or overlooked. This article examines these notions, gesturing towards mitigatory avenues for relief to prevent additional harm in some instances and preserving neighborhood values in others.

While the preceding chapters laid out several of the theoretical and practical elements that come with saving technologies, the view showing how to create saving cities would benefit from additional explorations. This chapter does just that. It identifies some wicked technologies, and then it examines some nascent alternatives that could help municipalities move towards saving-city status. In turn, a more comprehensive picture emerges, revealing more of what a saving city would look like. Although these technologies will require additional research and development in city halls, voting booths, laboratories, and boardrooms, the conceptual depictions below provide motivation and guidance for such measures.

While the previous chapter began expanding the taxonomy of technologies so that their impacts on mental life surfaced, this one continues that process. It shows that to move forward, we need a conceptual model that identifies kinds of technology dissimilar from previous ones and qualifies as having characteristics that can deliver desired outcomes. The present case includes the mitigatory efforts and innovative spirit that speak to the pattern behind saving power. This chapter does just that. It illustrates that such progress, considering wicked problems and impossible conditions, requires thinking about these affairs in this fashion. Even though such exploration reveals that saving technologies could serve us well in our pursuits, the modern temper will find them unfamiliar. However, if the goal is to save us from ourselves, we must understand the reasons for their embrace, which is what this chapter does, culminating in a push to move from saving technologies to saving cities.

While climate change can induce mental states such as anxiety, fear, stress, and depression, which affect our existence, other wicked problems such as vast social and economic inequalities that manifest in the urban environments do also. This phenomenon appears to be well entrenched in many cities today. In turn, through expanding our taxonomy to include wicked and saving technologies, we can employ these terms to enhance our understanding of situations in the urban sphere that manifest as distinctly harmful mental states. Common examples include homelessness and home-related issues, traffic, and extreme loneliness. Due to passive acceptance of such situations, some people might assume that these unfortunate realities are metropolitan places' inherent characteristics. However, viewing them as merely circumstantial provides a way to change how we perceive cities' possibilities, meaning that we can upgrade our position on such matters. This chapter lays the groundwork for that undertaking. It identifies some of the wicked technologies in play, and in turn, marks them as ones that could benefit from specialized study to discover means that can mitigate harms and change the unwelcome conditions surrounding them.

The conception of “wicked problems” can help us understand the challenges associated with many urban issues that exist now or will arise while building, rebuilding, or expanding cities. This chapter uses a recent case study in southern Nevada to grasp the latter's complexity. For instance, geologists discovered new deposits of naturally occurring asbestos, microscopic fibers found in rocks and soil. The danger is that inhaling them can lead to mesothelioma. One problem is that this rare cancer often takes decades to manifest. This discovery abruptly stalled a highway project near Las Vegas. In turn, I use this case as a “thought model” to challenge an established way of categorizing kinds of technologies. Advancing this conversation requires that we reclassify some of them and develop a categorization for those that reflect a different way of thinking about how urban technologies affect mental life.

Having established an account of saving technologies in the previous chapter, this one moves towards saving cities. This move’s motivation is to show that if the former can help increase positive mental states (love, joy, etc.) that create better mental lives, we can work towards meaningfully giving the latter the same categorization. On the one hand, this position holds that having many saving technologies creates numerous opportunities for them to work in unison to achieve the outcome above. On the other hand, it shows that cities, when thought about as technologies, can qualify as saving technologies, also. In turn, it makes sense to call such places “saving cities”, especially when considering that they could protect people from some immediate harm and humankind from an anthropogenic demise. To make this case, this chapter explores a somewhat novel housing technology called “cohousing.” The purpose behind this move is to exhibit how to apply the structure of “saving” to a technology that can facilitate immediate efforts that can help shape mental life, which could also contribute to long-term strategies to do the same on a municipal scale.

Research in the emerging area of the philosophy of the city has blossomed significantly in the last decade. One research strand is urban lighting, which offers several insights into how cities appear, focusing on a range of issues. This paper aims to contribute to this conversation by interrogating what it means to have a city that functions 24 hours a day. In turn, the author fleshes out the view that we can almost say that two cities exist within the exact location but opts to examine the differences between the daytime and the nighttime city instead. This process helps identify a few issues that arise when a municipality exists with such a duality at play. This paper concludes with some suggestions for dealing with these affairs.

Although Eugene Hargrove did not invent weak anthropocentrism, his version lacks adequate representation in several pedagogical and research venues in environmental ethics. In turn, weak anthropocentrism is one of the lesser-appreciated approaches when compared to areas such as ecocentrism. The author argues Hargrove’s version remains highly applicable to several of today’s ecological issues and advances in neighboring subfields, such as philosophy of technology, philosophy of food, and the emerging area of philosophy of the city. These points suggest weak anthropocentrism could require additional study to understand how it could enhance environmental thought and could benefit philosophy’s future in classrooms and research explorations.

The history of philosophy and urban thought makes it evident that there are several ways to define cities. However, there are no popular views holding that cities do not exist. While this paper does not make this claim per se, it shows there are significant reasons that allow such a position to advance. In turn, examining this view provides several insights into the nature of cities and exposes the challenges they face due to issues such as vast socioeconomic inequalities, widespread ecological degradation, and global climate change. Along with making this case, the author investigates steps to move toward progress regarding such challenges.

This book makes the case that several urban technologies contribute to wicked problems such as climate change and vast social and economic inequalities. Such situations often create unfavorable conditions for mental life in cities. These conditions force us to expand the taxonomy of technology to include new designations: “wicked” and “saving” technologies. Epting holds that the latter can support worthwhile goals such as socially just urban sustainability. Along with fleshing out this view, he provides concrete examples of saving technologies, which include cohousing initiatives, ariel cable cars, participatory budgeting, and car-free zones/cities.

Most components of urban infrastructure remain hidden. Due to this condition, we do not think about them in a way that pays attention to the full scope of moral possibilities. For instance, when such topics are forced from the periphery of our thinking to the forefront of our minds, it is usually in terms of figuring out who to blame when they fail to function properly. In turn, one could argue that we only care to talk about an action’s moral status that pertains to infrastructure when it becomes a hazard. While this point deserves examination, the more significant issue is that we lack the moral language required to have conversations about moral praise regarding public works. The purpose of this paper, then, is to flesh out how to discuss morality and infrastructure regarding moral praise.

Although there is a history in urban thought wherein scholars view cities as technologies, the encompassing character of such views inherently limits them. In turn, their usefulness does not efficiently support the kind of thinking that is required to deliver worthwhile outcomes that can promote social justice and human flourishing. However, narrowing the focus through examining municipalities as technologies offers possibilities that can help us achieve such goals. To maximize the utility of this endeavor, employing the structural-ethics approach provides a way to assess urban technologies to achieve success. In this paper, the author explores the ideas above, revealing how they advance our thinking when it comes to remaking, planning, and building existing and future cities. The article concludes by linking these claims to other lessons in urban studies and geography.

Recently, geologists in Southern Nevada discovered new deposits of naturally occurring asbestos and microscopic fibers in rocks and soil. The danger is that inhaling them can lead to mesothelioma. One problem is that this rare cancer often takes decades to manifest. This discovery abruptly stalled a highway project near Las Vegas. Due to this condition, management developed numerous protocols to keep workers safe. Using this case as a “thought model,” the author challenges an established way of categorizing kinds of technologies as they relate to the concept of being. In turn, this thought model reveals that climate change alters the conditions for being, as recognized in the literature. Advancing this conversation requires that we must reclassify some technologies and develop a categorization for those that reflect a different way of thinking as it concerns being.