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About this book
Offers an account of environmental values which recognizes the centrality of human relations with and responses to the environments in which we live, while rejecting attempts to reduce such relations and responses to preferences that can be captured by monetary values. Topics include: human welfare and the natural world, consequentialist approaches to environmental choice, environmental equity and justice, value pluralism, intrinsic value, the role of history and narrative in environmental valuation, biodiversity and sustainability.
Contents
Chapter 1 Values and the Environment 1. Environments and values 1.1. Living from the world 1.2. Living in the world 1.3 Living with the world 2. Addressing Value Conflicts 2.1 Value conflicts 2.2 The distribution of goods and harms 2.3 Addressing conflicts Part One: Utilitarian approaches to environmental decision making Chapter 2: Human well-being and the natural world 1. Introduction 2. Welfare: Hedonism, preferences and objective lists 2.1 The Hedonistic account of well-being 2.2 Preference utilitarianism 2.3 Objectivist accounts of welfare 3. Whose well-being counts? 4. Making comparisons: utilitarianism, economics and efficiency Chapter 3: Consequentialism and its critics 1. Introduction 2. Consequentialism permits too much 2.1 What is the problem with consequentialism? The moral standing of individuals 2.2 Rights, conflicts and community 3. Consequentialism demands too much 3.1 What is the problem with consequentialism? Agent-based restrictions on action 3.2 Virtues and environmental concern 4. Consequentialist responses 4.1. Indirect utilitarianism 4.2 Extending the account of the good 5. Ethical pluralism and the limits of theory Chapter 4 Equality, justice and environment 1. Utilitarianism and distribution 1.1. Equality in moral standing 1.2. Indirect utilitarian arguments for distributive equality 1.3 Economics, efficiency and equality 1.3.1 Willingness to pay 1.3.2 The Kaldor-Hicks compensation test 1.3.3. Discounting the future 2. Egalitarian ethics 2.1. Consequentialism without maximisation 2.1.1. The priority view 2.1.2. Telic egalitarianism 2.2. Deontological responses 2.3. Community, character and equality 3. Equality of what? Chapter 5 Value Pluralism, value commensurability and environmental choice 1. Value monism 2. Value pluralism 2.1 Trading-off values 2.2 Constitutive incommensurabilities 3. Value-pluralism, consequentialism, and the alternatives 4. Structural pluralism 5. Choice without commensurability 6. What can we expect from a theory of rational choice? Part Two: A New Environmental Ethic? Chapter 6: The moral considerability of the non-human world 1. New ethics for old? 2. Moral considerability 3. Extending the boundaries of moral considerability 4. New theories for old? Chapter 7 Environment, meta-ethics and intrinsic value 1. Meta-ethics and normative ethics 2. Intrinsic value 3. Is the rejection of meta-ethical realism compatible with an environmental ethic? 4. Objective value and the flourishing of living things 5. Environmental ethics through thick and thin Chapter 8. Nature and the natural 1. Valuing the 'natural' 2. The complexity of 'nature' 2.1 Some distinctions 2.2 Natural and artificial 2.3 Natural and cultural 2.4 Nature as wilderness 3. The value of natural things 4. Nature Conservation 4.1 A paradox? 5. On restoring the value of nature 6. Restitutive ecology 7. History, narrative and environmental goods Part 3: The narratives of nature Chapter 9. Nature and narrative 1. Three walks 2. History and processes as sources of value 3. Going back to nature? 4. Old worlds and new 5. Narrative and nature Chapter 10. Biodiversity: biology as biography 1. The itemising approach to environmental values 1.1 The nature of biodiversity - conceptual clarifications 1.2 The attractions of itemisation 2. Biodiversity and environmental sustainability 3. Time, history and biodiversity 4. Environmental ethics and the dangers of moral trumps Chapter 11. Sustainability and human well-being 1. Sustainability: of what, for whom and why? 2. Economic accounts of sustainability 3. Sustainability: weak and strong 4. Human well-being and substitutability 5. From preferences to needs 6. Narrative, human-well being and sustainability 7. Sustainability without capital Chapter 12. Public decisions and environmental goods 1. Procedural rationality and deliberative institutions 2. Decisions in context 3. Responsibility and character 4. What makes for good decisions?
Customer Reviews
Biography
John O'Neill is Professor of Political Economy at The University of Manchester. Alan Holland is Emeritus Professor of Applied Philosophy at Lancaster University Andrew Light is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of Washington, Seattle.
By: Alan Holland, Andrew Light and John O'Neill
233 pages, Figs
Environmental Values is an excellent book, easy to read, and relatively short. -- Richard Haynes, Ecological Restoration, Vol. 26, No. 1 Environmental Values covers an extraordinary amount of ground with clarity and precision. It distils key ideas from leading thinkers in environmental philosophy into one tightly argued volume. It offers both careful, accurate summaries of existing positions and an original, stuimulating position of its own. I highly recommend it. Clare Palmer, Geographical Journal