Teea Kortetmäki

Climate change compels us to rethink the ethics of our dietary choices and has become an interesting issue for ethicists concerned about diets, including animal ethicists. The defenders of veganism have found that climate change provides a new reason to support their cause because many animal-based foods have high greenhouse gas emissions. The new style of argumentation, the ‘climatic argument for veganism’, may benefit animals by persuading even those who are not concerned about animals themselves but worry about climate change. The arguments about the high emissions of animal-based food, and a resulting moral obligation to abstain from eating such products, are an addition to the prior forms of argument for principled veganism grounded on the moral standing of, and concern for, nonhuman animals. In this paper, we examine whether the climatic argument for veganism is convincing. We propose a formulation for the amended version of the argument and discuss its implications and differences compared to the moral obligations of principled veganism. We also reflect upon the implications of our findings on agricultural and food ethics more generally.

Climate change poses grave risks to food security, and mitigation and adaptation actions have so far been insufficient to lessen the risk of climate-induced violations of the right to food. Could safeguarding the right to food, then, justify some forms of geoengineering? This article examines geoengineering through the analytical lens of the right to food. We look at the components of food security and consider how the acceptability of geoengineering relates to the right to food via its impacts on these components. Our examination shows that results vary greatly between different forms of geoengineering: while some forms of geoengineering fail to respect the right to food, certain other forms may even become obligatory to protect the right to food. It appears that there is no support for aerosol-based solar radiation management, whereas some carbon dioxide removal methods can help protect or promote the right to food. The ethical challenges related to carbon dioxide removal methods are, we note, similar to those that will also be faced in the course of climate change mitigation.

The need to create more sustainable food systems calls for careful attention to justice in making the transition. However, to achieve a just transition and create policies to support the goal of developing sustainable food systems, we need more knowledge of the ways current policies tackle justice. This knowledge can reveal blind spots and development needs and increase the transparency of potentially conflicting goals, which is essential for designing just transition policies. From the normative perspective of food justice, a food system should produce three principal outcomes: food security and nutrition, livelihoods and fair income, and environmental sustainability. In this article, we take these outcomes as the starting point to study how they relate to the distributive, procedural, and recognitive aspects of food justice in the context of Finnish food policies. Our data consist of Finnish policy strategies relating to the national food system and data from interviews with experts involved in the policy processes. Our results suggest that food security and farmer livelihoods have dominated justice related considerations at the cost of environmental sustainability. Although these are important for distributive justice and for recognizing vulnerabilities, the current setting reveals risks regarding the possibilities of transitioning to a low-carbon food system. The invisibility of the often-invisible groups is also notable in the policy documents. To promote justice more broadly, there should be greater emphasis on environmental sustainability as well as procedural and recognitive justice and opportunities for diverse people to participate in food policymaking.

Stakeholder theory has grown into one of the most frequent approaches to organizational sustainability. Stakeholder research has provided considerable insight on organization–nature relations, and advanced approaches that consider the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature. However, nonhuman nature is typically approached as an ambiguous, unified entity. Taking nonhumans adequately into account requires greater detail for both grounding the status of nonhumans and particularizing nonhuman entities as a set of potential organizational stakeholders with different characteristics, vulnerabilities, and needs. We utilize the philosophical concept of ‘recognition’ to provide a normative underpinning for stakeholder theorizing on nonhuman nature in both universal and difference-sensitive terms. We discuss how the status model of recognition helps identify relevant nonhumans as organizational stakeholders, establish respect, and particularize nonhumans in their distinctiveness and in partner-like ways. The implications of the recognition approach for stakeholder research are explicated with an illustrative case that exemplifies the recognition and particularization of nonhuman nature. We contribute to stakeholder research on nonhuman nature by suggesting that recognition provides a conceptual tool for theorizing the stakeholder status and particularization of nonhuman nature. Thereby, this article reduces anthropocentric bias and increases the capacity of stakeholder theorizing to confront the challenges of the ecological crisis.

Reification is a concept of critical theory that denotes certain problematic, habitualised forms of objectification. In this article, I examine whether the concept can be applied in environmental philosophy and what value it has for environmental critical theory. I begin by introducing the concept and the two senses in which reification of the non-human world has been discussed in the literature: first, denoting the misrecognition of others’ attitudes towards the natural world; and second, denoting a misconceived relationship between humans and their environment. After this, I introduce two potentially new subjects of reification: non-human animals and non-human nature. I also discuss two phenomena that could count as reification: industrial meat production and the commodification of ecological systems.

The capabilities approach has attracted broad interest in environmental ethics. One very interesting application is the environmental or extended capabilities approach which promotes the notion of environmental capabilities that contribute to the flourishingof nonhuman beings and ecological systems. The approach, however, lacks any account of the capabilities of ecological systems. The environmental capabilities approach can be applied at the ecosystem level with the flourishing of an ecosystem understood in terms of capabilities. Ecosystem flourishing presumes the ability of a given system to maintain its characteristic functions, diversity, and quality, and to do so even in the face of various disturbances. Resilience can be understood as a central capability of ecosystems to maintain their characteristic functioning in disruptive circumstances, which is particularly important with regard to human-induced environmental changes. This approach evokes duties of ecological justice regarding ecosystems. These duties in terms of the environmental capabilities approach can promote more holistic decision making.

In this article, I apply the environmental or expanded capabilities approach to species and examine whether species as wholes can have capabilities and what are the implications if they can. The examination provides support for the claim that species as evolutionary groups can possess capabilities. They have integrity, which refers to the functionings that enable the self-making and development of species, and it is conceptually possible to identify capabilities that essentially enable or contribute to species integrity. One central capability for species can be identified from conservation literature: adaptive capacity, the ability of species to react to environmental changes by self-regulative evolution. After constructing the main argument that species can have capabilities and that they possess the capability to adaptive capacity, I shortly expound on the implications of these claims. It turns out that there are at least three different ways to apply the notion, and that the claim ‘species have capabilities’ does not entail that species are necessarily recipients of justice.

The purpose of this treatise is to analyse five of the Copenhagen Climate Convention's main speeches to see how they supported or weakened the agreement possibilities in the convention. Particular focus will be on the elements that divide or unite negotiators and whether the summit's failing outcome is already built in the pre-planned speeches held at the main podium. Theoretically, the study builds on Kenneth Burke's identification thesis and Elizabeth L. Malone's climate change debate analysis. I combine these in my analysis using a revised version of Malone's argument family classification tool putting it into Burke's theoretical framework. The central concept is Burke's identification, whose manifestations are searched from speeches. The analysis will cover five of the main speeches from Copenhagen summit negotiators (the United States, China, Zimbabwe, the African Union and the Climate Group). Analysed speeches contain more elements that divide negotiators than elements with possibly uniting effect. The division between North and South is particularly distinct in most speeches. Another dividing issue is the major emitters' tendency to speak themselves out of more emission cut commitments instead of expressing willingness to engage in more ambitious accord. At the same time, less developed countries utter their mistrust which increases division and weakens the possibilities for negotiators to become consubstantial. Every participator agrees in public about seriousness of climate change, but this claim is supported only weakly by other arguments in their speeches. Copenhagen Climate Convention's failure can be foreseen in speeches that fail to build and recognise a common interest among negotiator countries. Rhetorical analysis reveals that climate change as an environmental problem is not faced by a ”global we” but from national perspectives, which weakens the possibilities for real action. The ”global we” facing and reacting to climate change has not emerged. This is a challenge for further study discussing the ways in which the real identification could be achieved and action taken.

One of the hardest questions in environmental philosophy is the debate between anthropocentric and ecocentric accounts of value. I argue that a great deal of the disagreement in this debate arises from a) misunderstanding of the concepts used in the debate and b) unfruitful reading of vaguely framed arguments. The conceptual and argumentative analysis of the debate shows that many arguments can be ignored as they either contain conceptual confusion or concern issues that are actually irrelevant to the centrism division. However, there are arguments that maintain their relevance, and these arguments have important consequences on the practical environmental ethics. Hence, contrary to Bryan G. Norton’s optimism about the “centrism convergence” on the level of practical environmentalism, I contend that disagreements prevail even in practice. As a solution, I suggest that the centrism debaters should focus on the practical level and work to find space for agreement.

This article proposes reframing the justice discourse in climate negotiations. In so doing, it makes two claims. First, global climate negotiations deserve to be addressed as an issue of justice on their own due to their peculiar characteristics. Second, a multidimensional theory of justice is superior to distributional theories for this task. To support these arguments, I apply the multidimensional theory of justice to global climate negotiations. This analysis reveals that injustice in the negotiations is multidimensional and irreducible to distributional questions. Furthermore, it shows how promoting justice in this broad sense would have significant effect on the negotiation procedures and substantive outcomes.