Locating the Living View

This is part of an early draft of a chapter I wrote for my PhD thesis. I thought I’d see if I could serialise it here and on Substack. Anyone interested?

Environmental ethics just means that there is a way we should treat the world. It’s a subject that goes back as far as ancient Greece, or China but all societies have had to deliberate on the relationship they have with everything else, beyond other people. Hunter-gatherer or pastoralist societies who herded cattle, goats, camels or sheep from pasture to pasture had rites and rituals, from sacrifices to prayers to shamanic dances. which exerted an intention towards the living world, are prime examples of early explorations into what was owed by the living world to the human world of that society (see, for instance, Milton: 2002). However, in order to create a manageable overview of recent developments relevant to this work, we can more effectively begin to trace the history of environmental ethics if we locate its origins in 1970s America.

Environmental ethics relies fundamentally on questions about how ‘agents’ — always human, usually moral — relate to, variously, ‘patients’ (Taylor), ‘the Other’, (Hegel, Marx, Heidegger), ‘Nature’ (Taylor, Ames), ‘the environment’ (Attfield, Rolston, Callicott) or whatever else is deemed ‘morally considerable’ (Goodpaster, Lawrence).