Wendy Xin

Environmental campaigns today frequently appeal to a range of emotions we experience in our engagement with the nonhuman world. While such emotions have received increasing attention in psychology, the philosophical literature on emotions has largely been limited to emotions in a social, interpersonal context. In this thesis, I aim to fill this gap by asking what emotions we should appeal to in environmental campaigns. I begin by suggesting that our goals in environmental campaigns should be diverse: we should aim not only to motivate right actions, but also to improve value judgments and cultivate virtues. I then look at four emotions that are important in existing environmental campaigns, namely, empathy, awe, wonder, and fear. I suggest that it is beneficial to appeal to a mix of empathy, awe, and wonder. This is not only because they make us care about different nonhuman entities, but also because doing so can ameliorate some of the issues we encounter when only appealing to one emotion. I further suggest that we should limit the appeals to fear in environmental campaigns, because they are likely to lead to disengagement in most environmental issues, and have a negative impact on the audience’s wellbeing, rational capacity, and ability to experience some other emotions like empathy and awe. I conclude by reflecting on the complexity of my answer to the question of what emotions we should appeal to in environmental campaigns. Because there is a diverse range of valuable objects in the environment, as well as a diverse range of goals in environmental campaigns (that are sometimes in conflict), such complexity is inevitable in any serious attempt to answer the question.

Human genomics involves generating, processing, storing, using and sharing immense amounts of information. This will only increase given efforts to embed whole genome sequencing into mainstream clinical practice. However, as society becomes more conscious about the impact of human activity on the environment, it is imperative to consider what this means for the future of genomic data generation and its governance. There is scant literature on environmental ethics in the context of genomic data governance. To address this gap, we drew on existing debates and scholarship relating to the environmental impact of biobanking, healthcare generally, and data-intensive healthcare specifically, to construct the strongest conceptual challenges to the proposal that environmental concerns should be incorporated into genomic data governance frameworks. Each challenge was critically examined. We developed five conceptual obstacles to incorporating environmental considerations in genomic data governance: genomic data optimism; the outcome measurement challenge; the responsibility challenge; the worse offender challenge; and technological idealism. We argue that no objection, when considered individually or together, provides strong enough reasons to ignore or de-prioritise environmental considerations in genomic data governance. We suggest three proposals to move forward with environmental ethics in genomic data governance: research ethics committees should pilot how to consider environmental ethics when assessing and approving genomic research; environmental considerations should be explicitly considered in all prospective genomic data generation; the sector should catalogue low-value practices that can be easily discontinued with minimal disruption. As a rapidly growing field, the environmental harm from genomic data generation is certain and significant. The relevant question, then, is not whether but how to mitigate the harms without compromising genomics’ potential benefits.

One common strategy in climate communication is to appeal to one's fear of the frightening consequences of climate change. One common concern, however, is that fear can be counterproductive as it tends to lead to disengagement. Proponents of fear appeals typically respond by emphasising the importance of pairing fear with an efficacious recommended action. In this paper, I argue that, in the context of climate change, it is difficult to find a recommended action that is sufficiently efficacious. I suggest that one way to overcome this challenge is to appeal to our fear of moral corruption, rather than the negative physical consequences of climate change. I further argue that motivating right actions should not be the only goal in climate communication. Instead, getting the audience to feel fitting emotional responses, including fitting fear, is another goal that we can justifiably adopt. Thus, the counterproductivity of fear does not always necessitate refraining from using fear appeals.

Wonder has been considered an important emotion in environmental ethics. Yet, it is not always clear what is meant by the term wonder. I argue that we should recognize two kinds of wonder: one involving the appraisal that the object has non-instrumental value (‘non-instrumental wonder’), and the other involving the appraisal that the object has epistemic value in that it is worth knowing for its own sake (‘epistemic wonder’). Even though neither kind of wonder should be a basis of environmental ethics, they can nonetheless play an important role in different environmental virtues, including environmental benevolence and curiosity.

In this paper, I argue that considerations of epistemic bubbles can give us reason to defend censorship of hate speech. Although censoring hate speech leads to epistemic bubbles (‘censorship bubbles’), they tend to be less epistemically problematic than epistemic bubbles generated by the circulation of hate speech (‘hate bubbles’). Because hate speech silences its target groups and creates the illusion that the dominant group identities are threatened, hate bubbles are likely more restrictive in structure than censorship bubbles and have a stronger tendency to turn into echo chambers where opposing views are actively discredited. Therefore, I argue that censorship bubbles might be a minor price we ought to pay to avoid hate bubbles. Additionally, my analysis shows that we cannot focus exclusively on the content or the structure of epistemic bubbles, since their content can partly determine their structure, as is in the case of hate bubbles.