Overview

How do we understand our ethical obligations when we conceive of ourselves as part of an ecosystem? Must we move beyond an anthropocentric and temporally bounded perspective to a wider view that encompasses all species and future generations? These and other such questions lie at the heart of Environmental Ethics, a new and vibrant discipline within Western Philosophy. From this new philosophical perspective, key questions include the question of value (intrinsic or not?), the problem of pluralism (is there a universal Environmental Ethics?) and our ethical relations to nonhuman beings.

Dialogue 23
8 sessions
October 18, 2011
Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India
ML23 Print Program |pdf|
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Speakers

Clare Palmer, DPhil, is currently Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. She studied at Oxford University, and has held appointments in universities in the UK, Australia and the USA. She has published widely on environmental philosophy and animal ethics, most recently publishing Animal Ethics in Context (New York: Columbia University Press 2010). She has edited or co-edited a number of collections including Killing Animals, co-edited with the Animal Studies Group (Champaign-Urbana: Illinois University Press 2006) and the 5-volume collection Environmental Philosophy, co-edited with J.Baird Callicott (London: Routledge 2005). She was the founding editor of the journal Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion (Brill Academic Press) and held the position of President of the International Society for Environmental Ethics from 2007-2010. She is working on a book provisionally titled "Ethics, Climate Change and the Non-Human World".

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