Refounding Environmental Ethics: Pragmatism, Principle, and Practice

摘要

Since at least the early 1990s, the focus of most environmental ethics on issues in value theory and attempts to formulate a clearly nonanthropocentric ethical system has been challenged by environmental philosophers of a broadly prag-matist bent. Worried by the field's perceived lack of practical impact in tackling environmental problems, pragmatists such as Andrew Light, Bryan Norton, and Ben Minteer have criticized what they regard as the excessive abstraction of much environmental ethics, urging instead a stronger attention to direct policy and management concerns, and have attempted in different ways to suggest alternatives.