Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its nonhuman contents. This involves (1) the challenge of environmental ethics to the anthropocentrism (i.e., human-centeredness) embedded in traditional western ethical thinking; ((2) the connection of deep ecology, feminist environmental ethics, and social ecology to politics; (3) the attempt to apply traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to support contemporary environmental concerns; and (4) the focus of environmental literature on wilderness.
Our current de facto religious control fraud (economics) is broadly anti-green - Allan's 'golden calf'. It is resistant to Andrew's 'time walk history' and Molly up a tree being at one with nature other than as a 'sweet story' and communicative rationality generally, using pseudo-science systems to explain everything and direct what we can do. I now vote Green as my other 'choices' are neo-liberal or fascist. Gabby can perhaps vote that way with more direct hope.
Various books I've read recently suggest 'being green' is a morality changer. I've long thought science such, though not in the crude positivist sense most of the anti-science people use as a straw man.
Anthropocentrism often recognizes some non-intrinsic wrongness of anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) environmental devastation. Such destruction might damage the well-being of human beings now and in the future, since our well-being is essentially dependent on a sustainable environment. We have been aware of the population and environmental crisis since the 1960's. Much religion, perhaps especially the Judeo-Christian idea that humans are created in the image of the transcendent supernatural God, who is radically separate from nature, also by extension radically separates humans themselves from nature. This ideology further opened the way for untrammelled exploitation of nature. Modern Western science itself, White argues, was "cast in the matrix of Christian theology" so that it too inherited the "orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature" (White 1967, 1207). Clearly, without technology and science, the environmental extremes to which we are now exposed would probably not be realized. White's thesis, however, is that given the modern form of science and technology, Judeo-Christianity itself provides the original deep-seated drive to unlimited exploitation of nature. Nevertheless, White argued that some minority traditions within Christianity (e.g., the views of St. Francis) might provide an antidote to the "arrogance" of a mainstream tradition steeped in anthropocentrism ( White, L., 1967. "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis", Science, 155:1203-1207).
The arguments are old, though one rarely sees them in insanestream media. Two keys points are (1) the evaluative thesis (of non-anthropocentrism) is the claim that natural nonhuman things have intrinsic value, i.e., value in their own right independent of any use they have for others, and (2) the psycho-behavioural thesis (of non-anthropocentrism) is the claim that people who believe in the evaluative thesis of non-anthropocentrism are more likely to behave environmentally (i.e., behave in beneficial ways, or at least not in harmful ways, towards the environment) than those who do not.
Our 'deep ideologies' don't seem to be helping much. Ferguson and Tottenham rioted on the killings of minor black criminals by police, but we don't seem to be able to get 'up in arms' against burning the planet or wars that have killed millions of innocents and continue to do so. Looking at us from 40 million light-years away, a decent alien society might be discussing whether they have any ethical imperative to help us as distant strangers, perhaps wondering if delivering some practical green energy alternatives could help us move from our crude libidinal condition of scarcity wars and trinket consumption.
The economists don't want to discuss any deep ideology at all. The politicians seem able to whip it up and it hardly resembles 'deep green' when they do. Is our religious talk just talk above deeper crude ideology of a selfish, self-centred libidinal-tribal condition? So what are your views, my fellow carbon-footprints?
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