INTRODUCTION TO THE

PHILOSOPHY OF THE
HUMAN PERSON
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 MODULE I: INTRO TO PHILOSOPHY OF A HUMAN PERSON

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

Philosophy (from Greek φιλοσοφία, philosophia, literally "love of wisdom"

is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters
such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. The
term was probably coined by Pythagoras (c. 570–495 BCE).
Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational
argument, and systematic presentation. Classic philosophical questions
include: Is it possible to know anything and to prove it? What is most
real? Philosophers also pose more practical and concrete questions
such as: Is there a best way to live? Is it better to be just or unjust (if one
can get away with it)? Do humans have free will?

Historically, "philosophy" encompassed any body of knowledge. From

the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century,
"natural philosophy" encompassed astronomy, medicine, and physics.
Philosophers are the one who are engaged in doing Philosophy. They
are called lovers of wisdom.

Major Philosophers and Their Ideas

1. Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)

Thomas Aquinas was a 13th century Dominican friar, theologian and
Doctor of the Church, born in what is known today as the Lazio region of
Italy. His most important contribution to Western thought is the concept
of natural theology (sometimes referred to as Thomism in tribute to his
influence). This belief system holds that the existence of God is verified
through reason and rational explanation, as opposed to through scripture
or religious experience. This ontological approach is among the central
premises underpinning modern Catholic philosophy and liturgy. His
writings, and Aquinas himself, are still considered among the preeminent
models for Catholic priesthood. His ideas also remain central to
theological debate, discourse, and modes of worship.

Aquinas‘ Big Ideas

 Adhered to the Platonic/Aristotelian principle of realism, which
holds that certain absolutes exist in the universe, including the
existence of the universe itself;

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  Focused much of his work on reconciling Aristotelian and
Christian principles, but also expressed a doctrinal openness to
Jewish and Roman philosophers, all to the end of divining truth
wherever it could be found;
 The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) declared his Summa
Theolgoiae — a compendium of all the teachings of the Catholic
Church to that point — ―Perennial Philosophy.‖
Aquinas‘ Key Works
 Summa Theologica (1265–74)
 Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings

2. Aristotle (384–322 BCE)

Aristotle is among the most important and influential thinkers and
teachers in human history, often considered — alongside his mentor,
Plato — to be a father of Western Philosophy.‖ Born in the northern part
of ancient Greece, his writings and ideas on metaphysics, ethics,
knowledge, and methodological inquiry are at the very root of human
thought. Most philosophers who followed — both those who echoed and
those who opposed his ideas — owed a direct debt to his wide-ranging
influence. Aristotle‘s enormous impact was a consequence both of the
breadth of his writing and his personal reach during his lifetime.
In addition to being a philosopher, Aristotle was also a scientist, which
led him to consider an enormous array of topics, and largely through the
view that all concepts and knowledge are ultimately based on perception.
A small sampling of topics covered in Aristotle‘s writing includes physics,
biology, psychology, linguistics, logic, ethics, rhetoric, politics,
government, music, theatre, poetry, and metaphysics. He was also in a
unique position to prevail directly over thinking throughout the known
world, tutoring a young Alexander the Great at the request of the future
conqueror‘s father, Phillip II of Macedon. This position of influence gave
Aristotle the means to establish the library at Lyceum, where he
produced hundreds of writings on papyrus scrolls. And of course, it also
gave him direct sway over the mind of a man who would one day
command an empire stretching from Greece to northwestern India. The
result was an enormous sphere of influence for Aristotle‘s ideas, one that
only began to be challenged by Renaissance thinkers nearly 2,000 years
later.

Aristotle‘s Big Ideas

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  Asserted the use of logic as a method of argument and offered
the basic methodological template for analytical discourse;
 Espoused the understanding that knowledge is built from the
study of things that happen in the world, and that some
knowledge is universal — a prevailing set of ideas throughout
Western Civilization thereafter;
 Defined metaphysics as ―the knowledge of immaterial being,‖
and used this framework to examine the relationship between
substance (a combination of matter and form) and essence, from
which he devises that man is comprised from a unity of the two.

Aristotle‘s Key Works

 The Metaphysics
 Nicomachean Ethics
 Poetics

3. Confucius (551–479 BCE)

Chinese teacher, writer, and philosopher Confucius viewed himself as a
channel for the theological ideas and values of the imperial dynasties
that came before him. With an emphasis on family and social harmony,
Confucius advocated for a way of life that reflected a spiritual and
religious tradition, but which was also distinctly humanist and even
secularist. Confucius — thought to be a contemporary of Taoist
progenitor Lao-Tzu — had a profound impact on the development of
Eastern legal customs and the emergence of a scholarly ruling class.
Confucianism would engage in historic push-pull with the philosophies of
Buddhism and Taoism, experiencing ebbs and flows in influence, its high
points coming during the Han (206 BCE–220 CE), Tang (618–907 CE),
and Song (960–1296 CE) Dynasties. As Buddhism became the dominant
spiritual force in China, Confucianism declined in practice. However, it
remains a foundational philosophy underlying Asian and Chinese
attitudes toward scholarly, legal, and professional pursuits.

Confucius‘ Big Ideas

 Developed a belief system focused on both personal and
governmental morality through qualities such as justice, sincerity,
and positive relationships with others;
 Advocated for the importance of strong family bonds, including
respect for the elder, veneration of one‘s ancestors, and marital
loyalty;

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  Believed in the value of achieving ethical harmony through
skilled judgment rather than knowledge of rules, denoting that
one should achieve morality through self-cultivation.

Confucius‘ Key Works

 The Analects
 The Complete Confucius

4. René Descartes (1596–1650)

A French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, Descartes was born
in France but spent 20 years of his life in the Dutch Republic. As a
member of the Dutch States Army, then as the Prince of Orange and
subsequently as Stadtholder (a position of national leadership in the
Dutch Republic), Descartes wielded considerable intellectual influence
over the period known as the Dutch Golden Age. He often distinguished
himself by refuting or attempting to undo the ideas of those that came
before him.

Descartes‘ Big Ideas

 Discards belief in all things that are not absolutely certain,
emphasizing the understanding of that which can be known for
sure;
 Is recognized as the father of analytical geometry;
 Regarded as one of the leading influences in the Scientific
Revolution — a period of intense discovery, revelation, and
innovation that rippled through Europe between the Renaissance
and Enlightenment eras (roughly speaking, 15th to 18th
centuries).

Descartes‘ Key Works

 Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
 Principles of Philosophy (1644)
 The Passions of the Soul and Other Late Philosophical
Writings (1649)

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 82)

A Boston-born writer, philosopher, and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson is
the father of the transcendentalist movement. This was a distinctly
American philosophical orientation that rejected the pressures imposed

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by society, materialism, and organized religion in favor of the ideals of
individualism, freedom, and a personal emphasis on the soul‘s
relationship with the surrounding natural world. Though not explicitly a
―naturalist‖ himself, Emerson‘s ideals were taken up by this 20th century
movement. He was also seen as a key figure in the American romantic
movement.

Emerson‘s Big Ideas

 Wrote on the importance of subjects such as self-reliance,
experiential living, and the preeminence of the soul;
 Referred to ―the infinitude of the private man‖ as his central
doctrine;
 Was a mentor and friend to fellow influential transcendentalist
Henry David Thoureau.

Emerson‘s Key Works

 Nature and Other Essays (1836)
 Essays: First and Second Series (1841,1844)

6. Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Historian, social theorist, and philosopher Michel Foucault, born in the
riverfront city of Poiltiers, France, dedicated much of his teaching and
writing to the examination of power and knowledge and their connection
to social control. Though often identified as a postmodernist, Foucault
preferred to think of himself as a critic of modernity. His service as an
international diplomat on behalf of France also influenced his
understanding of social constructs throughout history and how they have
served to enforce racial, religious, and sexual inequality. His ideals have
been particularly embraced by progressive movements, and he allied
with many during his lifetime. Active in movements against racism,
human rights abuses, prisoner abuses, and marginalization of the
mentally ill, he is often cited as a major influence in movements for social
justice, human rights, and feminism. More broadly speaking, his
examination of power and social control has had a direct influence on the
studies of sociology, communications, and political science.
Foucault‘s Big Ideas
 Held the conviction that the study of philosophy must begin
through a close and ongoing study of history;
 Demanded that social constructs be more closely examined for
hierarchical inequalities, as well as through an analysis of the

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 corresponding fields of knowledge supporting these unequal
structures;
 Believed oppressed humans are entitled to rights and they have
a duty to rise up against the abuse of power to protect these
rights.

Foucault‘s Key Works

 The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human

Sciences (1966)
 The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on
Language (1969)
 Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)

7. David Hume (1711–77)

A Scottish-born historian, economist, and philosopher, Hume is often
grouped with thinkers such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Sir
Francis Bacon as part of a movement called British Empiricism. He was
focused on creating a ―naturalistic science of man‖ that delves into the
psychological conditions defining human nature. In contrast to
rationalists such as Descartes, Hume was preoccupied with the way that
passions (as opposed to reason) govern human behavior. This, Hume
argued, predisposed human beings to knowledge founded not on the
existence of certain absolutes but on personal experience. As a
consequence of these ideas, Hume would be among the first major
thinkers to refute dogmatic religious and moral ideals in favor of a more
sentimentalist approach to human nature. His belief system would help
to inform the future movements of utilitarianism and logical positivism,
and would have a profound impact on scientific and theological discourse
thereafter.

Hume‘s Big Ideas

 Articulated the ―problem of induction,‖ suggesting we cannot
rationally justify our belief in causality, that our perception only
allows us to experience events that are typically conjoined, and
that causality cannot be empirically asserted as the connecting
force in that relationship;

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  Assessed that human beings lack the capacity to achieve a true
conception of the self, that our conception is merely a ―bundle of
sensations‖ that we connect to formulate the idea of the self;
 Hume argued against moral absolutes, instead positing that our
ethical behavior and treatment of others is compelled by
emotion, sentiment, and internal passions, that we are inclined to
positive behaviors by their likely desirable outcomes.
Hume‘s Key Works
 A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)
 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)
 The History Of England (1754–62)

8. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Prussian-born (and therefore identified as a German philosopher), Kant
is considered among the most essential figures in modern philosophy, an
advocate of reason as the source for morality, and a thinker whose ideas
continue to permeate ethical, epistemological, and political debate. What
perhaps most distinguishes Kant is his innate desire to find a synthesis
between rationalists like Descartes and empiricists like Hume, to
decipher a middle ground that defers to human experience without
descending into skepticism. To his own way of thinking, Kant was
pointing a way forward by resolving a central philosophical impasse.

Kant‘s Big Ideas

 Defined the ―Categorical imperative,‖ the idea that there are
intrinsically good and moral ideas to which we all have a duty,
and that rational individuals will inherently find reason in
adhering to moral obligation;
 Argued that humanity can achieve a perpetual peace through
universal democracy and international cooperation;
 Asserted that the concepts of time and space, as well as cause
and effect, are essential to the human experience, and that our
understanding of the world is conveyed only by our senses and
not necessarily by the underlying (and likely unseen) causes of
the phenomena we observe.

Kant‘s Key Works

 Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
 Critique of Judgment (1790)
 The Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

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9. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55)
A Danish theologian, social critic, and philosopher, Kierkegaard is
viewed by many as the most important existentialist philosopher. His
work dealt largely with the idea of the single individual. His thinking
tended to prioritize concrete reality over abstract thought. Within this
construct, he viewed personal choice and commitment as preeminent.
This orientation played a major part in his theology as well. He focused
on the importance of the individual‘s subjective relationship with God,
and his work addressed the themes of faith, Christian love, and human
emotion. Because Kierkegaard‘s work was at first only available in
Danish, it was only after his work was translated that his ideas
proliferated widely throughout Western Europe. This proliferation was a
major force in helping existentialism take root in the 20th century.

Kierkegaard‘s Big Ideas

 Explored the idea of objective vs. subjective truths, and argued
that theological assertions were inherently subjective and
arbitrary because they could not be verified or invalidated by
science;
 Was highly critical of the entanglement between State and
Church;
First described the concept of angst, defining it as a dread the comes
from anxieties over choice, freedom, and ambiguous feelings.

Kierkegaard‘s Key Works

 The Concept of Dread (1844)
 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments,
Volume 1 (1846)
 Practice in Christianity (1850)

10. Lao-Tzu (also Laozi, lived between the 6th and 4th century BCE)
Historians differ on exactly when Lao-Tzu lived and taught, but it‘s largely
held that some time between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, the ―old
master‖ founded philosophical Taoism. Viewed as a divine figure in
traditional Chinese religions, his ideas and writings would form one of the
major pillars (alongside Confucius and the Buddha) for Eastern thought.
Lao-Tzu espoused an ideal life lived through the Dao or Tao (roughly
translated as ―the way‖). As such, Taoism is equally rooted in religion
and philosophy. In traditional telling, though Lao-Tzu never opened a

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formal school, he worked as an archivist for the royal court of Zhou
Dynasty. This gave him access to an extensive body of writing and
artifacts, which he synthesized into his own poetry and prose. As a result
of his writing, his influence spread widely during his lifetime. In fact, one
version of his biography implies he may well have been a direct mentor
to the Buddha (or, in some versions, was the Buddha himself). There are
lot of colorful narratives surrounding Lao-Tzu, some of which are almost
certainly myth. In fact, there are some historians who even question
whether or not Lao-Tzu was a real person. Historical accounts differ on
who he was, exactly when he lived and which works he contributed to
the canon of Taoism. However, in most traditional tellings, Lao-Tzu was
the living embodiment of the philosophy known as Taoism and author of
its primary text, the Tao Te Ching.

Lao-Tzu‘s Big Ideas

 Espoused awareness of the self through meditation;
 Disputed conventional wisdom as inherently biased, and urged
followers of the Tao to find natural balance between the body,
senses, and desires;
 Urged individuals to achieve a state of wu wei, freedom from
desire, an early staple tenet of Buddhist tradition thereafter.

Lao-Tzu‘s Key Works

 Tao Te Ching

11. John Locke (1632–1704)

An English physicist and philosopher, John Locke was a prominent
thinker during the Enlightenment period. Part of the movement of British
Empiricism alongside fellow countrymen David Hume, Thomas Hobbes,
and Sir Francis Bacon, Locke is regarded as an important contributor to
the development of the social contract theory and is sometimes identified
as the father of liberalism. Indeed, his discourses on identity, the self,
and the impact of sensory experience would be essential revelations to
many Enlightenment thinkers and, consequently, to real revolutionaries.
His philosophy is said to have figured prominently into the formulation of
the Declaration of Independence that initiated America‘s war for
independence from the British.

Locke‘s Big Ideas

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  Coined the term tabula rasa (blank slate) to denote that the
human mind is born unformed, and that ideas and rules are only
enforced through experience thereafter;
 Established the method of introspection, focusing on one‘s own
emotions and behaviors in search of a better understanding of
the self;
 Argued that in order to be true, something must be capable of
repeated testing, a view that girded his ideology with the intent of
scientific rigor.

Locke‘s Key Works

 Two Treatises of Government (1689)
 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

12. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527)

Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli is at once among the most influential
and widely debated of history‘s thinkers. A writer, public office-holder,
and philosopher of Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli both participated in
and wrote prominently on political matters, to the extent that he has even
been identified by some as the father of modern political science. He is
also seen as a proponent of deeply questionable — some would argue
downright evil — values and ideas. Machiavelli was an empiricist who
used experience and historical fact to inform his beliefs, a disposition
which allowed him to divorce politics not just from theology but from
morality as well. His most prominent works described the parameters of
effective rulership, in which he seems to advocate for leadership by any
means which retain power, including deceit, murder, and oppression.
While it is sometimes noted in his defense that Machiavelli himself did
not live according to these principles, this ―Machiavellian‖ philosophy is
often seen as a template for tyranny and dictatorship, even in the present
day.

Machiavelli‘s Big Ideas

 Famously asserted that while it would be best to be both loved
and feared, the two rarely coincide, and thus, greater security is
found in the latter;
 Identified as a ―humanist,‖ and believed it necessary to establish
a new kind of state in defiance of law, tradition and particularly,
the political preeminence of the Church;

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  Viewed ambition, competition and war as inevitable parts of
human nature, even seeming to embrace all of these tendencies.

Machiavelli‘s Key Works

 Discourses on Livy (1531)
 The Prince (1532)
 The Art Of War (1519–20)

13. Karl Marx (1818–83)

A German-born economist, political theorist, and philosopher, Karl Marx
wrote some of the most revolutionary philosophical content ever
produced. Indeed, so pertinent was his writing to the human condition
during his lifetime, he was exiled from his native country. This event
would, however, also make it possible for his most important ideas to find
a popular audience. Upon arriving in London, Marx took up work with
fellow German Friedrich Engels. Together, they devised an assessment
of class, society, and power dynamics that revealed deep inequalities,
and exposed the economic prerogatives for state-sponsored violence,
oppression, and war. Marx predicted that the inequalities and violence
inherent in capitalism would ultimately lead to its collapse. From its
ashes would rise a new socialist system, a classless society where all
participants (as opposed to just wealthy private owners) have access to
the means for production. What made the Marxist system of thought so
impactful though was its innate call to action, couched in Marx‘s
advocacy for a working class revolution aimed at overthrowing an
unequal system. The philosophy underlying Marxism, and his
revolutionary fervor, would ripple throughout the world, ultimately
transforming entire spheres of thought in places like Soviet Russia,
Eastern Europe, and Red China. In many ways, Karl Marx presided over
a philosophical revolution that continues in the present day in myriad
forms of communism, socialism, socialized democracy, and grassroots
political organization.

Marx‘s Big Ideas

 Advocated a view called historical materialism, arguing for the
demystification of thought and idealism in favor of closer
acknowledgement of the physical and material actions shaping
the world;
 Argued that societies develop through class struggle, and that
this would ultimately lead to the dismantling of capitalism;

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  Characterized capitalism as a production system in which there
are inherent conflicts of interest between the bourgeoisie (the
ruling class), and the proletariat (the working class), and that
these conflicts are couched in the idea that the latter must sell
their labor to the former for wages that offer no stake in
production.

Marx‘s Key Works

 Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy Of Right” (1843)
 The Communist Manifesto (1848)
 Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (1867)

14. John Stuart Mill (1806–73)

British economist, public servant, and philosopher John Stuart Mill is
considered a linchpin of modern social and political theory. He
contributed a critical body of work to the school of thought called
liberalism, an ideology founding on the extension of individual liberties
and economic freedoms. As such, Mill himself advocated strongly for the
preserving of individual rights and called for limitations to the power and
authority of the state over the individual. Mill was also a proponent of
utilitarianism, which holds that the best action is one that maximizes
utility, or stated more simply, one that provide the greatest benefit to all.
This and other ideas found in Mill‘s works have been essential to
providing rhetorical basis for social justice, anti-poverty, and human
rights movements. For his own part, as a member of Parliament, Mill
became the first office-holding Briton to advocate for the right of women
to vote.

Mill‘s Big Ideas

 Advocated strongly for the human right of free speech, and
asserted that free discourse is necessary for social and
intellectual progress;
 Determined that most of history can be understood as a struggle
between liberty and authority, and that limits must be placed on
rulership such that it reflects society‘s wishes;
 Stated the need for a system of ―constitutional checks‖ on state
authority as a way of protecting political liberties.
Mill‘s Key Works
 On Liberty and the Subjection of Women (1859, 1869)
 Utilitarianism (1861)

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15. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
Friedrich Nietzsche was a poet, cultural critic, and philosopher, as well
as possessor of among the most gifted minds in human history. The
German thinker‘s system of ideas would have a profound impact on the
Western World, contributing deeply to intellectual discourse both during
and after his life. Writing on an enormous breadth of subjects, from
history, religion and science to art, culture and the tragedies of Greek
and Roman Antiquity, Nietzsche wrote with savage wit and a love of
irony. He used these forces to pen deconstructive examinations of truth,
Christian morality, and the impact of social constructs on our formulation
of moral values. Also essential to Nietzshe‘s writing is articulation of the
crisis of nihilism, the basic idea that all things lack meaning, including life
itself. This idea in particular would remain an important component of the
existentialist and surrealist movements that followed.

Nietzsche‘s Big Ideas

 Favored perspectivism, which held that truth is not objective but
is the consequence of various factors effecting individual
perspective;
 Articulated ethical dilemma as a tension between the master vs.
slave morality; the former in which we make decisions based on
the assessment of consequences, and the latter in which we
make decisions based on our conception of good vs. evil;
 Believed in the individual‘s creative capacity to resist social
norms and cultural convention in order to live according to a
greater set of virtues.

Nietzsche‘s Key Works

 The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
 The Gay Science (1882)
 On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (1887, 1908)

16. Plato (428/427?–348/347? BCE)

Greek philosopher and teacher Plato did nothing less than found the first
institution of higher learning in the Western World, establishing the
Academy of Athens and cementing his own status as the most important
figure in the development of western philosophical tradition. As the pupil
of Socrates and the mentor to Aristotle, Plato is the connecting figure in
what might be termed the great triumvirate of Greek thought in both

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philosophy and science. A quote by British philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead sums up the enormity of his influence, noting ―the safest
general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it
consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.‖ Indeed, it could be argued that
Plato founded political philosophy, introducing both the dialectic and
dialogic forms of writing as ways to explore various areas of thought.
(Often, in his dialogues, he employed his mentor Socrates as the vessel
for his own thoughts and ideas.) While he was not the first individual to
partake of the activity of philosophy, he was perhaps the first to truly
define what it meant, to articulate its purpose, and to reveal how it could
be applied with scientific rigor. This orientation provided a newly
concreted framework for considering questions of ethics, politics,
knowledge, and theology. Such is to say that it is nearly impossible to
sum up the impact of Plato‘s ideas on science, ethics, mathematics, or
the evolution of thought itself other than to say it has been total,
permeating, and inexorable from the tradition of rigorous thinking itself.

Plato‘s Big Ideas

 Expressed the view, often referred to as Platonism, that those
whose beliefs are limited only to perception are failing to achieve
a higher level of perception, one available only to those who can
see beyond the material world;
 Articulated the theory of forms, the belief that the material world
is an apparent and constantly changing world but that another,
invisible world provides unchanging causality for all that we do
see;
 Held the foundational epistemological view of ―justified true
belief,‖ that for one to know that a proposition is true, one must
have justification for the relevant true proposition.

Plato‘s Key Works

 The Republic (380 BCE)
 The Laws (348 BCE)
 Plato: Complete Works

17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78)

Rousseau was a writer, philosopher, and — unique among entrants on
this list — a composer of operas and classical compositions. Born in
Geneva, then a city-state in the Swiss Confederacy, Rousseau would be
one of the most consequential thinkers of the Enlightenment era. His

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ideas on human morality, inequality, and most importantly, on the right to
rule, would have an enormous and definable impact not just on thinking
in Europe, but on the actual power dynamics within Western Civilization.
Indeed, his most important works would identify personal property as the
root to inequality and would refute the premise that monarchies are
divinely appointed to rule. Rousseau proposed the earth-shattering idea
that only the people have a true right to rule. These ideas fomented the
French Revolution, and more broadly, helped bring an end to a
centuries-old entanglement between Church, Crown, and Country.
Rousseau may be credited for providing a basic framework for classical
republicanism, a form of government centered around the ideas of civil
society, citizenship, and mixed governance.
Rousseau‘s Big Ideas
 Suggested that Man was at his best in a primitive state —
suspended between brute animalistic urges on one end of the
spectrum and the decadence of civilization on the other — and
therefore uncorrupted in his morals;
 Suggested that the further we deviate from our ―state of nature,‖
the closer we move to the ―decay of the species,‖ an idea that
comports with modern environmental and conservationist
philosophies;
 Wrote extensively on education and, in advocating for an
education that emphasizes the development of individual moral
character, is sometimes credited as an early proponent of child-
centered education.

Rousseau‘s Key Works

 A Discourse on Inequality) (1754)
 The Social Contract (1762)
 Emile: Or On Education (1762)

18. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80)

A French novelist, activist, and philosopher, Sartre was a leading
exponent of the 20th century existentialist movement as well as a vocal
proponent of Marxism and socialism. He advocated for resistance to
oppressive social constructs and argued for the importance of achieving
an authentic way of being. His writing coincided with, and contrasted, the
sweep of fascism through Europe, the rise of authoritarian regimes, and
the spread of Nazism. Sartre‘s ideas took on increased importance
during this time, as did his actions. Sartre became active in the socialist

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resistance, which aimed its activities at French Nazi collaborators. Of
note, one of his activist collaborators was both a romantic partner and a
fellow major cohort of existentialism, Simone de Beauvoir. Following the
war, Sartre‘s writing and political engagement centered on efforts at
anticolonialism, including involvement in the resistance to French
colonization of Algeria. In fact, his involvement earned Sartre two near-
miss bomb attacks at the hands of French paramilitary forces. Also
notable, Sartre was supportive of the Soviet Union throughout his
lifetime. Though occasionally serving to raise issues regarding human
rights abuses as an outside observer, he praised the Soviet Union‘s
attempt at manifesting Marxism.

Sartre‘s Big Ideas

 Believed that human beings are ―condemned to be free,‖ that
because there is no Creator who is responsible for our actions,
each of us alone is responsible for everything we do;
 Called for the experience of ―death consciousness,‖ an
understanding of our mortality that promotes an authentic life,
one spent in search of experience rather than knowledge;
 Argued that the existence of free will is in fact evidence of the
universe‘s indifference to the individual, an illustration that our
freedom to act toward objects is essentially meaningless and
therefore of no consequence to be intervened upon by the world.

Sartre‘s Key Works

 Being and Nothingness (1943)
 Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)
 Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One (1960)

19. Socrates (470–399 BCE)

A necessary inclusion by virtue of his role as, essentially, the founder of
Western Philosophy, Socrates is nonetheless unique among entrants on
this list for having produced no written works reflecting his key ideas or
principles. Thus, the body of his thoughts and ideas is left to be
deciphered through the works of his two most prominent students, Plato
and Xenophon, as well as to the legions of historians and critics who
have written on him since. The classical Greek thinker is best known
through Plato‘s dialogues, which reveal a key contributor to the fields of
ethics and education. And because Socrates is best known as a teacher

Page 18
of thought and insight, it is perhaps appropriate that his most widely
recognized contribution is a way of approaching education that remains
fundamentally relevant even today. The so-called Socratic Method,
which involves the use of of questioning and discourse to promote open
dialogue on complex topics and to lead pupils to their own insights, is on
particular display in the Platonic dialogues. His inquisitive approach also
positioned him as a central social and moral critic of the Athenian
leadership, which ultimately led to his trial and execution for corrupting
the minds of young Athenians.
Socrates‘ Big Ideas
 Argued that Athenians were wrong-headed in their emphasis on
families, careers, and politics at the expense of the welfare of
their souls;
 Is sometimes attributed the statement ―I know that I know
nothing,‖ to denote an awareness of his ignorance, and in
general, the limitations of human knowledge;
 Believed misdeeds were a consequence of ignorance, that those
who engaged in nonvirtuous behavior did so because they didn‘t
know any better.
Socrates‘ Key Works
 Early Socratic Dialogues

20. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

Born in Austria to a wealthy family, Wittgenstein is one of philosophy‘s
more colorful and unusual characters. He lived a life of eccentricity and
professional nomadism, dabbling in academia, military service,
education, and even as a hospital orderly. Moreover, during his life, he
wrote voluminously but published only a single manuscript. And yet, he
was recognized by his contemporaries as a genius. The posthumous
publication of his many volumes confirmed this view for future
generations, ultimately rendering Wittgenstein a towering figure in the
areas of logic, semantics, and the philosophy of mind. His investigations
of linguistics and psychology would prove particularly revelatory, offering
a distinctive window through which to newly understand the nature of
meaning and the limits of human conception.

Wittgenstein‘s Big Ideas

 Argued that conceptual confusion about language is the basis for
most intellectual tension in philosophy;

Page 19
  Asserted that the meaning of words presupposes our
understanding of that meaning, and that our particular
assignment of meaning comes from the cultural and social
constructs surrounding us;
 Resolved that because thought is inextricably tied to language,
and because language is socially constructed, we have no real
inner-space for the realization of our thoughts, which is to say
that the language of our thoughts renders our thoughts inherently
socially constructed.

Wittgenstein‘s Key Works

 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)
 Philosophical Investigations (1953)
 On Certainty (1969)1

The following are some of the reasons on why it is important for

people to practice philosophizing.

1. Philosophizing opens an endless well of possibilities - the

more people think, the more ideas would blossom and help in
developing various things
2. It answers some of the questions we have in life - when
people proposes theories or philosophies, it helps answers some
of the questions we have since it opens up discussions
3. It becomes a platform for discussion - people like discussing
things and theories and philosophies included. We could discuss
the cure for various illnesses or the ways on how the government
should work
4. It helps us with our daily life - whenever we wake up in the
morning, we ask ourselves the reason on why we do so.
Thinking about it or philosophizing about it helps us to get things
done
5. It answers some of life's greatest questions - this might
include our purpose in Earth, the origin of Earth, and others 2

1
https://thebestschools.org/magazine/major-philosopher-ideas/#aquinas
2
https://brainly.ph/question/1643305

Page 20
HOLISITC THINKING VS PARTIAL THINKING

Introduction

Since a human has the capacity to reflect on one‘s experiences and has
a never ending need to learn and discover, philosophy will remain the
most interesting discipline that will always make one‘s mind active. As
long as he wonders, doubts, and is always confronted with many
experiences and most especially has an insatiable desire to look for
truth, there is always a need to philosophize. As we are confronted with
questions or situations, how do we apply our analytical perspective on it?

HOLISTIC THINKING

Holistic approach is first formulated by Jan Smuts, holism has been

traditionally defined as a philosophical theory that states that the
determining factors in nature are wholes which are irreducible to the sum
of their parts and that the evolution of the universe is the record of the
activity and making of such wholes.

Holistic Thinking refers to a perspective that considers large scale

patterns in systems, and often describe as looking at the ―Big Picture‖
when describing and analyzing a situation or problem. A holistic
perspective requires an individual to have an open mindset regarding a
situation.

Thinking holistically is the opposite of analyzing something which

involves breaking down large information into details.

PARTIAL THINKING

It focuses on specific aspects of situation. Partial thinking is useful, but

philosophy utilizes holistic thinking in making sense of problems and
issues related to the human experience because people tend to apply an
analytical perspective when looking at problems or situations.
Partial thinking – focuses on the aspects of situation. The partial view is
an important component of analytical thinking as an individual focuses on
certain areas or aspects of a problem in order to understand it.

REFLECTION

Page 21
Requires a person to be willing to examine one‘s thoughts, feelings, and
actions and to learn more about one‘s life and experiences. Reflection
allows an individual to an opportunity to think more deeply about one‘s
action, motivations for doing such an action, and event its possible
consequences.

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 MODULE II:METHODS OF PHILOSOPHIZING

The methods of philosophy will help to learn the process of doing

philosophy in a systematic way. On the other hand, philosophizing is to
think or express oneself in a philosophical manner. There are four
different methods of philosophizing namely, logic, existentialism, analytic
tradition, and phenomenology.

Logic is the truth based on reasoning and critical thinking. It includes

analysis and construction of arguments. It serves as path to freedom
from half-truths and deception.

Deductive vs. Inductive

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As you can see in the figure above, deductive reasoning is a top-down
logic while inductive reasoning is a bottom-up logic.

1.Deductive Reasoning

In this type of reasoning, conclusion comes first, followed by main points,

and the last will be the supporting data, facts, examples, and evidences.
General idea comes first before the specific or particular idea.

In this reasoning, the general idea is all men are mortal. Because of this
general reasoning, we can conclude that Socrates is a man and he is
mortal because all men are mortal.

In this case, the general idea is if A then B. Because of this general

reasoning, we can conclude that A is true and B is also true since the
general idea says that A is same as B.

2. Inductive Reasoning

In this type of reasoning, supporting data, facts, examples, and

evidences come first followed by the main points and conclusion will be
the last part. This is the vice versa of the deductive reasoning because
particular idea comes first before the general idea.

Page 24
The person says that he exists and he is a human. He also thinks that
his pencil sharpener exists. Therefore, he concluded that his pencil
sharpener is human because he concluded that they both exist.

To make it short, logic features the reasoning and critical thinking. It uses
the observation, pattern, hypothesis, and theory.

Jean-Paul Sartre, (born June 21, 1905, Paris, France—died April 15,
1980, Paris) French novelist, playwright, and exponent of existentialism.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but he declined
it.

Page 25
Based upon him, existentialism is a philosophy acclaiming the freedom
of the individual human being. It is all about the freedom of a person.

Existentialism emphasizes the importance of free individual choice,

regardless of the power of other people to influence and coerce our
desires, beliefs, and decisions.

When the teacher taught you that 2 + 2 = 5. It is obvious that the given
answer is wrong. But it is up to the student if he will believe on teacher
taught. The teacher can‘t force the student to believe on him even if he is
the teacher. It‘s student‘s freedom.

Existentialism features the choice and freedom of a person.

Page 26
Another method of philosophizing is analytic tradition or philosophy. It is
the conviction that to some significant degree, puzzles, and philosophical
problems. It is about having clear language.

The picture above shows an example of analytic tradition. Those

questions require the process of logic, search for a single truth using
scientific processes, beliefs, and experiment

See the difference between the continental philosophy and analytic

philosophy.

Page 27
In continental philosophy, intuition, human condition, postmodernism,
and literature were used in that statement while in analytic philosophy,
reason, analysis, science, and logic were used.

Analytic tradition features related set of approaches to philosophical

problems, dominant in Anglo-American philosophy from the early 20th
century, that emphasizes the study of language and the logical analysis
of concepts.

Phenomenology is the careful inspection and description of phenomena

or appearance. No references on explaining in this method but it requires
experience. It is scientific study of the essential structure of
consciousness.

This is different from the other methods because it doesn‘t require too
much analysis but the experiences of a person.

Page 28
Phenomenology features essence, experience, focusing, group,
interviews, education. discussion, etc. It requires other people and can‘t
be done in isolation.3

Philosophical method (or philosophical methodology) is the study of

how to do philosophy. A common view among philosophers is
that philosophy is distinguished by the ways that philosophers follow in
addressing philosophical questions. There is not just
one method that philosophers use to
4
answer philosophical questions.

Systematic philosophy attempts to provide a framework in reason that

can explain all questions and problems related to human life. Examples
of systematic philosophers include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza
and Hegel. In many ways, any attempts to formulate a philosophical
method that provides the ultimate constituents of reality, a metaphysics,
can be considered systematic philosophy. In modern philosophy the
reaction to systematic philosophy began with Kierkegaard and continued
in various forms through analytic philosophy, existentialism,
hermeneutics, and deconstructionism.5

Some common features of the methods that philosophers follow (and

discuss when discussing philosophical method) include:

 Methodic Doubt - a systematic process of being skeptical about

(or doubting) the truth of one's beliefs.

 Argument - provide an argument or several arguments

supporting the solution.

3
https://gillemanalo.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/methods-of-philosophizing/
4
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-method-of-philosophizing
5
id

Page 29
  Dialetic - present the solution and arguments for criticism by
other philosophers, and help them judge their own. 6

Doubt and the sense of wonder

Plato said that "philosophy begins in wonder", a view which is echoed by

Aristotle: "It was their wonder, astonishment, that first led men to
philosophize and still leads them." Philosophizing may begin with some
simple doubts about accepted beliefs. The initial impulse to philosophize
may arise from suspicion, for example that we do not fully understand,
and have not fully justified, even our most basic beliefs about the world. 7

Formulate questions and problems

Another element of philosophical method is to formulate questions to be

answered or problems to be solved. The working assumption is that the
more clearly the question or problem is stated, the easier it is to identify
critical issues. A relatively small number of major philosophers prefer not
to be quick, but to spend more time trying to get extremely clear on what
8
the problem is all about.

Enunciate a solution

Another approach is to enunciate a theory, or to offer a definition or

analysis, which constitutes an attempt to solve a philosophical problem.
Sometimes a philosophical theory by itself can be stated quite briefly. All
the supporting philosophical text is offered by way of hedging,
explanation, and argument.9

Not all proposed solutions to philosophical problems consist of definitions

or generalizations. Sometimes what is called for is a certain sort of
explanation — not a causal explanation, but an explanation for example

6
id
7
id
8
id
9
id

Page 30
of how two different views, which seem to be contrary to one another,
can be held at the same time, consistently. One can call this a
philosophical explanation.10

Justify the solution

An argument is a set of statements, one of which (the conclusion), it is

said or implied, follows from the others (the premises). One might think
of arguments as bundles of reasons — often not just a list, but logically
interconnected statements — followed by the claim they are reasons for.
The reasons are the premises, the claim they support is the conclusion;
together they make an argument. 11

Philosophical arguments and justifications are another important part of

philosophical method. It is rare to find a philosopher, particularly in the
Western philosophical tradition, who lacks many arguments.
Philosophers are, or at least are expected to be, very good at giving
arguments. They constantly demand and offer arguments for different
claims they make. This therefore indicates that philosophy is a quest for
arguments.12

A good argument — a clear, organized, and sound statement of reasons

— may ultimately cure the original doubts that motivated us to take up
philosophy. If one is willing to be satisfied without any good supporting
reasons, then a Western philosophical approach may not be what one
13
actually requires.

10
id
11
id
12
id
13
id

Page 31
LET‘S PONDER

Which of the following statements are true? Write your explanation.

1. The sun is the centre of the solar system.

2. Boracay is the most beautiful island in the world.

3. God made the world in seven days.

4. Man has right to life, freedom and pursuit of happiness.

5. A person must always consider the happiness of his or her family

before her own happiness.

6. Citizens have the right to take arms and overthrow an oppressive

government

WHAT IS TRUTH AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

Truth, like knowledge, is surprisingly difficult to define. We seem to rely

on it almost every moment of every day and it's very "close" to us. Yet it's
difficult to define because as soon as you think you have it pinned down,
some case or counterexample immediately shows deficiencies.
Ironically, every definition of truth that philosophers have developed falls
prey to the question, "Is it true?"

Simply, we can define truth as: a statement about the way the world
actually is. We'll look at various theories below that philosophers have
considered but that's an adequate rough-and-ready definition to get us
started. Coming up with a definition of truth falls under the discipline of
epistemology or the study of knowledge though some philosophers
categorize it as a study in metaphysics--the study of what is real.

In this essay, we'll look at some reasons why defining truth can be
challenging. Truth seems like something we naturally comprehend and

Page 32
while intuition can help us a great deal in understanding what it is,
surface definitions present us with unique problems and I‘ll illustrate why.
I'll then lay out some terms and concepts that will help us get a better
handle on understanding what truth is. Next, we'll look at three main
views of truth. The coherence theory describes truth in terms of
interconnected belief. A belief is true if it is consistent with other beliefs
we have. The correspondence theory describes truth in terms of a
relation concepts or propositions have to the actual world. Finally
postmodernism lays out a view of truth in terms of individual perspectives
and community agreement. While this essay does not focus on practical
issues like why a view of truth is important, I'll say a few words about that
idea at the end and provide more resources for further reading.

Elusive Definition of Truth

I stated above that defining truth can be challenging. Let‘s briefly look at
why this is so by way of a seemingly simple example. Suppose you
examine an apple and determine that it‘s red, sweet, smooth and
crunchy. You might claim this is what the apple is. Put another way,
you've made truth claims about the apple and seemingly made
statements about real properties of the apple. But immediate problems
arise. Let's suppose your friend is color blind (this is unknown to you or
her) and when she looks at the apple, she says that the apple is a dull
greenish color. She also makes a truth claim about the color of the apple
but it's different than your truth claim. What color is the apple?

Well, you might respond, that's an easy problem to solve. It's actually red
because we've stipulated that your friend has an anomaly in her truth-
gathering equipment (vision) and even though we may not know she has
it, the fact that she does means her view of reality is incorrect. But now
let‘s suppose everyone is color blind and we all see "red" apples as
green? We can make this objection even stronger by asking how we
know that we all aren't in fact color blind in a way we don't understand
and apples really aren't red after all. No one has access to the ―real‖
color of the apple. Again, the response might be that that this is a
knowledge problem, not a truth problem. The apple really is red but we

Page 33
all believe it‘s green. But notice that the truth of the apple‘s color has little
role to play in what we believe. No one knows what the truth is and so it
plays no role in our epistemology.

The challenge is that our view of truth is very closely tied to our
perspective on what is true. This means that in the end, we may be able
to come up with a reasonable definition of truth, but if we decide that no
one can get to what is true (that is, know truth), what good is the
definition? Even more problematic is that our perspective will even
influence our ability to come up with a definition! These are no small
concerns and we'll explore some responses below.

Preliminaries: Truth and Meaning

Before we get to definitions of truth, we need to define some terms used

in those definitions which will make things a little easier to digest.
Epistemologists (people who study truth, belief and knowledge) use the
following concepts as the framework for their study of truth.

Propositions

A common technical definition of a proposition (credited to Peter van

Inwagen) is "a non-linguistic bearer of truth value." A proposition is a
representation of the world or a way the world could possibly be and
propositions are either true or false. Propositions are different than
sentences. Sentences are symbolic, linguistic representations of
propositions. Okay, that's all very technical. What does it mean?

Notice that the symbols themselves are neither true nor false. The
meaning the sentences represent is either true or false. Sentences are
symbolic representations of something else—propositions. The common
property true of all sentences that express the same truth is what
philosophers call the propositional content of the sentences or "the
proposition." Now we can better understand the idea behind "non-
linguistic bearer of truth value." Propositions are non-linguistic because
they aren't written or spoken in a language. They bear truth because they
are the things that are true or false. This is what allows them to be

Page 34
expressed or "exemplified" in a variety of different symbolic systems like
language-based sentences. When it comes to understanding truth, many
philosophers believe propositions are at the center.

Belief

Beliefs are things (at least) people have. They don't exist outside the
mind. Some philosophers say beliefs are "dispositional." That is, they
incline a person to behave in a way as if the thing they believe is true. So
a belief, simply, is a proposition that a person accepts as representing
the way the world actually is. Beliefs can be about false propositions and
thus be "wrong" because the person accepts them as true. This is a
critical distinction. While a proposition has to be true or false, beliefs can
be about true or false propositions even though a person always accepts
them as being true.

Some philosophers attempt to define truth "mind-independently." That

means, they want to come up with a definition that doesn't depend on
whether humans can actually believe or know what is true. Truth is
viewed as independent of our minds and they seek a definition of it that
captures this. Other philosophers have developed theories that keep
people at the center. That is, truth and belief are considered together and
are inseparable. I will try to make the relevance of the "epistemic" vs.
"independent" views of truth relevant below.

Knowledge

Knowledge is belief in a true proposition that a person is justified in

holding as true. The conditions under which a person is justified is
complicated and there are many theories about when the conditions are
met. Theories of knowledge attempt to describe when a person is in a
"right" cognitive relationship with true propositions. I describe some
theories of knowledge and some of the challenges in understanding
when a person knows in an article for Philosophy News called "What is
Knowledge?"

Common Definitions of Truth

Page 35
The Coherence View of Truth

The main idea behind this view is that a belief is true if it "coheres" or is
consistent with other things a person believes. For example, a fact a
person believes, say "grass is green" is true if that belief is consistent
with other things the person believes like the definition of green and
whether grass exists and the like. It also depends on the interpretation of
the main terms in those other beliefs. Suppose you‘ve always lived in a
region covered with snow and never saw grass or formed beliefs about
this strange plant life. The claim "grass is green" would not cohere with
other beliefs because you have no beliefs that include the concept
"grass." The claim, "grass is green" would be nonsense because it
contains a nonsensical term "grass." That is, you never formed a belief
about grass so there‘s nothing for this new belief to cohere with.

As you can see from the above description, coherence theories typically
are described in terms of beliefs. This puts coherence theories in the
"epistemic" view of truth camp noted above. This is because, coherence
theorists claim, we can only ground a given belief on other things we
believe. We cannot "stand outside" our own belief system to compare our
beliefs with the actual world. If I believe Booth shot Lincoln, I can only
determine if that belief is true based on other things I believe like
"Wikipedia provides accurate information" or "My professor knows history
and communicates it well" or "Uncle John sure was a scoundrel".

These are other beliefs and serve as a basis for my original belief. Thus
truth is essentially epistemic since any other model requires a type of
access to the "real world" we simply can't have. As philosopher Donald
Davidson describes the situation, "If coherence is a test of truth, there is
a direct connection with epistemology, for we have reason to believe
many of our beliefs cohere with many others, and in that case we have
reason to believe many of our beliefs are true." (Davidson, 2000)

Page 36
The Correspondence Theory of Truth

Arguably the more widely-held view of truth (stemming from a broader

rationalist tradition in philosophy), philosophers who argue for the
correspondence theory hold that there is a world external to our beliefs
that is somehow accessible to the human mind. More specifically,
correspondence theorists hold that there are a set of "truth-bearing"
representations (or propositions) about the world that align to or
correspond with reality or states of affairs in the world. A state of affairs
just is a particular way the world or reality is. When a proposition aligns
to the world, the proposition is said to be true. Truth, on this view, is that
correspondence relation.

Take this proposition: "The Seattle Seahawks won Super Bowl 48 in

2014." The proposition is true if in fact the Seahawks did win super Bowl
48 in 2014 (they did) and false if they didn't.

Page 37
Notice that on this view, propositions about reality are different from
beliefs we may have of reality. We believe propositions--I believe that the
moon has craters. What follows the "that" is meant to signify the
proposition that a person believes. So truth on this view is when the
proposition matches reality.

The correspondence theory only lays out the condition for truth in terms
of propositions and the way the world actually is. This definition does not
involve beliefs that people have. Propositions are true or false regardless
of whether anyone believes them. Just think of a proposition as a way
the world possibly could be: "The Seahawks won Super Bowl 48" or "The
Seahawks lost Super Bowl 48" -- both propositions possibly are true.
True propositions are those that correspond to what actually happened.

You'll notice that this definition does not include a belief component. That
is, unlike the coherence theory, the correspondence theory describes

Page 38
truth in terms that are independent of beliefs humans may have. This has
the distinct advantage of separating truth from the messy business of
belief and knowledge but may warrant complaints of being impractical.

Postmodernism and Truth

Postmodern thought covers a wide theoretical area but informs modern

epistemology particularly when it comes to truth. Postmodern theories of
truth are difficult to articulate in strict terms because postmodern
theorists tend to eschew hard and fast definitions. But we can provide
some insight here. Put in simple terms, postmodernists describe truth not
as a relationship outside of the human mind that we can align belief to
but as a product of belief. We never access reality because we can
never get outside our own beliefs to do so. Our beliefs function as filters
that keep reality (if such a thing exists) beyond us. Since we can never
access reality, it does no good to describe knowledge or truth in terms of
reality because there's nothing we can actually say about it that's
meaningful. Truth then is constructed by what we perceive and ultimately
believe.

Immanuel Kant

Kant was at the gateway of postmodern thought. He wasn't a

postmodernist himself but provided the framework for what later
developed.

Kant makes a foundational distinction between the "objects" of subjective

experience and the "objects" of "reality." He labels the former
phenomena and that latter noumena. The noumena for Kant are things in
themselves (ding an sich). These exist outside of and separate from the
mind. This is what we might call "reality" or actual states of affairs similar
to what we saw in the correspondence theory above. But for Kant, the
noumena are entirely unknowable in and of themselves. However, the
noumena give rise to the phenomena or are the occasion by which we
come to know the phenomena.

Page 39
The phenomena make up the world we know, the world "for us" (für uns).
This is the world of rocks, trees, books, tables, and any other objects we
access through the five senses. This is the world of our experience. This
world, however, does not exist apart from our experience. It is essentially
experiential. Kant expressed this idea as follows: the world as we know it
is "phenomenally real but transcendentally ideal." That is, things that we
believe exist in the world are a "real" part of our subjective experience
but they do not exist apart from that subjective experience and don't
transcend the ideas we have. The noumena are "transcendentally real"
or they exist in and of themselves but are never experienced directly or
even indirectly.

For example, suppose you look at an apple. You see a specific shape
and color. You can pick it up and feel its weight and bite into it and taste
that it‘s sort of sweet and maybe a bit sour. These all are your
experiences of the apple. Kant suggests that these experiences do not
tell us much about the ‗real‘ apple. After all, how could we know that our
experience is of the real apple? Perhaps another person would see a
slightly different color when she looks at the apple. Or if you just had
something very sweet, the apple will taste more sour but if you had
something very sour, the apple might taste more sweet. So what is the
‗real‘ flavor of the apple? Kant (and postmodernists in general) would say
that this isn‘t a good question since we can never get beyond our
subjective experience to answer it. Rather, we can say that the
phenomena—the colors, shapes, and taste—that we experience is for us
and very real for us. But we can‘t get beyond (transcend) that subjective
experience. Instead, we should describe the apple in just those terms. I
can say, ―The apple tastes sweet to me." But I can‘t really say, ―The
apple is sweet.‖ since it‘s not possible to actually know anything beyond
subjective experience.

The noumena are given form and shape by what Kant described as
categories of the mind and this 'ordering' gives rise to phenomenal
objects. This is where it relates to truth: phenomenal objects are not
analogues, copies, representations or any such thing of the noumena.
The noumena gives rise to the phenomena but in no way resembles

Page 40
them. Scholars have spent countless hours trying to understand Kant on
this point since it seems like the mind interacts with the noumena in
some way. But Kant does seem to be clear that the mind never
experiences the noumena directly and the phenomena in no way
represents the noumena.

We can now see the beginnings of postmodern thought. If we

understand the noumena as ―reality‖ and the phenomena as the world
we experience, we can see that we never get past our experience to
reality itself. It's not like a photograph which represents a person and by
seeing the photograph we can have some understanding of what the
"real person" actually looks like. Rather (to use an admittedly clumsy
example) it's like being in love. We can readily have the experience and
we know the brain is involved but we have no idea how it works. By
experiencing the euphoria of being in love, we learn nothing about how
the brain works.

On this view then, what is truth? Abstractly we might say truth is found in
the noumena since that's reality. But postmodernists have taken Kant's
idea further and argued that since we can't say anything about the
noumena, why bother with it at all? Kant didn‘t provided a good reason to

Page 41
believe the noumena exists but seems to have asserted its existence
because, after all, something was needed to give rise to the phenomena.
Postmodernists just get rid of this extra baggage and focus solely on
what we experience.

Perspective and Truth

Further, everyone's experience of the world is a bit different--we all have

different life experiences, background beliefs, personalities and
dispositions, and even genetics that shape our view of the world. This
makes it impossible, say the postmodernists to declare an "absolute
truth" about much of anything since our view of the world is a product of
our individual perspective. Some say that our worldview makes up a set
of lenses or a veil through which we interpret everything and we can't
remove those lenses. Interpretation and perspective are key ideas in
postmodern thought and are contrasted with "simple seeing" or a purely
objective view of reality--something postmodernists reject as impossible.

We only have interconnected beliefs and for each individual, that's what
truth is. We can see some similarities here to the coherence theory of
truth with its web of interconnected and mutually supported beliefs. But
where the coherence theory holds that coherence among beliefs gives
us reason to hold that what we believe corresponds to some external
reality, postmodernists reject that. In postmodernism there is nothing for
our beliefs to correspond to or if there is, our beliefs never get beyond
the limits of our minds to enable us to make any claims about that reality.

Community Agreement

Postmodernism differs from radical subjectivism (truth is centered only in

what an individual experiences) by allowing that there might be
"community agreement" for some truth claims. The idea is that two or
more people may be able to agree on a particular truth claim and form a
shared agreement that a given proposition is true. To be clear, it's not
true because they agree it maps or corresponds to reality. But since the
group all agree that a given proposition or argument works in some
practical way, or has explanatory power (seems to explain some

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particular thing), or has strong intuitive force for them, they can use this
shared agreement to form a knowledge community.

When you think about it, this is how things tend to work. A scientist
discovers something she takes to be true and writes a paper explaining
why she thinks it's true. Other scientists read her paper, run their own
experiments and either validate her claims or are unable to invalidate her
claims. These scientists then declare the theory "valid" or "significant" or
give it some other stamp of approval. In most cases, this does not mean
the theory is immune from falsification or to being disproved--it's not
absolute. It just means that the majority of the scientific community that
have studied the theory agree that it‘s true given what they currently
understand. This shared agreement creates a communal "truth" for those
scientists. This is what led Richard Rorty to state the oft-quoted phrase,
"Truth is what my colleagues will let me get away with."

Truth in Real Life

Philosophers are supposed to love wisdom and wisdom is more oriented

towards the practical than the theoretical. This article has been largely
about a theoretical view of truth so how do we apply it? Most people
don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about what truth is but tend to get
by in the world without that understanding. That's probably because the
world seems to impose itself on us rather than being subject to some
theory we might come up with about how it has to operate. We all need
food, water and shelter, meaning, friendship, and some purpose that
compels us to get out of bed in the morning. This is a kind of practical
truth that is not subject to the fluidity of philosophical theory.

Even so, we all contend with truth claims on a daily basis. We have to
make decisions about what matters. Maybe you're deeply concerned
about politics and what politicians are claiming or what policy should be
supported or overturned. Perhaps you care about which athlete should
be traded or whether you should eat meat or support the goods
produced by a large corporation. You may want to know if God exists
and if so, which one. You probably care what your friends or loved ones

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are saying and whether you can count on them or invest in their
relationship. In each of these cases, you will apply a theory of truth
whether you realize it or not and so a little reflection on what you think
about truth will be important.

Your view of truth will impact how you show up at work and impacts the
decisions you make about how to raise your children or deal with a
conflict. For example, suppose you're faced with a complex question at
work about something you're responsible for. You need to decide
whether to ship a product or do more testing. If you're a postmodernist,
your worldview may cause you to be more tentative about the
conclusions you're drawing about the product's readiness because you
understand that your interpretation of the facts you have about the
product may be clouded by your own background beliefs. Because of
this, you may seek more input or seek more consensus before you move
forward. You may find yourself silently scoffing at your boss who makes
absolute decisions about the "right" way to move forward because you
believe there is no "right" way to do much of anything. There's just each
person's interpretation of what is right and whoever has the loudest voice
or exerts the most force wins.

An engineer may disagree here. She may argue, as an example, that

there is a "right" way to build an airplane and a lot of wrong ways and
years of aviation history documents both. Here is an instance where the
world imposes itself on us: airplanes built with wings and that follow
specific rules of aerodynamics fly and machines that don't follow those
"laws" don't. Further most of us would rather fly in airplanes built by
engineers that have more of a correspondence view of truth. We want to
believe that the engineers that built the plane we're in understand
aerodynamics and built a plane that corresponds with the propositions
that make up the laws of aerodynamics.

Your view of truth matters. You may be a correspondence theorist when

it comes to airplanes but a postmodernist when it comes to ethics or
politics. But why hold different views of truth for different aspects of your
life? This is where a theory comes in. As you reflect on the problems

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posed by airplanes and ethics, the readiness of your product to be
delivered to consumers and the readiness of your child to be loosed
upon the world, about what makes you happy and about your
responsibility to your fellow man, you will develop a theory of truth that
will help you navigate these situations with more clarity and
consistency.14

YOU KNOW WHAT?

Facts – contains ideas or information that are easily verifiable

Opinions – statements go beyond providing facts, provides conclusions

or perspectives regarding certain situations. These also provides bases
for making arguments and convincing people that a certain claim is a
fact.

Conclusion – judgement based on certain facts.

Beliefs – statements that expresses conviction that are not easily and
clearly explained by facts.

Explanations – statements that assume the claim to be true and provide

reasons why the statement is true.

Arguments – series of statements that provides reasons to convince the

reader or listener that a claim or opinion is truthful.

PLATO‘S CAVE

‗The Allegory of The Cave‘ by Plato: Summary and Meaning

The ‗Allegory Of The Cave‘ is a theory put forward by Plato, concerning

human perception. Plato claimed that knowledge gained through the
senses is no more than opinion and that, in order to have real
knowledge, we must gain it through philosophical reasoning.

14
https://www.philosophynews.com/post/2015/01/29/What-is-Truth.aspx

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The Allegory of the Cave‘ by Plato

In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato distinguishes between people who

mistake sensory knowledge for the truth and people who really do see
the truth. It goes like this:

The Cave

Imagine a cave, in which there are three prisoners. The prisoners are
tied to some rocks, their arms and legs are bound and their head is tied
so that they cannot look at anything but the stonewall in front of them.

These prisoners have been here since birth and have never seen outside
of the cave.

Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between them is a raised walkway.

People outside the cave walk along this walkway carrying things on their
head including; animals, plants, wood and stone.

The Shadows

So, imagine that you are one of the prisoners. You cannot look at
anything behind or to the side of you – you must look at the wall in front
of you.

When people walk along the walkway, you can see shadows of the
objects they are carrying cast on to the wall.

If you had never seen the real objects ever before, you would believe
that the shadows of objects were ‗real.

The Game

Plato suggests that the prisoners would begin a ‗game‘ of guessing

which shadow would appear next.

If one of the prisoners were to correctly guess, the others would praise
him as clever and say that he were a master of nature.

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The Escape

One of the prisoners then escapes from their bindings and leaves the
cave.

He is shocked at the world he discovers outside the cave and does not
believe it can be real.

As he becomes used to his new surroundings, he realizes that his former

view of reality was wrong.

He begins to understand his new world, and sees that the Sun is the
source of life and goes on an intellectual journey where he discovers
beauty and meaning

He sees that his former life, and the guessing game they played is
useless.

The Return

The prisoner returns to the cave, to inform the other prisoners of his
findings.

They do not believe him and threaten to kill him if he tries to set them
free.

The Allegory of The Cave‘ by Plato – The Meaning

The Allegory of the cave by Plato should not be taken at face value. In
essays and exams, whoever is marking it expects you to have a deeper
understanding of the meaning of the theory. You can then use these to
think about criticisms and then to form your own opinion.

The Cave

In Plato‘s theory, the cave represents people who believe that knowledge
comes from what we see and hear in the world – empirical evidence. The

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cave shows that believers of empirical knowledge are trapped in a ‗cave‘
of misunderstanding.

The Shadows

The Shadows represent the perceptions of those who believe empirical

evidence ensures knowledge. If you believe that what you see should be
taken as truth, then you are merely seeing a shadow of the truth. In
Plato‘s opinion you are a ‗pleb‘ if you believe this (their insult for those
who are not Philosophers)!

The Game

The Game represents how people believe that one person can be a
‗master‘ when they have knowledge of the empirical world. Plato is
demonstrating that this master does not actually know any truth, and
suggesting that it is ridiculous to admire someone like this.

The Escape

The escaped prisoner represents the Philosopher, who seeks knowledge

outside of the cave and outside of the senses.

The Sun represents philosophical truth and knowledge

His intellectual journey represents a philosophers journey when finding

truth and wisdom

The Return

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The other prisoners reaction to the escapee returning represents that
people are scared of knowing philosophical truths and do not trust
philosophers.15

KINDS OF FALLACIES

Logical fallacies are flawed, deceptive, or false arguments that can be

proven wrong with reasoning. These are the most common fallacies you
should know about.

Arguments and debates are an important part of college and academic

discourse. But not every argument is perfect. Some can be picked apart
because they have errors in reasoning and rhetoric. These are called
"logical fallacies," and they're very common.

You'll hear logical fallacies in the classroom, during televised debates,

and in arguments with your friends. It can even be challenging to avoid
using them yourself.

1.Ad Hominem

An ad hominem fallacy uses personal attacks rather than logic. This

fallacy occurs when someone rejects or criticizes another point of view
based on the personal characteristics, ethnic background, physical
appearance, or other non-relevant traits of the person who holds it.

Ad hominem arguments are often used in politics, where they are often
called "mudslinging." They are considered unethical because politicians
can use them to manipulate voters' opinions against an opponent without
addressing core issues.

Study Tool

See if you can tell which of these is an ad hominem argument and which
is just an insult.

15
https://www.philosophyzer.com/the-allegory-of-the-cave-by-plato-
summary-and-meaning/

Page 49
EXAMPLE 1

"MacDougal roots for a British football team. Clearly he's unfit to be a

police chief in Ireland."

EXAMPLE 2

"All people from Crete are liars."

2. Straw Man

A straw man argument attacks a different subject rather than the topic
being discussed — often a more extreme version of the counter
argument. The purpose of this misdirection is to make one's position look
stronger than it actually is.

The straw man argument is appropriately named after a harmless,

lifeless scarecrow. Instead of contending with the actual argument, they
attack the equivalent of a lifeless bundle of straw — an easily defeated
puppet that the opponent was never arguing for in the first place.

Study Tool

See if you can detect how both of the following statements could qualify
as strawmen arguments.

EXAMPLE 1

"The Senator thinks we can solve all our ecological problems by driving a
Prius."

EXAMPLE 2

"Quite the contrary: The Senator thinks the environment is such a wreck
that no one's car choice or driving habits would make the slightest
difference."

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—
3. Appeal to Ignorance

An appeal to ignorance (also known as an "argument from ignorance")

argues that a proposition must be true because it has not been proven
false or there is no evidence against it.

The argument can be used to bolster multiple contradictory conclusions

at once, such as the following two claims:

 "No one has ever been able to prove that extraterrestrials exist,
so they must not be real."

 "No one has ever been able to prove that extraterrestrials do not
exist, so they must be real."

An appeal to ignorance doesn't prove anything. Instead, it shifts the need

for proof away from the person making a claim.

Study Tool

Which of the following examples is an appeal to ignorance?

EXAMPLE 1

"We have no evidence that the Illuminati ever existed. They must have
been so clever that they destroyed all the evidence."

EXAMPLE 2

"I know nothing about Tank Johnson except that he has a criminal record
as long as your leg, but I'll bet he's really just misunderstood."

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4. False Dilemma/False Dichotomy

A false dilemma or false dichotomy presents limited options — typically

by focusing on two extremes — when in fact more possibilities exist. The
phrase "America: Love it or leave it" is an example of a false dilemma.

The false dilemma fallacy is a manipulative tool designed to polarize the

audience, promoting one side and demonizing another. It's common in
political discourse as a way of strong-arming the public into supporting
controversial legislation or policies.

Study Tool

See if you can come up with a third option that these examples failed to
mention.

EXAMPLE 1

"Either we go to war or we appear weak."

EXAMPLE 2

"Either you love me or you hate me."

—
5. Slippery Slope

A slippery slope argument assumes that a certain course of action will

necessarily lead to a chain of future events. The slippery slope fallacy
takes a benign premise or starting point and suggests that it will lead to
unlikely or ridiculous outcomes with no supporting evidence.

You may have used this fallacy on your parents as a teenager: "But you
have to let me go to the party! If I don't go to the party, I'll be a loser with
no friends. Next thing you know, I'll end up alone and jobless, living in
your basement when I'm 30!"

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Study Tool

Which of these examples is a slippery slope fallacy and which is not?

EXAMPLE 1

"Your coach's policy is that no one can be a starter on game day if they
miss practice. So if you miss basketball practice today, you won't be a
starter in Friday's game. Then you won't be the first freshman to start on
the varsity basketball team at our school."

EXAMPLE 2

"If you miss practice, it means you were probably goofing off. People
who goof off drop out of school and end up penniless."

—
6. Circular Argument

Circular arguments occur when a person's argument repeats what they

already assumed before without arriving at a new conclusion. For
example, if someone says, "According to my brain, my brain is reliable,"
that's a circular argument.

Circular arguments often use a claim as both a premise and a

conclusion. This fallacy only appears to be an argument when in fact it's
just restating one's assumptions.

Study Tool

See if you can identify which of these is a circular argument.

EXAMPLE 1

"Smoking pot is against the law because it's wrong; I know it's wrong
because it is against the law."

EXAMPLE 2

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"Smoking pot is against the law; this leads many to believe it is wrong."

—
7. Hasty Generalization

A hasty generalization is a claim based on a few examples rather than

substantial proof. Arguments based on hasty generalizations often don't
hold up due to a lack of supporting evidence: The claim might be true in
one case, but that doesn't mean it's always true.

Hasty generalizations are common in arguments because there's a wide

range of what's acceptable for "sufficient" evidence. The rules for
evidence can change based on the claim you're making and the
environment where you are making it — whether it's rooted in
philosophy, the sciences, a political debate, or discussing house rules for
using the kitchen.

Study Tool

Which of the following is a hasty generalization?

EXAMPLE 1

"Some people vote without seriously weighing the merits of the

candidate."

EXAMPLE 2

"People nowadays only vote with their emotions instead of their brains."

—
8. Red Herring

A red herring is an argument that uses confusion or distraction to shift

attention away from a topic and toward a false conclusion. Red herrings
usually contain an unimportant fact, idea, or event that has little
relevance to the real issue.

Page 54
Red herrings are a common diversionary tactic when someone wants to
shift the focus of an argument to something easier or safer to address.
But red herrings can also be unintentional.

Study Tool

Which of the following examples is a red herring fallacy?

EXAMPLE 1

"My roommate wants to talk about cleaning out the garage, so I asked
her what she wants to do with our patio furniture. Now she's shopping for
new patio furniture and not asking me about the garage."

EXAMPLE 2

"My wife wants to talk about cleaning out the garage, so I asked her what
she wants to do with the patio furniture, because it's just sitting in the
garage taking up space."

—
9. Appeal to Hypocrisy

An appeal to hypocrisy — also known as the tu quoque fallacy —

focuses on the hypocrisy of an opponent. The tu quoque fallacy deflects
criticism away from oneself by accusing the other person of the same
problem or something comparable.

The tu quoque fallacy is an attempt to divert blame. The fallacy usually

occurs when the arguer uses apparent hypocrisy to neutralize criticism
and distract from the issue.

Study Tool

Which of the following is an appeal to hypocrisy?

Page 55
EXAMPLE 1

"But, Dad, I know you smoked when you were my age, so how can you
tell me not to do it?"

EXAMPLE 2

"Son, yes, I smoked when I was your age. It was dumb then and it's
dumb now. That's why I forbid you to smoke, chew, vape, use nicotine
gum, or do whatever you kids do with tobacco these days."

—
10. Causal Fallacy

Causal fallacies are informal fallacies that occur when an argument

incorrectly concludes that a cause is related to an effect. Think of the
causal fallacy as a parent category for other fallacies about unproven
causes.

One example is the false cause fallacy, which is when you draw a
conclusion about what the cause was without enough evidence to do so.
Another is the post hoc fallacy, which is when you mistake something for
the cause because it came first — not because it actually caused the
effect.

Study Tool

Which kind of causal fallacy is at work in these examples?

EXAMPLE 1

"Jimmy isn't at school today. He must be on a family trip."

EXAMPLE 2

"Every time a rooster crows, the sun comes up. Crows must be the
creators of the universe."

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—
11. Sunk Cost

A sunk cost fallacy is when someone continues doing something

because of the effort they already put in it, regardless of whether the
additional costs outweigh the potential benefits. "Sunk cost" is an
economic term for any past expenses that can no longer be recovered.

For example: Imagine that after watching the first six episodes of a TV
show, you decide the show isn't for you. Those six episodes are your
"sunk cost." A sunk cost fallacy would be deciding to finish watching
anyway because you've already invested roughly six hours of your life in
it.

Study Tool

Which of these is a sunk cost fallacy and which is not?

EXAMPLE 1

"I know this relationship isn't working anymore and that we're both
miserable. No marriage. No kids. No steady job. But I've been with him
for seven years, so I'd better stay with him."

EXAMPLE 2

"I'm halfway done with college. This is so tough, and it's not nearly as fun
as I thought it would be, but I don't know. I guess I'll finish it and get my
degree."

—
12. Appeal to Authority

Appeal to authority is the misuse of an authority's opinion to support an

argument. While an authority's opinion can represent evidence and data,
it becomes a fallacy if their expertise or authority is overstated,
illegitimate, or irrelevant to the topic.

Page 57
For example, citing a foot doctor when trying to prove something related
to psychiatry would be an appeal to authority fallacy.

Study Tool

How do these statements mishandle authorities?

EXAMPLE 1

"Because Martin Sheen played the president on television, he'd probably

make a great president in real life."

EXAMPLE 2

"One day robots will enslave us all. It's true. My computer science
teacher says so."

—
13. Equivocation

Equivocation happens when a word, phrase, or sentence is used

deliberately to confuse, deceive, or mislead. In other words, saying one
thing but meaning another.

When it's poetic or comical, we call this a "play on words." But when it's
done in a political speech, an ethics debate, or an economics report —
and it's designed to make the audience think you're saying something
you're not — that's when it becomes a fallacy.

Study Tool

How does each of these examples commit an equivocation fallacy?

EXAMPLE 1

"His political party wants to spend your precious tax dollars on big
government. But my political party is planning strategic federal
investment in critical programs."

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EXAMPLE 2

"I don't understand why you're saying I broke a promise. I said I'd never
speak to my ex-girlfriend again. And I didn't. I just sent her some pictures
and text messages."

—
14. Appeal to Pity

An appeal to pity relies on provoking your emotions to win an argument

rather than factual evidence. Appealing to pity attempts to pull on an
audience's heartstrings, distract them, and support their point of view.

Someone accused of a crime using a cane or walker to appear more

feeble in front of a jury is one example of appeal to pity. The appearance
of disability isn't an argument on the merits of the case, but it's intended
to sway the jury's opinion anyway.

Study Tool

Which of these is a fallacious appeal to emotion and which one is not?

EXAMPLE 1

"Professor, you have to give me an A on this paper. I know I only turned

in a sentence and some clip art, but you have to understand, my
grandmother suddenly died while traveling in the Northern Yukon, and
her funeral was there so I had to travel, and my parents got divorced in
the middle of the ceremony, and all the stress caused me to become
catatonic for two weeks. Have some pity — my grandmother's last wish
was that I'd get an A in this class."

EXAMPLE 2

"Professor, I know this work was subpar, and I feel pretty bad about it. I'd
like to schedule a meeting with you to discuss how I can do better on our
next assignment."

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—
15. Bandwagon Fallacy

The bandwagon fallacy assumes something is true (or right or good)

because others agree with it. In other words, the fallacy argues that if
everyone thinks a certain way, then you should, too.

One problem with this kind of reasoning is that the broad acceptance of a
claim or action doesn't mean that it's factually justified. People can be
mistaken, confused, deceived, or even willfully irrational in their opinions,
so using them to make an argument is flawed.

Study Tool

Which of these is a bandwagon fallacy?

EXAMPLE 1

"Almost everyone at my school will be at the party Friday night. It must

be a popular thing to do."

EXAMPLE 2

"Almost everyone at my school will be at the party Friday night. It must

be the right thing to do."16

16
https://thebestschools.org/magazine/15-logical-fallacies-know/

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 MODULE III:HUMAN PERSON AS AN EMBODIED SPIRIT

Terms related to human person:

Man – general term used to refer to entire human race.

Human – refers to man as a species Homo Sapiens or modern human

beings

Human being - is a term used to distinguish man from other animals.

Person – much complex term which generally refers to a human being

granted recognition of certain rights, protection, responsibilities and
above all, dignity.

Personhood – refers to the state of being as person.

Human Nature refers to the characteristics that distinguish humans from

all other creatures

What is a human person?

The most basic definition of a human being relates to the nature of

humans as animals. Philosophers however, believe that the human
being is just not mere an animal. There is something in the human
individual that sets him or her apart from other beings. These special
traits makes a human a distinct individual person.

What is Human Being?

Embodied spirit is the living animating core within each of us, the driving
force behind all that we think, say and do.

Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies -- all these are private and, except
through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool
information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves.
From family to nation, every human group is a society of island
universes.

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Human Being as an Embodied Spirit

What is Embodied Spirit?

"Every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude"

The human being is a complex matter and many believe that just trying
to understand life and what it means to be human is a futile undertaking.

--by Aldous Huxley

A human person is an embodied spirit (a "soul") whose nature has

numerous bodily, affective, cognitive, volitional and gender capacities,
the expression of which may lead by freedom to flourishing in a harmony
with one's nature or dysfunction against one's nature, ultimately shaped
by and finding their relational telos in the love of neighbor and union with
God, relationships made possibly by our nature but realized only by the
ministry of the indwelling Spirit of God.

For St. Thomas: his own total vision of man would be

A human being is by nature a finite embodied spirit, in search of the

Infinite, in social solidarity with its fellow human beings, on an historical
journey through this material cosmos towards its final trans-worldly goal,
a loving union with God as the infinite fullness of all goodness.

For Aristotle:

A human person is a personal being possessing its intellectual nature as

joined in a natural unity with a material body.

This unity called "man" as "a rational animal."

Conclusion

The Human Being as an Embodied Spirit is one which is expressed fully,

shining for all the world to see. It is our right and responsibility to give our

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Spirit its fullest expression in this body. The opportunity to become
embodied and whole begins at birth and continues throughout life.

A human being is a biosocial being and represents the highest level of

development of all living organisms on earth, the subject of labour, of the
social forms of life, communication and consciousness.

1. The Human Person as an Embodied Spirit

Man is an important subject in Philosophy & an understanding of the

nature and condition of man is the foremost goal of the discipline.

The word man is a general term w/c is commonly used to refer to the
entire human race.

Other related terms include humanity, mankind & humankind

The word human refers to man as a species – homo sapiens

sapiens[modern human beings]

Persons is a much more complex term w/c generally refers to a human

being granted recognition of certain rights, protection and
responsibilities.

As w/ any major philosophical question, the concepts of man and human

nature are much-discussed and highly debated among philosophers and
scientists. From these discussions & debates, various perspectives have
emerge regarding the nature of man.

ɸ View on the nature of Man

Biological Perspective

 Considers man as a part of the natural world & a product of

evolution

 Modern humans [homo sapiens sapiens] – are considered one of

the most successfully adapted species on the planet

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  Humans also share w/ other animals the so-called primal
instincts such as the instincts for survival & reproduction

 Human have progressed & developed additional traits and

capabilities such as the capacity for

a) planning & intentional action

b) Innovation & creativity

c) Communication through language & writing

d) Technology

e) Symbolic interaction as evidenced by religion & art

 Culture is considered man‘s most significant achievement w/c

sets apart the evolution of humanity from other species on this
planet

Psychological Perspective

 Places emphasis on human behavior & thought processes in

analyzing human nature

 Man possesses mental faculties that enable him to possess

awareness, a sense of self, & the capacity to perceive and
experience

 The significant mental faculties & capabilities of man include:

a. The psyche – refers to the human mind & is divided into the
conscious & unconscious mind

- Conscious mind is the part w/c governs awareness

- Unconscious mind consists of latent or repressed

emotions, thoughts & desires

Page 64
b. rationality – or the state of being reasonable, the ability to understand
experiences in order to solve problems or do tasks, and engage in
decision making and judgment.

c. Intelligence – or the ability to perceive information, store knowledge,

and apply it in various situations

d. introspection – or the ability to examine one‘s own

conscious thoughts, feelings, and mental state, and
the capacity for self-reflection.

Economic Perspective

 Focuses on man‘s ability to engage in productive activities in an

effort to meet wants & needs

 This perspective emerged in the 19 th century and places

emphasis on the ―economic man‖ [homo economicus] – who is
driven by rationality and self-interest in his desire to possess
wealth.

 It considers man as a productive being – his primary role is to

produce & engage in labor

 Economic forces are considered a greater influence on the

actions of man than society or culture

Theological Perspective

 Considers man as God‘s creation

 Man is considered to have a special relationship w/ the Creator,

being created in His image & given an immortal spirit

 Man‘s existence was brought about by the purposive creative act

of God, and his ultimate destiny is part of a divine plan

ɸ Proposed certain views as to its nature of the self

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The self as Innate

 The self is an essential part of the human being and self-

awareness is natural & innate

One of the most unique traits of humans is the awareness of self. Like all
other animals, human beings possess sentience – the ability to feel &
experience. Sentience is often seen as the ability to perceive
surroundings & react to stimulus such as pain. However, we humans not
only experience and react to the world around us. We are also able to
look into ourselves and be aware of our distinctness and uniqueness.

 Religious views consider the concept of self as synonymous to

the spirit or soul

The self as Emergent

 Holds that awareness of the self is gained through interaction w/

the world & other human beings

The self as Integrated and Developing

 Holds that the self is composed of varied elements that change

over time

Varied notions w/c justify the recognition of personhood

The person as an ―Autonomous being‖

 A human being is considered a person if he or she possesses

the ability to determine his her life through ―reasoned free
choice‖

 This view assumes that man possess reason, the capacity for
reflection and the ability to engage in decision making

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  Tis perspective is a major influence in determining the legal
definition of a human ―person‖ and the conventional concept of
an ―adult‖

The concept of the self is closely tied w/ the ideas of identity &
personhood.

● Identity – is defined as the distinct personality of an individual

Personal identity is composed of a person‘s unique physical

characteristics, mental attributes, experiences, memories, ideas, and
views. Identity is said to persist through time, though certain aspects of it
may change.

● Personhood – is the recognition of a human person as a distinct

entity – a person

The person as a ―unified individual‖

 The human being has the inherent capacity to function as a

person.

 It emphasizes the potential of the human being & recognizes that

each human possesses the means to achieve his her capabilities

 On this perspective – disable people, the unborn fetus, infants,

and children are recognized as persons although they may not
fully possess the cognitive faculties of an adult.

The Person in Relation to others

 Asserts that a human being becomes a person through

interactions w/ other human beings

 Remove him/her from society and he/she ceases to become a

person

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 Karol Wojtyla [Pope John Paull II] asserts that the person is
defined by his/her actions and experiences, and through them
achieves self-development and fulfillment.

 There may be situations where a human being may not be

recognized as a person. For instance, people suffering from
debilitating conditions that impair their judgment may lack the
means to make decisions for themselves. A person who suffers
extensive brain damage or a comatose individual may not be
recognized as persons and thus other may be empowered to
make decisions on their behalf.

 Throughout history, there have been instances where certain

groups of people have not been recognized as persons. In
ancient times, slaves were considered property. Women were
also not granted recognition as persons during most of the
ancient period. In ancient Greece, for example, women were not
considered citizens and had limited roles in society and
government.

 It was only in the late 19th century that women were given the
right to vote and participate in government.

 There instances that the concept of ―person‖ is extended to other

entities aside from human beings. In legal circles, organizations
and corporations may be granted personhood as they are given
certain rights and may take action in court to protect their
interests

 Still, personhood remains largely applied to human beings.

 The concept of the human person is especially important in law

& politics as it is closely tied to the concept of civil liberties and
rights.

 Being Human is to be aware of two specific elements:

Page 68
  1. Being a body as object.

 2. Being a soul as subject.

 The body

 Has passive desires.

 Sets limitations on life-projects.

 The soul

 The seat of freedom

 Can transcends bodily limitations.

Man as Entanglement

 In realizations, one is an entanglement of body and soul.

 One is expected to struggle between these two

elements.

 One must also accept that we cannot fully control the

world around us.

 Being able to resolve and harmonize the directions of

both the body and soul leads to the realization of
ourselves as ―embodied, free, rational, creative, moral
and finite.‖

Man is Determined

How?

 Cultural

 Political

 Religious

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  Sociological

Though he is determined by them, he is free to transcend and reinvent

what is ‗determined.‘

 Understanding what it means to be human is dependent on the

exchanges between the transcendent capacity known as the
voluntary soul and determined, involuntary body.

 One views human consciousness connected with the

body.

 Man‘s voluntary will is bounded and entangled

by the limitations of an involuntary body.

 The voluntary element is thus ―fundamentally

reciprocal‖ with the involuntary element, the
involuntary serving as a ―vehicle for the will.‖

The Soul as the Essence of the Human Person

Plato and Aristotle accepted the distinction between the body and soul,
but made the soul as the true essence of the human person

Plato

 The true essence of the person according to Plato was

already present, prior to having a body.

 His previous existence was in the ―world of forms.‖

 The soul taking on a human body was deemed an

accident that imprisons a ―free and pure soul.‖

 For Plato, the human person and its source of

movement ultimately derive from the soul.

 The soul is divisible into three distinct parts:

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  1. Reason

 2. Spirit

 3. Desire

Reason

 Reason, the seat of the mind and the intellect, is the

conscious part of the soul.

 It allows the human person to provide the distinction

between the real and the false.

 It is expected to consider and perform wise

decisions which make life properly lived.

Spirit and Desire

 Spirit is in charge of the motivation of the human person to

action.

 Its expected function is to carry out the dictates of

reason in day-to-day living.

 Desire, also known as emotion or appetite, is the part of the

human person that desires bodily pleasure.

 Desire and bodily pleasure is regulated by reason and is

deferred at certain times to achieve appropriate pursuits.

Phaedrus‘ Chariot and Morality and Virtue

 In Plato‘s Phaedrus the rational soul is characterized as a

charioteer whose chariot is driven by two horses: an unruly
horse, and a disciplined and obedient horse.

 The unruly horse characterizes desire.

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  The obedient horse characterizes spirit.

 In respect to morality, Plato would utilize his theory on the soul

as its basis.

 Morality and virtue are special states of the soul.

 For Plato, there are three main sources of motivation or

desire:

 1. Satisfying one‘s instincts.

 2. Preservation

 3. Understanding and truth

 These sources of motivation have some ability to affect one‘s

moral decisions.

 Example: The Thirsty Man

 A very thirsty man is wandering through the desert and

sees a pool of water.

 As he comes closer, he sees a sign that states that the

water is poisonous.

 Upon viewing the sign, the man enters a state of conflict

within his soul.

 Desire says to drink, but reason says not to.

 Reason says that partaking of the water will worsen his

situation and so he employs spirit to overcome his
desire.

 Spirit however, can go either way depending on the pull between

the two forces.

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  Though the soul should be prior in importance than the body, the
body is heavily influenced by the world of the senses and is more
influenced than the world of forms.

Aristotle: ―The soul cannot exist without a body.‖

 Aristotle agrees that the soul is the essence of the human

person.

 It functions as the principle of actuality, the source of

movement, and is also known as the form of the living
thing.

 However, the body is seen as important to the living thing and is

inseparable to the soul.

 ―The soul cannot exist without a body‖ though it is not

itself a body.

 [Notice that for Plato, the soul existed without a body

and entered it. So, it can exist without a body for Plato]

 The soul for Aristotle, is something which ―belongs to‖

and ―exists in‖ a body of a specific kind.

Three Levels of Soul

 There are three kinds of souls and their functions

1. Nutritive soul - growth and nutrition; belonging to plants

2. Sensitive soul - locomotion and perception; belonging to

animals

3. Rational soul - thinking; belonging to human beings

 The three souls are presented in a hierarchy from the one having
the most functions or powers at the top and the least functions at
the bottom.

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 1. Plant Soul - Growth, Decay, Reproduction, Nutrition

2. Animal Soul - Growth, Decay, Reproduction, Nutrition,

Locomotion, Sensation

3. Human Soul - Growth, Decay, Reproduction, Nutrition,

Locomotion, Sensation, Reason

Reason, Excellence, Virtue and Happiness

 For the Human Soul, adjustment to reason is what deems such a

person with excellence and virtue.

 Aristotle‘s theory of soul is very significant to his ethics.

 The pursuit of happiness (the good life which is the

target of ethics) must be in line with what it means to be
a Human Soul.

 What is happiness?

 The highest good.

 ―Proper to the nature of the person.‖

 An essential possibility.

 Man can only attain happiness by performing what is his function

- Reason.

 Non-rational activity is neither proper nor, ―within the

human person‘s control.‖

It is not easy to partake of the life of Nous

 What is rational to the human person or shall we say proper role

of reason is finding the mean in situations under the duress of
emotions, habits or one‘s usual way of going about.

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  To be good is also difficult since it is not easy to find the middle
of every action or what is proper to the situation.

 ―The best activity of the soul therefore must be the one that
activates whatever is best in us.

 It is the one that incorporates the levels of nutrition and

reproduction, sensation, and reason. At the very peak is nous or
mind; the non-passive, purely active source of knowledge and
wisdom.

 The best is the activity of the nous, the highest good and also the
greatest happiness for a human being.‖

Interference

 Though there are expectations of man to ―perform virtuous acts,‖

people may do not do so at all times.

 The soul is again connected with the body, and the body
interferes with the project of reason.

Human Possibility for Fallibility

 The body and the will are not without gaps or spaces. [is not
seamless]

 We exist dialectically.

 We are free, yet constrained in boundaries that are

beyond our control.

 People have a ―certain character along with an

unconscious mind that defies their will.‖

 ―The human being which is supposed to be the unified

locus of the voluntary and the involuntary appears
instead as the intermediary of its antinomical structure -

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 ‗suspended between a pole of infinitude and a pole of
finitude.‘‖

 This makes fallibility for the human being possible.

Fallibility: Knowing, Acting, and Feeling

 Fallibility is the manifestation that allows evil to come in

as ―a fault, as an interruption or distortion‖ in the will.

 ―Human beings experience fallibility in the dimensions of

1) knowing

2) acting

3) feeling

Fallibility in Knowing

 In the dimension of knowing: Fallibility is the disproportion

between sensibility and understanding.

 The split is due to a disproportion between what is

expressed about ―being and truth‖ (understanding) and
particular appearance of perspective (sensibility).

 Seeing is one thing, but its meaning is another.

 Thus the intermediary that bridges sensibility and

understanding would be the pure imagination in the form
of ―synthesis of presence and meaning in things.‖

Fallibility in Acting

 In the dimension of acting or activity, fallibility ―is experienced in

the disparity between character and happiness.‖

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  One‘s character is seen as ―the finitude that expresses
the affective aspect of perspective which motivates one‘s
practical dispositions to act.‖

 Character is not infinite and character expresses

our moods or feelings which are motives for
action.

 Character is acquired through personal

assessments of the world and the world of
values surrounding us.

Fallibility in Acting and Happiness

 Happiness

 is the aim of the completion of our totality.

 the point of view of every personal action.

 However, it is not certain that we will be happy and that

is because character as the orientation of all one‘s ways
of being motivated only attains happiness if all
motivations end up towards realizing that character.

 The disconnect here is that though our personality is our view of

the total field of motivation. Happiness is the end towards where
all motivation moves to.

Disproportion between Passions and Affectivity

 In the dimension of feeling, fallibility is caused by the

disproportion between pleasure and happiness.

 Happiness is realized in the three human passions of

having, power, and worth.

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  Having, power, and worth depend ―on the intentions of
the self or how they affect the self.‖

 Intentionality and affectivity (feeling) are

paradoxical, ―cannot be seperated,‖ and are the
roots of fallibility.

 In sense, one can never intend the object of

intention without seperating the inner effect it
has within him or her.

 Example: one cannot say ―I love you‖ apart from

the feeling of love.

Having, Power, Worth and Conflict

 Pallauer describes various distortions between personal

affectivity and the object of intention

 Having reduced to ―what is mine.‖

 Power reduced to the ability to command others.

 Worth reduced to esteem dependent on others.

 Conflict is essentially then - the ―disproportion between

happiness and pleasure.‖

 ―This conflict indicates the possibility of fallibility

as something constitutive of human condition. A
human being experiences conflicts within him
‗between his self , his character and his
personality, his thinking and his feelings, etc.‘‖

Conclusion

 The project of man is in conflict between two directions: fallibility

and transcendence.

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  Willing can imagine valid conditions, and generate
projects not grounded on particular experiences which
allows the human being to transcendence .

 One can eventually find fallibility as not bad since it

allows for the human being to become creative.

 Restlessness and insatiability of desire allow us to

create our story.

 Feeling allows me to continue my existence.

Human Activity, Transcendence, and Reflection

 Human activity always allows for attention of one‘s body.

 Human activity is therefore tied down to the range of the

involuntary, and thus poses eminent fallibility.

 Realizing that the self is defined and grounded in its

concrete history ―signals moments of transcendence.‖

 His self-conscious activity helps to lead him into

reflective activity.

 To will gives one many possibilities and allows one to be

grounded in one‘s own project.

 There is doubt and indecision.

 Hesitation is present because of lack or involuntary

aspects of the person.

 Hesitation allows for that possibility.

 Choice closes that possibility.

 To will gives one many possibilities and allows one to be

grounded in one‘s own project.

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  There is doubt and indecision.

 Hesitation is present because of lack or involuntary

aspects of the person.

 Hesitation allows for that possibility.

 Choice closes that possibility.

2. Man and the Environment

 So what is a study of ―Humanity and the Environment‖ all about?

 ―Environment refers to the totality of things, both

living and non-living, and conditions in the
surroundings.‖

 When studying the environment, one must already hold

the presumption that there is a subject that is
surrounded and affected by his or her surroundings.

 When studying the environment, priority of attention is given to

what is guided by the laws of physics in contradistinction to the
supernatural.

 The basis is that environment and man are natural, and

so, myth or mysticism has no place for the topic.

 All living and non-living things cannot be thought of in isolation,

and so, we consider such an order as biophysical.

 Environmental
environment & humanity‘s place within it.

Page 80
  Major issues tackled by the environmental philosophers are
humanity‘s role in the world, the interaction between nature &
human activities, and humanity‘s response to environmental
challenges.

Different Views

● Most views in environmental philosophy emphasize the role

humans play in causing environmental changes.

● Other views recognize that changes in the environment are part

of a larger interplay among organisms and ecosystem on the
planet

Gaia Hypothesis

• non-organic elements in the planet play a significant role in

maintaining balance in the environment as they interact with
living organisms to regulate the various systems that enable life
to continue thriving on Earth.

Anthropocentrism

• is the belief that humans are the central & most significant
species on the planet.

• humans are considered the primary cause that drives changes in

the environment.

Deep Ecology

• the world as being maintained by the interrelationship among

living organisms

• every living thing on the planet is dependent on each other for

survival

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 • human interference as a significant threat to the natural world
and all living things

Theological View

• Mankind is intended to live in harmony with all creation.

• God created man & granted him dominion over all creatures and
tasked him to ―subdue‖ the earth [Gen 1:26-28]

• This dominion did not mean wanton exploitation &

destruction but rather to care for nature & the
environment, enhance it, and contribute to its growth &
development.

PJPII

• Recognized man‘s lordship over nature as a ―ministerial‖ act, a

continuation of the work of the Creator, and such mission must
be exercised w/ wisdom and love.

Philosophical views that influence environmental actions

● The varied philosophical views all regard man as an active

participant in the environment, and the key to nature‘s thriving or
ruin.

● Current philosophical discussions, coupled w/ scientific studies,

point to the increasing negative impact of human activities on the
condition of our planet.

● The growing concern for the environment and the evidence of

the impact of human activities on nature has led philosophers to
advocate for the application of ethical concepts to environmental
concerns

Environmental Ethics

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 • All no- human have value and should be preserved.

• The preservation of environment is beneficial.

• Man has the responsibility to safeguard the planet.

Social Ecology

o Applies ecological and ethical approach in analyzing society

o Sees a relationship between social problems and Environmental

problems

o Society should implement changes in order to address issues

regarding the environment.

o In the face of the realities of climate change, policy makers have

sought insights from philosophers in the development of
programs that will effectively deal w/ the degradation of the
environment

o The human factor can be clearly seen in environmental problems

such as pollution, environmental degradation, depletion of
natural resources, global warming, and climate change.

The growing concern about the climate change and other environmental
problems inspired number of views such as:

Climate ethics and Climate justice

• Consider climate change as a significant issue.

Environmental justice

• Refers to the fair distribution of environmental benefits and

burdens.

Page 83
 • Significant social movements that were inspired by increased
environmental awareness include the environmental protection
and conservation movement, animal rights, and green politics.

• Activism & increased organized action are indications of the

growing awareness of environmentalism in today‘s society.

● There is a position called aesthetic environmentalism.

○ Prizing nature on the basis of beauty.

Environmental Aesthetics

● Discuss concepts of beauty in nature.

● Maintaining the order and balance in the environment.

● There are criticism of aesthetic environmentalism

○ Though it is counted as a human need, ―it is too relative

to provide a firm ground for an environmental advocacy.‖

○ Conformity to human taste is not a necessary reason in

order to preserve or justify the environment‘s existence.

○ Nature can exist without our admiration and neither are

we a necessary being for the rest of nature.

Environmentalism

• Has also become an important issue in international politics.

Significant developments

• Signing of Kyoto Protocol

• Earth Day, 1970 up to present

We are a Part of Nature

Page 84
  At times we may think that we can focus on those things
proximate to our interests like our phones, or games, or
computers.

 However, without nature we would not be able to exist

since whatever we have now came from the processing
of the fruits of nature itself.

 Hence, one cannot escape being a part of nature.

Fitting in

 The environment is necessary for us to exist in.

 At the same time, it is a necessity for us to adapt to our

surroundings.

 It is possible for us to exist because our ancestors were

able to fit in the environment

 ―They fit in their environment in spite of heat and cold,

diseases and accidents, predators and scarce
resources.

Patterns of Relations in the Environment

 Some patterns in how we are related can be listed.

 Mutualism - two different organisms interact and benefit.

 Commensalism - two different organisms interact; one

benefits, while the other is not adversely affected.

 Predation, parasitism, and herbivory: one benefits, while

the other is adversely affected.

■ Predation - kill and consume.

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 ■ Parasitism - feeds on the host and may or may
not kill the host.

 Example of Mutualistic Relation:

■ People have a mutualistic relation with dogs.

 Dogs get a free meal, shelter,

companionship and belongingness, and
we get help with our hunts, protection
and companionship.

Humans are Predatorial

 Given our needs, we are not usually cast in mutualistic

relations; we are mostly seen as predatory creatures.

 We compete among ourselves and other

predatory species.

 At times, we may cooperate with others of our

species.

 Relations between predator and prey can be

adversarial.

 Apex predators are not preyed on, and so they

need to be smaller in population than their prey
in order to keep the harmony in the ecosystem.

 Parasatism can also be a characteristic of human beings

 Nietzsche noted on the parasitism between

people.

 Herbivory - is an option for man despite our apparent

inclination to predatory consumption.

Survival of the Fittest and Keystone Species

Page 86
 o When we say ―survival of the fittest‖ we are not necessarily trying
to compete in order to dominate.

• We are filling in an ‗ecological niche.‘

o Superiority relative to other species does not make us

necessarily equal to all other species.

• Some species perform a key function in the ecosystem

that their lose would lead to malfunction or instability in
that environment.

• Such species are called ‗keystone species‘ since loss of

these organisms would lead to malfunction or cessation
of the ecosystem.

• ―A keystone species has disproportionately significant

effect on the ecosystem relative to its population size.‖

o Unfortunately, Homo Sapiens are not a keystone species and

thus the ecosystem can be better off without us.

o To survive we must fit in our role in the ‗web of life.‘

• we participate as both consumer and contributor to other

species.

• Our participation sustains the equilibrium of the

ecosystem‘s balance for the present and the future.

Balance With the Environment

o In order for us to maintain the balance of the ecosystem, we‘re

called on to adjust our way of life.

o Culture, with the environment.

• Consumption is one way of being at harmony with the

rest of the environment.

Page 87
However, it must also extend to what we use, how we use it and our
waste products.

o Having presented patterns of how species interact with others,

one asks what would allow us to fit with our ecosystem; our
niche?

• We consume, but one also needs to reply to the fact that

our resources are limited.

• we must consider how we are going to manage

resources now and for the future.

o How much do we need?

• We simply divide the usable part of the Earth for present

and future generations who wish to use it.

o We are currently at the apex of being predators.

• Except for rare occasion, we are able to keep many of

our adversaries or predators at bay due to our
technology.

• In fact, most people die due to other people than by

being food of other animals.

• We have colonized every habitable part of the globe

and, In a sense, ―our presence is almost an infestation.‖

o ―We consume to satisfy our needs and wants.‖

• Economics focuses on how we sate our drives.

• We generate energy in order to fuel the processes of

production, consumption, and disposal.

• During this process energy and matter is lost while some

of it end up as waste.

Page 88
 • The faster this process continues, the more waste is
produced as by-product which eventually goes back to
the environment.

o Our activities eventually make the environment more

unpredictable and adversely affect agriculture and income.

o Heat increase melts glaciers in the arctic regions.

• Water levels rise and flooding and drought occur.

o These are in result due to our human activities.

o We are a ‗purpose-oriented species.‘

• When we have a need or a want, we seek to satisfy it.

• We have the capacity of understanding causation.

• This allows us to plan ahead to a certain degree better

than animals.

o Though humans have varied desired interests, what is common

is we find satisfaction upon their completion.

• We feel anger, deprivation and dissatisfaction upon

failure.

• So, what makes us do more harm than benefit to

ourselves?

o ―All living things are genetically programmed to function to

survive.‖

• At times, humans go beyond that general function and

we tend to consume more than what is needed to live.

o We consider ourselves free.

Page 89
 • For those communities lacking of resources, there is
frustration and deprivation.

• For those communities abundant in resources, ‗choice

fatigue‘ is a source of unhappiness.

o It is assumed that if a person is given a choice,

that person should make the best solution, but
often times, it is a source of unhappiness when
abundant.

o Choices are not the culprit of unhappiness themselves, rather it

is the person making the choice.

• The environment can provide for our physical needs, but

not our psychological ones.

o Nature does not have unlimited resources.

• Moderation must be put in order least we exhaust all of

our resources.

o The problem here is not consumption itself, but how we are

approaching our resources.

• ―The problem is the extent and patterns of consumption;

the problem is consumerism.‖

• Our values are in coordination with constant

consumption.

• Mass media reinforces this activity by conferring identity

in correlation to our purchases.

o our purchases are what determine our identity.

o Once a community sees that it is not in nature but how it

approaches nature - via culture - it has a chance to be aware

Page 90
 that perhaps some of its practices are not compatible with
nature.

o Man is aware of its capacity for choice.

• Proper use leads to satisfaction.

• Unmitigated attention to possibilities leads to

dissatisfaction.

● We are constantly assailed by natural hazards

● The rate of mineral exploitation, though not entirely exhausted,

adds to the hazard.

○ Mining destroys vegetation, pollutes the air, soil and

water.

○ Burning coal to fuel rampant consumerism contributes to

the path of climate change.

● Resource mismanagement also puts stress on society.

○ Government resettlement problems put all the problems

of the scarcity of land.

○ Cultures cannot harmonize.

○ Competition for limited resources put stress on the

environment.

○ forests are denuded besides frequent conflict.

● Resource mismanagement eventually takes its toll on the

economy.

○ There is indeed a need to manage how we work with our

limited resources.

Page 91
● Knowing that we are the cause of damage to the ecosystem, we
now have a basis to reflect upon what is our role in nature and
what would be the consequence of not performing that role.

● We are aware that we can change the environment drastically

● what is more important than having the power to change the

environment is changing ourselves rather than the environment
itself.

● We can also be selective of what species we prey on.

○ There is a need to chose other species since there are

some species either weakned in population or extinct.

○ It is important to preserve keystone species to ensure

longevity of the environment.

● The change must come from us and not on nature itself.

● Concern for finding our niche in the planet or ecosystem we live

in is palpable.

○ Humans as a species have significantly changed the

planet‘s climatic patterns and if we continue on our
current course, Homo Sapiens will no longer exist on this
planet and be replaced by other resilient species.

● The extension of the term ‗environment‘ is extended across the

planet.

○ Many of the things that we purchase and use are

sourced from other places all across the planet.

○ The raw materials from other parts of the planet are sent
to other places and they are manufactured into
[chocolates, clothes and electronics], for example.

Page 92
 ● ―Economics is the ecology of man; ecology is the economy of
nature.‖

● We recall that we are a species that consumes whatever is in our

immediate environment.

● We were not given a user‘s manual on how we ought to care for

ourselves and our environment.

○ We can learn from past experiences and focus on what

works.

○ We change our environment for good or worse and

change our behavior through our experiences.

● We can in a sense control ourselves.

○ We cannot control the natural laws and the

consequences that necessarily follow from certain
actions.

○ However, knowing ―the structure, laws, and mechanisms

of nature‖ our activities are predictable to a certain
degree.

○ This knowledge of predictability allows us to choose

actions with consequences that benefit all stakeholders
involved.

3. FREEDOM

What is Freedom?

 Is a social & political concept w/c has great significance in how

people participate in society.

 Enlightenment thinkers believed that early an existed in a

―natural state‖& have absolute freedom.

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  The establishment of societies required people to surrender
some of their freedoms in order to live in harmony w/ others &
ensure survival of society

 People entered into ―social contract‖ w/c defined freedoms that

they will be enjoying as members of a society and the state.

 In political & social context – freedom of an individual from

oppression, compulsion, or coercion from other persons, an
authority figure, or from society itself.

Two types of Political Freedom

 Positive liberty – a person taking control of his own life and

fulfilling one‘s potential

 Negative liberty –freedom from external restraints, barriers, and

other interferences from other people.

The development of a number of political ideologies was influenced by

varied ideas on human liberty

 Liberalism – upholds the preservation of individual rights and

stress the role of the government in protecting these civil
liberties.

 Libertarianism – believes that the individual, not the government,

is the best judge in upholding & exercising rights.

 Socialism – considers freedom as the freedom to acquire

economic resources &the ability to work & act according to one‘s
desires.

 Freedom also entails the recognition of certain rights &

entitlements of person

 Natural rights – w/c are innate in the person such as the right to
life [these are considered universal & inalienable ]

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  Legal rights – based on society‘s customs & laws, & are enacted
by legislation & enforced by a government. [the enjoyment of
these rights is based on citizenship]

 Theological views – freedom from sin & living a life of

righteousness. [Christians define freedom in the context of living
in accordance with the will of God]

In simplest sense

 Freedom – the freedom to make choices in life

Philosophers relate human freedom to the concept of human agency.[the

capacity of a person to act & exert control over his/her behavior]

What makes us free? How does freedom shape our experience?

Two ways human freedom is expressed

 Freewill – the capacity to choose fro alternative courses of action

or decision

 Free action – freedom to perform an action w/out any obstacles

or hindrances

 Faculties model – we have free will due to our intellect and that
each human action is based on rationality and sound judgment

 Hierarchical model – free will is based on wants and desires,

individual is faced with various wants and desires that need to be
met – a person exercise his free will when he/she identifies one
desire as acceptable and decides to act on it

 Reasons-responsive view – an has free will because he/she is

able to entertain reasons not to enact a certain decision and act
upon them when the need arises.

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What can prevent us exercising our freedom? Human freedom has its
constraints

 Constraints on free action include external obstacle such as

o Prohibitions

o Laws

o social controls imposed by society

 Constraints on freewill include certain methods that cloud the

person‘s judgment such as manipulation & brainwashing.

 People can also be coerced to perform actions against their will

 A person can also be performing an action by disability or

sickness, or by coercion exerted by another person

 Other external factors that may restrict free action include the
weather, accidents, or poverty.

 Considering these constraints, it is then possible for people to

exercise their free will but are perverted to engage in free action

 Example – a family may decide to go on vacation but a storm

may force them to cancel their plans at the last minute.

 It is also possible for a person to freely act w/out freewill

regarding his/her actions- as a person forced to participate in
hazing ritual to gain admission into an organizatio does not have
freewill.

Human freedom - Free will and existentialist philosophy.

1. Natural libertarians vs determinism.

2. Existentialism: Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel Marcel.

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 Natural Libertarian View and Its Anti-ThesisWe are natural
libertarians - i.e. we believe we have free will.

 First Challenge to free will presented: Theologico-Philosophical

point that God knows all.

 If God knows all, and, by extension, what we will do in future,

then, by virtue of God‘s omniscience, we do not have a decision
in whatever we do.

 We are forced to do actions as a result of God‘s

knowledge.

 If I don‘t do the action that God already knows, God‘s

knowledge would not be perfect.

 Therefore, due to divine foreknowledge, we do not have free will.

 Determinism – a philosophical view that believes that every

event in the world is brought about by underlying causes or
factors

 If man is indeed free – how can he exercise his free will & action
in a world where events are already determined by outside
forces?

 Natural DeterminismSecond Challenge to free will: Natural

Determinism.

 Everything is set up before human existence.

 ―Free will‖ is an illusion - a by-product of natural laws,

genetics, and natural environment.

 The case of Robert Alton Harris.

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  Harris murdered two teenagers and it was argued that
he was not responsible for killing due to bad
circumstances in his childhood.

 His actions were a product of his heredity and

environment.

 St. Augustine‘s Counter to Theological Determinism

 St. Augustine would respond by saying that though God knows

all, we are still free to decide, otherwise Hell would not make
sense.

 ―Love, and do what thou wilt‖

Compatibalism

 free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is

possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent

 it is possible for an agent to be determined in all her choices and

actions and still make some of her choices freely.

Harry G. Frankfurt

 Compatibalism and the Priniciple of Alternative Possibilities

(PAP) is exemplified by Harry G. Frankfurt

 ―[A] person is morally responsible for what he has done

only if he could have done otherwise.‖

 Freedom = not being in a situation where you can only

do one thing.

 Criticism to PAP: ―Frankfurt examples‖; ―Frankfurt-type

examples.‖

 Even if there are no other choices, one can still be

morally liable.

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  A captive forced to shoot someone could still be liable.

 One can still ―mentally will‖ oneself not to shoot, though

physically forced to shoot.

Human Freedom in Existentialist Philosophy

 Concerning human freedom/autonomy.

 Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) - free in isolation

 Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) - freedom within one‘s community

 Sartre

 He would assert that it is only in contradiction that one

can be free.

 ―Hell is other people.‖

 People‘s action restrict our own actions.

 Freedom can only be found when we can find a

way to make others actions not affect oneself.

 Sartre's point was not to criticize other people but to point out the
objectification and loss of freedom that come along with needing
the approval of others.

 Humans are self-determining.

 Man is what he makes of himself.

Essence Precedes Existence Inverted

 What do we mean by saying that existence precedes

essence?

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―We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in
the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist
sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He
will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of
himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to
have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he
conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives
himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards
existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself…‖

Written works:

How will you uphold dignity of the human person in the following
situations?

1. Your classmates are teasing your cross-eyed classmates

because they find her funny looking.

Transcendence

In philosophy, transcendence is the basic ground concept from the

word's literal meaning (from Latin), of climbing or going beyond, albeit
with varying connotations in its different historical and cultural stages. It
includes philosophies, systems, and approaches that describe the
fundamental structures of being, not as an ontology (theory of being), but
as the framework of emergence and validation of knowledge of being.
"Transcendental" is a word derived from the scholastic, designating the
extra-categorical attributes of beings

Modern philosophy

The Ethics of Baruch Spinoza used the expression "terms styled

transcendental" (in Latin: termini transcendentales) to indicate concepts
like Being, Thing, Something, which are so general not to be included in
the definitions of species, genus and category.

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In modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant introduced a new term,
transcendental, thus instituting a new, third meaning. In his theory of
knowledge, this concept is concerned with the condition of possibility of
knowledge itself. He also opposed the term transcendental to the term
transcendent, the latter meaning "that which goes beyond" (transcends)
any possible knowledge of a human being. For him transcendental
meant knowledge about our cognitive faculty with regard to how objects
are possible a priori. "I call all knowledge transcendental if it is occupied,
not with objects, but with the way that we can possibly know objects
even before we experience them. Therefore, metaphysics, as a
fundamental and universal theory, turns out to be an epistemology.
Transcendental philosophy, consequently, is not considered a traditional
ontological form of metaphysics.

Kant also equated transcendental with that which is "...in respect of the
subject's faculty of cognition." Something is transcendental if it plays a
role in the way in which the mind "constitutes" objects and makes it
possible for us to experience them as objects in the first place. Ordinary
knowledge is knowledge of objects; transcendental knowledge is
knowledge of how it is possible for us to experience those objects as
objects. This is based on Kant's acceptance of David Hume's argument
that certain general features of objects (e.g. persistence, causal
relationships) cannot be derived from the sense impressions we have of
them. Kant argues that the mind must contribute those features and
make it possible for us to experience objects as objects. In the central
part of his Critique of Pure Reason, the "Transcendental Deduction of the
Categories", Kant argues for a deep interconnection between the ability
to have consciousness of self and the ability to experience a world of
objects. Through a process of synthesis, the mind generates both the
structure of objects and its own unity.

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A metaphilosophical question discussed by many Kantian scholars is
what transcendental reflection is and how transcendental reflection is
itself possible. Valentin Balanovskiy shows that this is a special
instrument inherent in our consciousness, something by what individuals
can distinguish themselves from any other objects of reality.Stephen
Palmquist argues that Kant's solution to this problem is an appeal to
faith.

For Kant, the "transcendent", as opposed to the "transcendental", is that

which lies beyond what our faculty of knowledge can legitimately know.
Hegel's counter-argument to Kant was that to know a boundary is also to
be aware of what it bounds and as such what lies beyond it – in other
words, to have already transcended it.

Contemporary philosophy

In phenomenology, the "transcendent" is that which transcends our own

consciousness: that which is objective rather than only a phenomenon of
consciousness. Noema is employed in phenomenology to refer to the
terminus of an intention as given for consciousness.

Jean-Paul Sartre also speaks of transcendence in his works. In Being

and Nothingness, Sartre uses transcendence to describe the relation of
the self to the object oriented world, as well as our concrete relations
with others. For Sartre, the for-itself is sometimes called a
transcendence. Additionally if the other is viewed strictly as an object,
much like any other object, then the other is, for the for-itself, a
transcendence-transcended. When the for-itself grasps the other in the
others world, and grasps the subjectivity that the other has, it is referred
to as transcending-transcendence. Thus, Sartre defines relations with
others in terms of transcendence.

Contemporary transcendental philosophy is developed by German

philosopher Harald Holz with a holistic approach. Holz liberated
transcendental philosophy from the convergence of neo-Kantianism, he
critically discussed transcendental pragmatism and the relation between

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transcendental philosophy, neo-empiricism and so-called
postmodernism.

Colloquial usage

In everyday language, "transcendence" means "going beyond", and

"self-transcendence" means going beyond a prior form or state of
oneself. Mystical experience is thought of as a particularly advanced
state of self-transcendence, in which the sense of a separate self is
abandoned. "Self-transcendence" is believed to be psychometrically
measurable, and (at least partially) inherited, and has been incorporated
as a personality dimension in the Temperament and Character Inventory.
The discovery of this is described in the book "The God Gene" by Dean
Hamer, although this has been criticized by commentators such as Carl
Zimmer.

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MODULE 4: HUMAN PERSON IN THE ENVIRONMENT

Introduction: The Challenge of Environmental Ethics

Suppose putting out natural fires, culling feral animals or destroying

some individual members of overpopulated indigenous species is
necessary for the protection of the integrity of a certain ecosystem. Will
these actions be morally permissible or even required? Is it morally
acceptable for farmers in non-industrial countries to practise slash and
burn techniques to clear areas for agriculture? Consider a mining
company which has performed open pit mining in some previously
unspoiled area. Does the company have a moral obligation to restore the
landform and surface ecology? And what is the value of a humanly
restored environment compared with the originally natural environment?
It is often said to be morally wrong for human beings to pollute and
destroy parts of the natural environment and to consume a huge
proportion of the planet‘s natural resources. If that is wrong, is it simply
because a sustainable environment is essential to (present and future)
human well-being? Or is such behaviour also wrong because the natural
environment and/or its various contents have certain values in their own
right so that these values ought to be respected and protected in any
case? These are among the questions investigated by environmental
ethics. Some of them are specific questions faced by individuals in
particular circumstances, while others are more global questions faced
by groups and communities. Yet others are more abstract questions
concerning the value and moral standing of the natural environment and
its non-human components.

In the literature on environmental ethics the distinction between

instrumental value and intrinsic value (in the sense of ―non-instrumental
value‖) has been of considerable importance. The former is the value of
things as means to further some other ends, whereas the latter is the
value of things as ends in themselves regardless of whether they are
also useful as means to other ends. For instance, certain fruits have
instrumental value for bats who feed on them, since feeding on the fruits
is a means to survival for the bats. However, it is not widely agreed that

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fruits have value as ends in themselves. We can likewise think of a
person who teaches others as having instrumental value for those who
want to acquire knowledge. Yet, in addition to any such value, it is
normally said that a person, as a person, has intrinsic value, i.e., value in
his or her own right independently of his or her prospects for serving the
ends of others. For another example, a certain wild plant may have
instrumental value because it provides the ingredients for some medicine
or as an aesthetic object for human observers. But if the plant also has
some value in itself independently of its prospects for furthering some
other ends such as human health, or the pleasure from aesthetic
experience, then the plant also has intrinsic value. Because the
intrinsically valuable is that which is good as an end in itself, it is
commonly agreed that something‘s possession of intrinsic value
generates a prima facie direct moral duty on the part of moral agents to
protect it or at least refrain from damaging it (see O‘Neil 1992 and
Jamieson 2002 for detailed accounts of intrinsic value).

Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, are

anthropocentric or human-centered in that either they assign intrinsic
value to human beings alone (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in
a strong sense) or they assign a significantly greater amount of intrinsic
value to human beings than to any non-human things such that the
protection or promotion of human interests or well-being at the expense
of non-human things turns out to be nearly always justified (i.e., what we
might call anthropocentric in a weak sense). For example, Aristotle
(Politics, Bk. 1, Ch. 8) maintains that ―nature has made all things
specifically for the sake of man‖ and that the value of non-human things
in nature is merely instrumental. Generally, anthropocentric positions find
it problematic to articulate what is wrong with the cruel treatment of non-
human animals, except to the extent that such treatment may lead to bad
consequences for human beings. Immanuel Kant (―Duties to Animals
and Spirits‖, in Lectures on Ethics), for instance, suggests that cruelty
towards a dog might encourage a person to develop a character which
would be desensitized to cruelty towards humans. From this standpoint,
cruelty towards non-human animals would be instrumentally, rather than
intrinsically, wrong. Likewise, anthropocentrism often recognizes some

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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 (see Passmore
1974; Bookchin 1990; Norton et al. (eds.) 1995).

When environmental ethics emerged as a new sub-discipline of

philosophy in the early 1970s, it did so by posing a challenge to
traditional anthropocentrism. In the first place, it questioned the assumed
moral superiority of human beings to members of other species on Earth.
In the second place, it investigated the possibility of rational arguments
for assigning intrinsic value to the natural environment and its non-
human contents. It should be noted, however, that some theorists
working in the field see no need to develop new, non-anthropocentric
theories. Instead, they advocate what may be called enlightened
anthropocentrism (or, perhaps more appropriately called, prudential
anthropocentrism). Briefly, this is the view that all the moral duties we
have towards the environment are derived from our direct duties to its
human inhabitants. The practical purpose of environmental ethics, they
maintain, is to provide moral grounds for social policies aimed at
protecting the Earth‘s environment and remedying environmental
degradation. Enlightened anthropocentrism, they argue, is sufficient for
that practical purpose, and perhaps even more effective in delivering
pragmatic outcomes, in terms of policy-making, than non-anthropocentric
theories given the theoretical burden on the latter to provide sound
arguments for its more radical view that the non-human environment has
intrinsic value (cf. Norton 1991, de Shalit 1994, Light and Katz 1996).
Furthermore, some prudential anthropocentrists may hold what might be
called cynical anthropocentrism, which says that we have a higher-level
anthropocentric reason to be non-anthropocentric in our day-to-day
thinking. Suppose that a day-to-day non-anthropocentrist tends to act
more benignly towards the non-human environment on which human
well-being depends. This would provide reason for encouraging non-
anthropocentric thinking, even to those who find the idea of non-
anthropocentric intrinsic value hard to swallow. In order for such a
strategy to be effective one may need to hide one‘s cynical

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anthropocentrism from others and even from oneself. The position can
be structurally compared to some indirect form of consequentialism and
may attract parallel critiques (see Henry Sidgwick on utilitarianism and
esoteric morality, and Bernard Williams on indirect utilitarianism).

2. The Early Development of Environmental Ethics

Although nature was the focus of much nineteenth and twentieth century
philosophy, contemporary environmental ethics only emerged as an
academic discipline in the 1970s. The questioning and rethinking of the
relationship of human beings with the natural environment over the last
thirty years reflected an already widespread perception in the 1960s that
the late twentieth century faced a human population explosion as well as
a serious environmental crisis. Among the accessible work that drew
attention to a sense of crisis was Rachel Carson‘s Silent Spring (1963),
which consisted of a number of essays earlier published in the New
Yorker magazine detailing how pesticides such as DDT, aldrin and
deildrin concentrated through the food web. Commercial farming
practices aimed at maximizing crop yields and profits, Carson
speculates, are capable of impacting simultaneously on environmental
and public health.

In a much cited essay (White 1967) on the historical roots of the

environmental crisis, historian Lynn White argued that the main strands
of Judeo-Christian thinking had encouraged the overexploitation of
nature by maintaining the superiority of humans over all other forms of
life on Earth, and by depicting all of nature as created for the use of
humans. White‘s thesis was widely discussed in theology, history, and
has been subject to some sociological testing as well as being regularly
discussed by philosophers (see Whitney 1993, Attfield 2001). Central to
the rationale for his thesis were the works of the Church Fathers and The
Bible itself, supporting the anthropocentric perspective that humans are
the only things that matter on Earth. Consequently, they may utilize and
consume everything else to their advantage without any injustice. For
example, Genesis 1: 27–8 states: ―God created man in his own image, in
the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And

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God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and
replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over fish of the
sea, and over fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth
upon the earth.‖ Likewise, Thomas Aquinas (Summa Contra Gentiles,
Bk. 3, Pt 2, Ch 112) argued that non-human animals are ―ordered to
man‘s use‖. According to White, 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 untrammeled exploitation of nature. Modern Western science itself,
White argued, 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.
The point of 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.

Around the same time, the Stanford ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich
warned in The Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1968) that the growth of human
population threatened the viability of planetary life-support systems. The
sense of environmental crisis stimulated by those and other popular
works was intensified by NASA‘s production and wide dissemination of a
particularly potent image of Earth from space taken at Christmas 1968
and featured in the Scientific American in September 1970. Here, plain to
see, was a living, shining planet voyaging through space and shared by
all of humanity, a precious vessel vulnerable to pollution and to the
overuse of its limited capacities. In 1972 a team of researchers at MIT
led by Dennis Meadows published the Limits to Growth study, a work
that summed up in many ways the emerging concerns of the previous
decade and the sense of vulnerability triggered by the view of the Earth
from space. In the commentary to the study, the researchers wrote:

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We affirm finally that any deliberate attempt to reach a rational and
enduring state of equilibrium by planned measures, rather than by
chance or catastrophe, must ultimately be founded on a basic change of
values and goals at individual, national and world levels. (Meadows et al.
1972: 195)

The call for a ―basic change of values‖ in connection to the environment

(a call that could be interpreted in terms of either instrumental or intrinsic
values) reflected a need for the development of environmental ethics as
a new sub-discipline of philosophy.

The new field emerged almost simultaneously in three countries—the

United States, Australia, and Norway. In the first two of these countries,
direction and inspiration largely came from the earlier twentieth century
American literature of the environment. For instance, the Scottish
emigrant John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club and ―father of American
conservation‖) and subsequently the forester Aldo Leopold had
advocated an appreciation and conservation of things ―natural, wild and
free‖. Their concerns were motivated by a combination of ethical and
aesthetic responses to nature as well as a rejection of crudely economic
approaches to the value of natural objects (a historical survey of the
confrontation between Muir‘s reverentialism and the human-centred
conservationism of Gifford Pinchot (one of the major influences on the
development of the US Forest Service) is provided in Norton 1991; also
see Cohen 1984 and Nash (ed) 1990). Leopold‘s A Sand County
Almanac (1949), in particular, advocated the adoption of a ―land ethic‖:

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is
to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. (Leopold 1949: vii–
ix)

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and

beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
(Leopold 1949: 224–5)

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However, Leopold himself provided no systematic ethical theory or
framework to support these ethical ideas concerning the environment.
His views therefore presented a challenge and opportunity for moral
theorists: could some ethical theory be devised to justify the injunction to
preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biosphere?

The land ethic sketched by Leopold, attempting to extend our moral

concern to cover the natural environment and its non-human contents,
was drawn on explicitly by the Australian philosopher Richard Routley
(later Sylvan). According to Routley (1973 (cf. Routley and Routley
1980)), the anthropocentrism imbedded in what he called the ―dominant
western view‖, or ―the western superethic‖, is in effect ―human
chauvinism‖. This view, he argued, is just another form of class
chauvinism, which is simply based on blind class ―loyalty‖ or prejudice,
and unjustifiably discriminates against those outside the privileged class.
Echoing the plot of a popular movie some three years earlier (see Lo and
Brennan 2013), Routley speculates in his ―last man‖ (and ―last people‖)
arguments about a hypothetical situation in which the last person,
surviving a world catastrophe, acts to ensure the elimination of all other
living things and the last people set about destroying forests and
ecosystems after their demise. From the human-chauvinistic (or
absolutely anthropocentric) perspective, the last person would do nothing
morally wrong, since his or her destructive act in question would not
cause any damage to the interest and well-being of humans, who would
by then have disappeared. Nevertheless, Routley points out that there is
a moral intuition that the imagined last acts would be morally wrong. An
explanation for this judgment, he argued, is that those non-human
objects in the environment, whose destruction is ensured by the last
person or last people, have intrinsic value, a kind of value independent of
their usefulness for humans. From his critique, Routley concluded that
the main approaches in traditional western moral thinking were unable to
allow the recognition that natural things have intrinsic value, and that the
tradition required overhaul of a significant kind.

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Leopold‘s idea that the ―land‖ as a whole is an object of our moral
concern also stimulated writers to argue for certain moral obligations
toward ecological wholes, such as species, communities, and
ecosystems, not just their individual constituents. The U.S.-based
theologian and environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III, for
instance, argued that species protection was a moral duty (Rolston
1975). It would be wrong, he maintained, to eliminate a rare butterfly
species simply to increase the monetary value of specimens already held
by collectors. Like Routley‘s ―last man‖ arguments, Rolston‘s example is
meant to draw attention to a kind of action that seems morally dubious
and yet is not clearly ruled out or condemned by traditional
anthropocentric ethical views. Species, Rolston went on to argue, are
intrinsically valuable and are usually more valuable than individual
specimens, since the loss of a species is a loss of genetic possibilities
and the deliberate destruction of a species would show disrespect for the
very biological processes which make possible the emergence of
individual living things (also see Rolston 1989, Ch 10). Natural processes
deserve respect, according to Rolston‘s quasi-religious perspective,
because they constitute a nature (or God) which is itself intrinsically
valuable (or sacred).

Meanwhile, the work of Christopher Stone (a professor of law at the

University of Southern California) had become widely discussed. Stone
(1972) proposed that trees and other natural objects should have at least
the same standing in law as corporations. This suggestion was inspired
by a particular case in which the Sierra Club had mounted a challenge
against the permit granted by the U.S. Forest Service to Walt Disney
Enterprises for surveys preparatory to the development of the Mineral
King Valley, which was at the time a relatively remote game refuge, but
not designated as a national park or protected wilderness area. The
Disney proposal was to develop a major resort complex serving 14000
visitors daily to be accessed by a purpose-built highway through Sequoia
National Park. The Sierra Club, as a body with a general concern for

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wilderness conservation, challenged the development on the grounds
that the valley should be kept in its original state for its own sake.

Stone reasoned that if trees, forests and mountains could be given

standing in law then they could be represented in their own right in the
courts by groups such as the Sierra Club. Moreover, like any other legal
person, these natural things could become beneficiaries of compensation
if it could be shown that they had suffered compensatable injury through
human activity. When the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, it was
determined by a narrow majority that the Sierra Club did not meet the
condition for bringing a case to court, for the Club was unable and
unwilling to prove the likelihood of injury to the interest of the Club or its
members. In a dissenting minority judgment, however, justices Douglas,
Blackmun and Brennan mentioned Stone‘s argument: his proposal to
give legal standing to natural things, they said, would allow conservation
interests, community needs and business interests to be represented,
debated and settled in court.

Reacting to Stone‘s proposal, Joel Feinberg (1974) raised a serious

problem. Only items that have interests, Feinberg argued, can be
regarded as having legal standing and, likewise, moral standing. For it is
interests which are capable of being represented in legal proceedings
and moral debates. This same point would also seem to apply to political
debates. For instance, the movement for ―animal liberation‖, which also
emerged strongly in the 1970s, can be thought of as a political
movement aimed at representing the previously neglected interests of
some animals (see Regan and Singer (eds.) 1976, Clark 1977, and also
the entry on the moral status of animals). Granted that some animals
have interests that can be represented in this way, would it also make
sense to speak of trees, forests, rivers, barnacles, or termites as having
interests of a morally relevant kind? This issue was hotly contested in the
years that followed. Meanwhile, John Passmore (1974) argued, like
White, that the Judeo-Christian tradition of thought about nature, despite
being predominantly ―despotic‖, contained resources for regarding
humans as ―stewards‖ or ―perfectors‖ of God‘s creation. Skeptical of the
prospects for any radically new ethic, Passmore cautioned that traditions

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of thought could not be abruptly overhauled. Any change in attitudes to
our natural surroundings which stood the chance of widespread
acceptance, he argued, would have to resonate and have some
continuities with the very tradition which had legitimized our destructive
practices. In sum, then, Leopold‘s land ethic, the historical analyses of
White and Passmore, the pioneering work of Routley, Stone and
Rolston, and the warnings of scientists, had by the late 1970s focused
the attention of philosophers and political theorists firmly on the
environment.

The confluence of ethical, political and legal debates about the

environment, the emergence of philosophies to underpin animal rights
activism and the puzzles over whether an environmental ethic would be
something new rather than a modification or extension of existing ethical
theories were reflected in wider social and political movements. The rise
of environmental or ―green‖ parties in Europe in the 1980s was
accompanied by almost immediate schisms between groups known as
―realists‖ versus ―fundamentalists‖ (see Dobson 1990). The ―realists‖
stood for reform environmentalism, working with business and
government to soften the impact of pollution and resource depletion
especially on fragile ecosystems or endangered species. The ―fundies‖
argued for radical change, the setting of stringent new priorities, and
even the overthrow of capitalism and liberal individualism, which were
taken as the major ideological causes of anthropogenic environmental
devastation. It is not clear, however, that collectivist or communist
countries do any better in terms of their environmental record (see
Dominick 1998).

Underlying these political disagreements was the distinction between

―shallow‖ and ―deep‖ environmental movements, a distinction introduced
in the early 1970s by another major influence on contemporary
environmental ethics, the Norwegian philosopher and climber Arne
Næss. Since the work of Næss has been significant in environmental
politics, the discussion of his position is given in a separate section
below.

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3. Environmental Ethics and Politics

3.1 Deep Ecology

―Deep ecology‖ was born in Scandinavia, the result of discussions

between Næss and his colleagues Sigmund Kvaløy and Nils Faarlund
(see Næss 1973 and 1989; also see Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999
for a historical survey and commentary on the development of deep
ecology). All three shared a passion for the great mountains. On a visit to
the Himalayas, they became impressed with aspects of ―Sherpa culture‖
particularly when they found that their Sherpa guides regarded certain
mountains as sacred and accordingly would not venture onto them.
Subsequently, Næss formulated a position which extended the
reverence the three Norwegians and the Sherpas felt for mountains to
other natural things in general.

The ―shallow ecology movement‖, as Næss (1973) calls it, is the ―fight
against pollution and resource depletion‖, the central objective of which
is ―the health and affluence of people in the developed countries.‖ The
―deep ecology movement‖, in contrast, endorses ―biospheric
egalitarianism‖, the view that all living things are alike in having value in
their own right, independent of their usefulness to others. The deep
ecologist respects this intrinsic value, taking care, for example, when
walking on the mountainside not to cause unnecessary damage to the
plants.

Inspired by Spinoza‘s metaphysics, another key feature of Næss‘s deep

ecology is the rejection of atomistic individualism. The idea that a human
being is such an individual possessing a separate essence, Næss
argues, radically separates the human self from the rest of the world. To
make such a separation not only leads to selfishness towards other
people, but also induces human selfishness towards nature. As a
counter to egoism at both the individual and species level, Næss
proposes the adoption of an alternative relational ―total-field image‖ of
the world. According to this relationalism, organisms (human or

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otherwise) are best understood as ―knots‖ in the biospherical net. The
identity of a living thing is essentially constituted by its relations to other
things in the world, especially its ecological relations to other living
things. If people conceptualise themselves and the world in relational
terms, the deep ecologists argue, then people will take better care of
nature and the world in general.

As developed by Næss and others, the position also came to focus on

the possibility of the identification of the human ego with nature. The idea
is, briefly, that by identifying with nature I can enlarge the boundaries of
the self beyond my skin. My larger—ecological—Self (the capital ―S‖
emphasizes that I am something larger than my body and
consciousness), deserves respect as well. To respect and to care for my
Self is also to respect and to care for the natural environment, which is
actually part of me and with which I should identify. ―Self-realization‖, in
other words, is the reconnection of the shriveled human individual with
the wider natural environment. Næss maintains that the deep satisfaction
that we receive from identification with nature and close partnership with
other forms of life in nature contributes significantly to our life quality.
(One clear historical antecedent to this kind of nature spiritualism is the
romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as expressed in his last work,
the Reveries of the Solitary Walker)

When Næss‘s view crossed the Atlantic, it was sometimes merged with
ideas emerging from Leopold‘s land ethic (see Devall and Sessions
1985; also see Sessions (ed) 1995). But Næss—wary of the apparent
totalitarian political implications of Leopold‘s position that individual
interests and well-being should be subordinated to the holistic good of
the Earth‘s biotic community (see section 4 below)—has always taken
care to distance himself from advocating any sort of ―land ethic‖. (See
Anker 1999 for cautions on interpreting Næss‘s relationalism as an
endorsement of the kind of holism displayed in the land ethic; cf. Grey
1993, Taylor and Zimmerman 2005). Some critics have argued that
Næss‘s deep ecology is no more than an extended social-democratic

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version of utilitarianism, which counts human interests in the same
calculation alongside the interests of all natural things (e.g., trees,
wolves, bears, rivers, forests and mountains) in the natural environment
(see Witoszek 1997). However, Næss failed to explain in any detail how
to make sense of the idea that oysters or barnacles, termites or bacteria
could have interests of any morally relevant sort at all. Without an
account of this, Næss‘s early ―biospheric egalitarianism‖—that all living
things whatsoever had a similar right to live and flourish—was an
indeterminate principle in practical terms. It also remains unclear in what
sense rivers, mountains and forests can be regarded as possessors of
any kind of interests. This is an issue on which Næss always remained
elusive.

Biospheric egalitarianism was modified in the 1980s to the weaker claim

that the flourishing of both human and non-human life have value in
themselves. At the same time, Næss declared that his own favoured
ecological philosophy—―Ecosophy T‖, as he called it after his
Tvergastein mountain cabin—was only one of several possible
foundations for an environmental ethic. Deep ecology ceased to be a
specific doctrine, but instead became a ―platform‖, of eight simple points,
on which Næss hoped all deep green thinkers could agree. The platform
was conceived as establishing a middle ground, between underlying
philosophical orientations, whether Christian, Buddhist, Daoist, process
philosophy, or whatever, and the practical principles for action in specific
situations, principles generated from the underlying philosophies. Thus
the deep ecological movement became explicitly pluralist (see Brennan
1999; c.f. Light 1996).

While Næss‘s Ecosophy T sees human Self-realization as a solution to

the environmental crises resulting from human selfishness and
exploitation of nature, some of the followers of the deep ecology platform
in the United States and Australia further argue that the expansion of the
human self to include non-human nature is supported by the
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which is said to have
dissolved the boundaries between the observer and the observed (see
Fox 1984, 1990, and Devall and Sessions 1985; cf. Callicott 1985).

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These "relationalist" developments of deep ecology are, however,
criticized by some feminist theorists. The idea of nature as part of
oneself, one might argue, could justify the continued exploitation of
nature instead. For one is presumably more entitled to treat oneself in
whatever ways one likes than to treat another independent agent in
whatever ways one likes. According to some feminist critics, the deep
ecological theory of the ―expanded self‖ is in effect a disguised form of
human colonialism, unable to give nature its due as a genuine ―other‖
independent of human interest and purposes (see Plumwood 1993, Ch.
7, 1999, and Warren 1999).

Meanwhile, some third-world critics accused deep ecology of being elitist

in its attempts to preserve wilderness experiences for only a select group
of economically and socio-politically well-off people. The Indian writer
Ramachandra Guha (1989, 1999) for instance, depicts the activities of
many western-based conservation groups as a new form of cultural
imperialism, aimed at securing converts to conservationism (cf. Bookchin
1987 and Brennan 1998a). ―Green missionaries‖, as Guha calls them,
represent a movement aimed at further dispossessing the world‘s poor
and indigenous people. ―Putting deep ecology in its place,‖ he writes, ―is
to recognize that the trends it derides as ―shallow‖ ecology might in fact
be varieties of environmentalism that are more apposite, more
representative and more popular in the countries of the South.‖ Although
Næss himself repudiates suggestions that deep ecology is committed to
any imperialism (see Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999, Ch. 36–7 and
41), Guha‘s criticism raises important questions about the application of
deep ecological principles in different social, economic and cultural
contexts. Finally, in other critiques, deep ecology is portrayed as having
an inconsistent utopian vision (see Anker and Witoszek 1998).

3.2 Feminism and the Environment

Broadly speaking, a feminist issue is any that contributes in some way to

understanding the oppression of women. Feminist theories attempt to
analyze women‘s oppression, its causes and consequences, and
suggest strategies and directions for women‘s liberation. By the mid

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1970s, feminist writers had raised the issue of whether patriarchal modes
of thinking encouraged not only widespread inferiorizing and colonizing
of women, but also of people of colour, animals and nature. Sheila
Collins (1974), for instance, argued that male-dominated culture or
patriarchy is supported by four interlocking pillars: sexism, racism, class
exploitation, and ecological destruction.

Emphasizing the importance of feminism to the environmental movement

and various other liberation movements, some writers, such as Ynestra
King (1989a and 1989b), argue that the domination of women by men is
historically the original form of domination in human society, from which
all other hierarchies—of rank, class, and political power—flow. For
instance, human exploitation of nature may be seen as a manifestation
and extension of the oppression of women, in that it is the result of
associating nature with the female, which had been already inferiorized
and oppressed by the male-dominating culture. But within the plurality of
feminist positions, other writers, such as Val Plumwood (1993),
understand the oppression of women as only one of the many parallel
forms of oppression sharing and supported by a common ideological
structure, in which one party (the colonizer) uses a number of conceptual
and rhetorical devices to privilege its interests over that of the other party
(the colonized). Facilitated by a common structure, seemingly diverse
forms of oppression can mutually reinforce each other (Warren 1987,
1990, 1994, Cheney 1989, and Plumwood 1993).

Not all feminist theorists would call that common underlying oppressive
structure ―androcentric‖ or ―patriarchal‖. But it is generally agreed that
core features of the structure include ―dualism‖, hierarchical thinking, and
the ―logic of domination‖, which are typical of, if not essential to, male-
chauvinism. These patterns of thinking and conceptualizing the world,
many feminist theorists argue, also nourish and sustain other forms of
chauvinism, including, human-chauvinism (i.e., anthropocentrism), which
is responsible for much human exploitation of, and destructiveness
towards, nature. The dualistic way of thinking, for instance, sees the
world in polar opposite terms, such as male/female,
masculinity/femininity, reason/emotion, freedom/necessity,

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active/passive, mind/body, pure/soiled, white/coloured, civilized/primitive,
transcendent/immanent, human/animal, culture/nature. Furthermore,
under dualism all the first items in these contrasting pairs are assimilated
with each other, and all the second items are likewise linked with each
other. For example, the male is seen to be associated with the rational,
active, creative, Cartesian human mind, and civilized, orderly,
transcendent culture; whereas the female is regarded as tied to the
emotional, passive, determined animal body, and primitive, disorderly,
immanent nature. These interlocking dualisms are not just descriptive
dichotomies, according to the feminists, but involve a prescriptive
privileging of one side of the opposed items over the other. Dualism
confers superiority to everything on the male side, but inferiority to
everything on the female side. The ―logic of domination‖ then dictates
that those on the superior side (e.g., men, rational beings, humans) are
morally entitled to dominate and utilize those on the inferior side (e.g.,
women, beings lacking in rationality, non-humans) as mere means.

The problem with dualistic and hierarchical modes of thinking, however,

is not just that that they are epistemically unreliable. It is not just that the
dominating party often falsely sees the dominated party as lacking (or
possessing) the allegedly superior (or inferior) qualities, or that the
dominated party often internalizes false stereotypes of itself given by its
oppressors, or that stereotypical thinking often overlooks salient and
important differences among individuals. More important, according to
feminist analyses, the very premise of prescriptive dualism—the valuing
of attributes of one polarized side and the devaluing of those of the other,
the idea that domination and oppression can be justified by appealing to
attributes like masculinity, rationality, being civilized or developed, etc.—
is itself problematic.

Feminism represents a radical challenge for environmental thinking,

politics, and traditional social ethical perspectives. It promises to link

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environmental questions with wider social problems concerning various
kinds of discrimination and exploitation, and fundamental investigations
of human psychology. However, whether there are conceptual, causal or
merely contingent connections among the different forms of oppression
and liberation remains a contested issue (see Green 1994). The term
―ecofeminism‖ (first coined by Françoise d‘Eaubonne in 1974) or
―ecological feminism‖ was for a time generally applied to any view that
combines environmental advocacy with feminist analysis. However,
because of the varieties of, and disagreements among, feminist theories,
the label may be too wide to be informative and has generally fallen from
use.

3.3 Disenchantment and the New Animism

An often overlooked source of ecological ideas is the work of the neo-

Marxist Frankfurt School of critical theory founded by Max Horkheimer
and Theodore Adorno (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969). While classical
Marxists regard nature as a resource to be transformed by human labour
and utilized for human purposes, Horkheimer and Adorno saw Marx
himself as representative of the problem of ―human alienation‖. At the
root of this alienation, they argue, is a narrow positivist conception of
rationality—which sees rationality as an instrument for pursuing
progress, power and technological control, and takes observation,
measurement and the application of purely quantitative methods to be
capable of solving all problems. Such a positivistic view of science
combines determinism with optimism. Natural processes as well as
human activities are seen to be predictable and manipulable. Nature
(and, likewise, human nature) is no longer mysterious, uncontrollable, or
fearsome. Instead, it is reduced to an object strictly governed by natural
laws, which therefore can be studied, known, and employed to our
benefit. By promising limitless knowledge and power, the positivism of
science and technology not only removes our fear of nature, the critical
theorists argue, but also destroys our sense of awe and wonder towards
it. That is to say, positivism ―disenchants‖ nature—along with everything
that can be studied by the sciences, whether natural, social or human.

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The progress in knowledge and material well-being may not be a bad
thing in itself, where the consumption and control of nature is a
necessary part of human life. However, the critical theorists argue that
the positivistic disenchantment of natural things (and, likewise, of human
beings—because they too can be studied and manipulated by science)
disrupts our relationship with them, encouraging the undesirable attitude
that they are nothing more than things to be probed, consumed and
dominated. According to the critical theorists, the oppression of ―outer
nature‖ (i.e., the natural environment) through science and technology is
bought at a very high price: the project of domination requires the
suppression of our own ―inner nature‖ (i.e., human nature)—e.g., human
creativity, autonomy, and the manifold needs, vulnerabilities and
longings at the centre of human life. To remedy such an alienation, the
project of Horkheimer and Adorno is to replace the narrow positivistic
and instrumentalist model of rationality with a more humanistic one, in
which the values of the aesthetic, moral, sensuous and expressive
aspects of human life play a central part. Thus, their aim is not to give up
our rational faculties or powers of analysis and logic. Rather, the
ambition is to arrive at a dialectical synthesis between Romanticism and
Enlightenment, to return to anti-deterministic values of freedom,
spontaneity and creativity.

In his later work, Adorno advocates a re-enchanting aesthetic attitude of

―sensuous immediacy‖ towards nature. Not only do we stop seeing
nature as primarily, or simply, an object of consumption, we are also able
to be directly and spontaneously acquainted with nature without
interventions from our rational faculties. According to Adorno, works of
art, like natural things, always involve an ―excess‖, something more than
their mere materiality and exchange value (see Vogel 1996, ch. 4.4 for a
detailed discussion of Adorno‘s views on art, labour and domination).
The re-enchantment of the world through aesthetic experience, he
argues, is also at the same time a re-enchantment of human lives and
purposes. Adorno‘s work remains largely unexplored in mainstream
environmental philosophy, although the idea of applying critical theory

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(embracing techniques of deconstruction, psychoanalysis and radical
social criticism) to both environmental issues and the writings of various
ethical and political theorists has spawned an emerging field of
―ecocritique‖ or ―eco-criticism‖ (Vogel 1996, Luke 1997, van Wyk 1997,
Dryzek 1997).

Some students of Adorno‘s work have argued that his account of the role
of ―sensuous immediacy‖ can be understood as an attempt to defend a
―legitimate anthropomorphism‖ that comes close to a weak form of
animism (Bernstein 2001, 196). Others, more radical, have claimed to
take inspiration from his notion of ―non-identity‖, which, they argue, can
be used as the basis for a deconstruction of the notion of nature and
perhaps even its elimination from eco-critical writing. For example,
Timothy Morton argues that ―putting something called Nature on a
pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what
patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic
admiration‖ (Morton 2007, 5), and that ―in the name of all that we value in
the idea of ‗nature‘, [ecocritique] thoroughly examines how nature is set
up as a transcendental, unified, independent category. Ecocritique does
not think that it is paradoxical to say, in the name of ecology itself: ‗down
with nature!‘ ‖ (ibid., 13).

It remains to be seen, however, whether the radical attempt to purge the

concept of nature from eco-critical work meets with success. Likewise, it
is unclear whether the dialectic project on which Horkheimer and Adorno
embarked is coherent, and whether Adorno, in particular, has a
consistent understanding of ―nature‖ and ―rationality‖ (see Eckersley
1992 and Vogel 1996, for a review of the Frankfurt School‘s thinking
about nature).

On the other hand, the new animists have been much inspired by the
serious way in which some indigenous peoples placate and interact with
animals, plants and inanimate things through ritual, ceremony and other
practices. According to the new animists, the replacement of traditional
animism (the view that personalized souls are found in animals, plants,
and other material objects) by a form of disenchanting positivism directly

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leads to an anthropocentric perspective, which is accountable for much
human destructiveness towards nature. In a disenchanted world, there is
no meaningful order of things or events outside the human domain, and
there is no source of sacredness or dread of the sort felt by those who
regard the natural world as peopled by divinities or demons (Stone
2006). When a forest is no longer sacred, there are no spirits to be
placated and no mysterious risks associated with clear-felling it. A
disenchanted nature is no longer alive. It commands no respect,
reverence or love. It is nothing but a giant machine, to be mastered to
serve human purposes. The new animists argue for reconceptualizing
the boundary between persons and non-persons. For them, ―living
nature‖ comprises not only humans, animals and plants, but also
mountains, forests, rivers, deserts, and even planets.

Whether the notion that a mountain or a tree is to be regarded as a

person is taken literally or not, the attempt to engage with the
surrounding world as if it consists of other persons might possibly
provide the basis for a respectful attitude to nature (see Harvey 2005 for
a popular account of the new animism). If disenchantment is a source of
environmental problems and destruction, then the new animism can be
regarded as attempting to re-enchant, and help to save, nature. More
poetically, David Abram has argued that a phenomenological approach
of the kind taken by Merleau-Ponty can reveal to us that we are part of
the ―common flesh‖ of the world, that we are in a sense the world
thinking itself (Abram 1995).

In her work, Freya Mathews has tried to articulate a version of animism

or panpsychism that captures ways in which the world (not just nature)
contains many kinds of consciousness and sentience. For her, there is
an underlying unity of mind and matter in that the world is a ―self-
realizing‖ system containing a multiplicity of other such systems (cf.
Næss). According to Mathews, we are meshed in communication, and
potential communication, with the ―One‖ (the greater cosmic self) and its
many lesser selves (Mathews 2003, 45–60). Materialism (the monistic
theory that the world consists purely of matter), she argues, is self-
defeating by encouraging a form of ―collective solipsism‖ that treats the

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world either as unknowable or as a social-construction (Mathews 2005,
12). Mathews also takes inspiration from her interpretation of the core
Daoist idea of wuwei as ―letting be‖ and bringing about change through
―effortless action‖. The focus in environmental management,
development and commerce should be on ―synergy‖ with what is already
in place rather than on demolition, replacement and disruption. Instead of
bulldozing away old suburbs and derelict factories, the synergistic
panpsychist sees these artefacts as themselves part of the living
cosmos, hence part of what is to be respected. Likewise, instead of
trying to eliminate feral or exotic plants and animals, and restore
environments to some imagined pristine state, ways should be found—
wherever possible—to promote synergies between the newcomers and
the older native populations in ways that maintain ecological flows and
promote the further unfolding and developing of ecological processes
(Mathews 2004). Panpsychism, Mathews argues, frees us from the
―ideological grid of capitalism‖, can reduce our desire for consumer
novelties, and can allow us and the world to grow old together with grace
and dignity.

In summary, if disenchantment is a source of environmentally destructive

or uncaring attitudes, then both the aesthetic and the animist/panpsychist
re-enchantment of the world are intended to offer an antidote to such
attitudes, and perhaps also inspirations for new forms of managing and
designing for sustainability.

3.4 Social Ecology and Bioregionalism

Apart from feminist-environmentalist theories and Næss‘s deep ecology,

Murray Bookchin‘s ―social ecology‖ has also claimed to be radical,
subversive, or countercultural (see Bookchin 1980, 1987, 1990).
Bookchin‘s version of critical theory takes the ―outer‖ physical world as
constituting what he calls ―first nature‖, from which culture or ―second
nature‖ has evolved. Environmentalism, on his view, is a social
movement, and the problems it confronts are social problems. While
Bookchin is prepared, like Horkheimer and Adorno, to regard (first)
nature as an aesthetic and sensuous marvel, he regards our intervention

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in it as necessary. He suggests that we can choose to put ourselves at
the service of natural evolution, to help maintain complexity and diversity,
diminish suffering and reduce pollution. Bookchin‘s social ecology
recommends that we use our gifts of sociability, communication and
intelligence as if we were ―nature rendered conscious‖, instead of turning
them against the very source and origin from which such gifts derive.
Exploitation of nature should be replaced by a richer form of life devoted
to nature‘s preservation.

John Clark has argued that social ecology is heir to a historical,

communitarian tradition of thought that includes not only the anarchist
Peter Kropotkin, but also the nineteenth century socialist geographer
Elisée Reclus, the eccentric Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes and the
latter‘s disciple, Lewis Mumford (Clark 1998). Ramachandra Guha has
described Mumford as ―the pioneer American social ecologist‖ (Guha
1996, 210). Mumford adopted a regionalist perspective, arguing that
strong regional centres of culture are the basis of ―active and securely
grounded local life‖ (Mumford 1944, 403). Like the pessimists in critical
theory, Mumford was worried about the emergence under industrialised
capitalism of a ―megamachine‖, one that would oppress and dominate
human creativity and freedom, and one that—despite being a human
product—operates in a way that is out of our control. While Bookchin is
more of a technological optimist than Mumford, both writers have
inspired a regional turn in environmental thinking. Bioregionalism gives
regionalism an environmental twist. This is the view that natural features
should provide the defining conditions for places of community, and that
secure and satisfying local lives are led by those who know a place, have
learned its lore and who adapt their lifestyle to its affordances by
developing its potential within ecological limits. Such a life, the
bioregionalists argue, will enable people to enjoy the fruits of self-
liberation and self-development (see the essays in List 1993, and the
book-length treatment in Thayer 2003, for an introduction to bioregional
thought).

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However, critics have asked why natural features should significant in
defining the places in which communities are to be built, and have
puzzled over exactly which natural features these should be—geological,
ecological, climatic, hydrological, and so on (see Brennan 1998b). If
relatively small, bioregional communities are to be home to flourishing
human societies, then a question also arises over the nature of the laws
and punishments that will prevail in them, and also of their integration
into larger regional and global political and economic groupings. For
anarchists and other critics of the predominant social order, a return to
self-governing and self-sufficient regional communities is often depicted
as liberating and refreshing. But for the skeptics, the worry remains that
the bioregional vision is politically over-optimistic and is open to the
establishment of illiberal, stifling and undemocratic communities. Further,
given its emphasis on local self-sufficiency and the virtue of life in small
communities, a question arises over whether bioregionalism is workable
in an overcrowded planet.

Deep ecology, feminism, and social ecology have had a considerable

impact on the development of political positions in regard to the
environment. Feminist analyses have often been welcomed for the
psychological insight they bring to several social, moral and political
problems. There is, however, considerable unease about the implications
of critical theory, social ecology and some varieties of deep ecology and
animism. Some writers have argued, for example, that critical theory is
bound to be ethically anthropocentric, with nature as no more than a
―social construction‖ whose value ultimately depends on human
determinations (see Vogel 1996). Others have argued that the demands
of ―deep‖ green theorists and activists cannot be accommodated within
contemporary theories of liberal politics and social justice (see Ferry
1998). A further suggestion is that there is a need to reassess traditional
theories such as virtue ethics, which has its origins in ancient Greek
philosophy (see the following section) within the context of a form of
stewardship similar to that earlier endorsed by Passmore (see Barry
1999). If this last claim is correct, then the radical activist need not, after
all, look for philosophical support in radical, or countercultural, theories of

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the sort deep ecology, feminism, bioregionalism and social ecology claim
to be (but see Zimmerman 1994).

4. Traditional Ethical Theories and Contemporary Environment

Ethics

Although environmental ethicists often try to distance themselves from

the anthropocentrism embedded in traditional ethical views (Passmore
1974, Norton 1991 are exceptions), they also quite often draw their
theoretical resources from traditional ethical systems and theories.
Consider the following two basic moral questions: (1) What kinds of thing
are intrinsically valuable, good or bad? (2) What makes an action right or
wrong?

Consequentialist ethical theories consider intrinsic ―value‖ / ―disvalue‖ or

―goodness‖ / ―badness‖ to be more fundamental moral notions than
―rightness‖ / ―wrongness‖, and maintain that whether an action is
right/wrong is determined by whether its consequences are good/bad.
From this perspective, answers to question (2) are informed by answers
to question (1). For instance, utilitarianism, a paradigm case of
consequentialism, regards pleasure (or, more broadly construed, the
satisfaction of interest, desire, and/or preference) as the only intrinsic
value in the world, whereas pain (or the frustration of desire, interest,
and/or preference) is the only intrinsic disvalue, and maintains that right
actions are those that would produce the greatest balance of pleasure
over pain.

As the utilitarian focus is the balance of pleasure and pain as such, the
question of to whom a pleasure or pain belongs is irrelevant to the
calculation and assessment of the rightness or wrongness of actions.
Hence, the eighteenth century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1789), and
now Peter Singer (1993), have argued that the interests of all the
sentient beings (i.e., beings who are capable of experiencing pleasure or
pain)—including non-human ones—affected by an action should be
taken equally into consideration in assessing the action. Furthermore,
rather like Routley (see section 2 above), Singer argues that the

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anthropocentric privileging of members of the species Homo sapiens is
arbitrary, and that it is a kind of ―speciesism‖ as unjustifiable as sexism
and racism. Singer regards the animal liberation movement as
comparable to the liberation movements of women and people of colour.
Unlike the environmental philosophers who attribute intrinsic value to the
natural environment and its inhabitants, Singer and utilitarians in general
attribute intrinsic value to the experience of pleasure or interest
satisfaction as such, not to the beings who have the experience.
Similarly, for the utilitarian, non-sentient objects in the environment such
as plant species, rivers, mountains, and landscapes, all of which are the
objects of moral concern for environmentalists, are of no intrinsic but at
most instrumental value to the satisfaction of sentient beings (see Singer
1993, Ch. 10). Furthermore, because right actions, for the utilitarian, are
those that maximize the overall balance of interest satisfaction over
frustration, practices such as whale-hunting and the killing of an elephant
for ivory, which cause suffering to non-human animals, might turn out to
be right after all: such practices might produce considerable amounts of
interest-satisfaction for human beings, which, on the utilitarian
calculation, outweigh the non-human interest-frustration involved. As the
result of all the above considerations, it is unclear to what extent a
utilitarian ethic can also be an environmental ethic. This point may not so
readily apply to a wider consequentialist approach, which attributes
intrinsic value not only to pleasure or satisfaction, but also to various
objects and processes in the natural environment.

Deontological ethical theories, in contrast, maintain that whether an

action is right or wrong is for the most part independent of whether its
consequences are good or bad. From the deontologist perspective, there
are several distinct moral rules or duties (e.g., ―not to kill or otherwise
harm the innocent‖, ―not to lie‖, ―to respect the rights of others‖, ―to keep
promises‖), the observance/violation of which is intrinsically right/wrong;
i.e., right/wrong in itself regardless of consequences. When asked to
justify an alleged moral rule, duty or its corresponding right, deontologists
may appeal to the intrinsic value of those beings to whom it applies. For
instance, ―animal rights‖ advocate Tom Regan (1983) argues that those
animals with intrinsic value (or what he calls ―inherent value‖) have the

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moral right to respectful treatment, which then generates a general moral
duty on our part not to treat them as mere means to other ends. We
have, in particular, a prima facie moral duty not to harm them. Regan
maintains that certain practices (such as sport or commercial hunting,
and experimentation on animals) violate the moral right of intrinsically
valuable animals to respectful treatment. Such practices, he argues, are
intrinsically wrong regardless of whether or not some better
consequences ever flow from them. Exactly which animals have intrinsic
value and therefore the moral right to respectful treatment? Regan‘s
answer is: those that meet the criterion of being the ―subject-of-a-life‖. To
be such a subject is a sufficient (though not necessary) condition for
having intrinsic value, and to be a subject-of-a-life involves, among other
things, having sense-perceptions, beliefs, desires, motives, memory, a
sense of the future, and a psychological identity over time.

Some authors have extended concern for individual well-being further,

arguing for the intrinsic value of organisms achieving their own good,
whether those organisms are capable of consciousness or not. Paul
Taylor‘s version of this view (1981 and 1986), which we might call
biocentrism, is a deontological example. He argues that each individual
living thing in nature—whether it is an animal, a plant, or a micro-
organism—is a ―teleological-center-of-life‖ having a good or well-being of
its own which can be enhanced or damaged, and that all individuals who
are teleological-centers-of life have equal intrinsic value (or what he calls
―inherent worth‖) which entitles them to moral respect. Furthermore,
Taylor maintains that the intrinsic value of wild living things generates a
prima facie moral duty on our part to preserve or promote their goods as
ends in themselves, and that any practices which treat those beings as
mere means and thus display a lack of respect for them are intrinsically
wrong. A more recent and biologically detailed defence of the idea that
living things have representations and goals and hence have moral worth
is found in Agar 2001. Unlike Taylor‘s egalitarian and deontological
biocentrism, Robin Attfield (1987) argues for a hierarchical view that
while all beings having a good of their own have intrinsic value, some of
them (e.g., persons) have intrinsic value to a greater extent. Attfield also
endorses a form of consequentialism which takes into consideration, and

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attempts to balance, the many and possibly conflicting goods of different
living things (also see Varner 1998 for a defense of biocentric
individualism with affinities to both consequentialist and deontological
approaches). However, some critics have pointed out that the notion of
biological good or well-being is only descriptive not prescriptive (see
Williams 1992 and O‘Neill 1993, Ch. 2). For instance, even if HIV has a
good of its own this does not mean that we ought to assign any positive
moral weight to the realization of that good.

More recently, the distinction between these two traditional approaches

has taken its own specific form of development in environmental
philosophy. Instead of pitting conceptions of value against conceptions of
rights, it has been suggested that there may be two different conceptions
of intrinsic value in play in discussion about environmental good and evil.
One the one side, there is the intrinsic value of states of affairs that are
to be promoted - and this is the focus of the consequentialist thinkers. On
the other (deontological) hand there is the intrinsic values of entities to
be respected (see Bradley 2006, McShane 2014). These two different
foci for the notion of intrinsic value still provide room for fundamental
argument between deontologists and consequentialist to continue, albeit
in a somewhat modified form.

Note that the ethics of animal liberation or animal rights and biocentrism
are both individualistic in that their various moral concerns are directed
towards individuals only—not ecological wholes such as species,
populations, biotic communities, and ecosystems. None of these is
sentient, a subject-of-a-life, or a teleological-center-of-life, but the
preservation of these collective entities is a major concern for many
environmentalists. Moreover, the goals of animal liberationists, such as
the reduction of animal suffering and death, may conflict with the goals of
environmentalists. For example, the preservation of the integrity of an
ecosystem may require the culling of feral animals or of some indigenous
animal populations that threaten to destroy fragile habitats. So there are
disputes about whether the ethics of animal liberation is a proper branch
of environmental ethics (see Callicott 1980, 1988, Sagoff 1984,
Jamieson 1998, Crisp 1998 and Varner 2000).

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Criticizing the individualistic approach in general for failing to
accommodate conservation concerns for ecological wholes, J. Baird
Callicott (1980) once advocated a version of land-ethical holism which
takes Leopold‘s statement ―A thing is right when it tends to preserve the
integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it
tends otherwise‖ to be the supreme deontological principle. In this
theory, the Earth‘s biotic community per se is the sole locus of intrinsic
value, whereas the value of its individual members is merely instrumental
and dependent on their contribution to the ―integrity, stability, and beauty‖
of the larger community. A straightforward implication of this version of
the land ethic is that an individual member of the biotic community ought
to be sacrificed whenever that is needed for the protection of the holistic
good of the community. For instance, Callicott maintains that if culling a
white-tailed deer is necessary for the protection of the holistic biotic
good, then it is a land-ethical requirement to do so. But, to be consistent,
the same point also applies to human individuals because they are also
members of the biotic community. Not surprisingly, the misanthropy
implied by Callicott‘s land-ethical holism was widely criticized and
regarded as a reductio of the position (see Aiken (1984), Kheel (1985),
Ferré (1996), and Shrader-Frechette (1996)). Tom Regan (1983, p.362),
in particular, condemned the holistic land ethic‘s disregard of the rights of
the individual as ―environmental fascism‖.

Under pressure from the charge of ecofascism and misanthropy, Callicott

(1989 Ch. 5, and 1999, Ch. 4) later revised his position and now
maintains that the biotic community (indeed, any community to which we
belong) as well as its individual members (indeed, any individual who
shares with us membership in some common community) all have
intrinsic value. To further distance himself from the charge of ecofascism,
Callicott introduced explicit principles which prioritize obligations to
human communities over those to natural ones. He called these
―second-order‖ principles for specifying the conditions under which the
land ethic‘s holistic and individualistic obligations were to be ranked. As
he put it:

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... obligations generated by membership in more venerable and intimate
communities take precedence over these generated in more recently-
emerged and impersonal communities... The second second-order
principle is that stronger interests (for lack of a better word) generate
duties that take precedence over duties generated by weaker interests.
(Callicott 1999, 76)

Lo (in Lo 2001) provides an overview and critique of Callicott‘s changing

position over two decades, while Ouderkirk and Hill (eds.) 2002 gives an
overview of debates between Callicott and others concerning the
metaethical and metaphysical foundations for the land ethic and also its
historical antecedents. As Lo pointed out, the final modified version of
the land ethic needs more than two second-order principles, since a
third-order principle is needed to specify Callicott‘s implicit view that the
second second-order principle generally countermands the first one
when they come into conflict (Lo 2001, 345). In his most recent work,
Callicott follows Lo‘s suggestion, while cautioning against aiming for too
much precision in specifying the demands of the land ethic (Callicott
2013, 66 - 7).

The controversy surrounding Callicott‘s original position, however, has

inspired efforts in environmental ethics to investigate possibilities of
attributing intrinsic value to ecological wholes, not just their individual
constituent parts. Following in Callicott‘s footsteps, and inspired by
Næss‘s relational account of value, Warwick Fox has championed a
theory of ―responsive cohesion‖ which apparently gives supreme moral
priority to the maintenance of ecosystems and the biophysical world (Fox
2007). It remains to be seen if this position escapes the charges of
misanthropy and totalitarianism laid against earlier holistic and relational
theories of value.

Individual natural entities (whether sentient or not, living or not), Andrew

Brennan (1984, 2014) argues, are not designed by anyone to fulfill any
purpose and therefore lack ―intrinsic function‖ (i.e., the function of a thing
that constitutes part of its essence or identity conditions). This, he
proposes, is a reason for thinking that individual natural entities should

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not be treated as mere instruments, and thus a reason for assigning
them intrinsic value. Furthermore, he argues that the same moral point
applies to the case of natural ecosystems, to the extent that they lack
intrinsic function. In the light of Brennan‘s proposal, Eric Katz (1991 and
1997) argues that all natural entities, whether individuals or wholes, have
intrinsic value in virtue of their ontological independence from human
purpose, activity, and interest, and maintains the deontological principle
that nature as a whole is an ―autonomous subject‖ which deserves moral
respect and must not be treated as a mere means to human ends.
Carrying the project of attributing intrinsic value to nature to its ultimate
form, Robert Elliot (1997) argues that naturalness itself is a property in
virtue of possessing which all natural things, events, and states of affairs,
attain intrinsic value. Furthermore, Elliot argues that even a
consequentialist, who in principle allows the possibility of trading off
intrinsic value from naturalness for intrinsic value from other sources,
could no longer justify such kind of trade-off in reality. This is because
the reduction of intrinsic value due to the depletion of naturalness on
Earth, according to him, has reached such a level that any further
reduction of it could not be compensated by any amount of intrinsic value
generated in other ways, no matter how great it is.

As the notion of ―natural‖ is understood in terms of the lack of human

contrivance and is often opposed to the notion of ―artifactual‖, one much
contested issue is about the value of those parts of nature that have
been interfered with by human artifice—for instance, previously
degraded natural environments which have been humanly restored.
Based on the premise that the properties of being naturally evolved and
having a natural continuity with the remote past are ―value adding‖ (i.e.,
adding intrinsic value to those things which possess those two
properties), Elliot argues that even a perfectly restored environment
would necessarily lack those two value-adding properties and therefore
be less valuable than the originally undegraded natural environment.
Katz, on the other hand, argues that a restored nature is really just an
artifact designed and created for the satisfaction of human ends, and that

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the value of restored environments is merely instrumental. However,
some critics have pointed out that advocates of moral dualism between
the natural and the artifactual run the risk of diminishing the value of
human life and culture, and fail to recognize that the natural
environments interfered with by humans may still have morally relevant
qualities other than pure naturalness (see Lo 1999). Two other issues
central to this debate are that the key concept ―natural‖ seems
ambiguous in many different ways (see Hume 1751, App. 3; Mill 1874;
Brennan [1988] 2014; Ch. 6; Elliot 1997, Ch. 4), and that those who
argue that human interference reduces the intrinsic value of nature seem
to have simply assumed the crucial premise that naturalness is a source
of intrinsic value. Some thinkers maintain that the natural, or the ―wild‖
construed as that which ―is not humanized‖ (Hettinger and Throop 1999,
p. 12) or to some degree ―not under human control‖ (ibid., p. 13) is
intrinsically valuable. Yet, as Bernard Williams points out (Williams
1992), we may, paradoxically, need to use our technological powers to
retain a sense of something not being in our power. The retention of wild
areas may thus involve planetary and ecological management to
maintain, or even ―imprison‖ such areas (Birch 1990), raising a question
over the extent to which national parks and wilderness areas are free
from our control. An important message underlying the debate, perhaps,
is that even if ecological restoration is achievable, it might have been
better to have left nature intact in the first place.

Given the significance of the concept of naturalness in these debates, it

is perhaps surprising that there has been relatively little analysis of that
concept itself in environmental thought. In his pioneering work on the
ethics of the environment, Holmes Rolston has worked with a number of
different conceptions of the natural (see Brennan and Lo 2010, pp.116–
23, for an analysis three senses of the term "natural" that may be found
in Rolston‘s work). An explicit attempt to provide a conceptual analysis of
a different sort is found in Siipi 2008, while an account of naturalness
linking this to historical narratives of place is given in O‘Neill, Holland and
Light 2008, ch. 8 (compare the response to this in Siipi 2011).

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As an alternative to consequentialism and deontology both of which
consider ―thin‖ concepts such as ―goodness‖ and ―rightness‖ as essential
to morality, virtue ethics proposes to understand morality—and assess
the ethical quality of actions—in terms of ―thick‖ concepts such as
―kindness‖, ―honesty‖, ―sincerity‖ and ―justice‖. As virtue ethics speaks
quite a different language from the other two kinds of ethical theory, its
theoretical focus is not so much on what kinds of things are good/bad, or
what makes an action right/wrong. Indeed, the richness of the language
of virtues, and the emphasis on moral character, is sometimes cited as a
reason for exploring a virtues-based approach to the complex and
always-changing questions of sustainability and environmental care (Hill
1983, Wensveen 2000, Sandler 2007). One question central to virtue
ethics is what the moral reasons are for acting one way or another. For
instance, from the perspective of virtue ethics, kindness and loyalty
would be moral reasons for helping a friend in hardship. These are quite
different from the deontologist‘s reason (that the action is demanded by a
moral rule) or the consequentialist reason (that the action will lead to a
better over-all balance of good over evil in the world). From the
perspective of virtue ethics, the motivation and justification of actions are
both inseparable from the character traits of the acting agent.
Furthermore, unlike deontology or consequentialism the moral focus of
which is other people or states of the world, one central issue for virtue
ethics is how to live a flourishing human life, this being a central concern
of the moral agent himself or herself. ―Living virtuously‖ is Aristotle‘s
recipe for flourishing. Versions of virtue ethics advocating virtues such as
―benevolence‖, ―piety‖, ―filiality‖, and ―courage‖, have also been held by
thinkers in the Chinese Confucian tradition. The connection between
morality and psychology is another core subject of investigation for virtue
ethics. It is sometimes suggested that human virtues, which constitute an
important aspect of a flourishing human life, must be compatible with
human needs and desires, and perhaps also sensitive to individual
affection and temperaments. As its central focus is human flourishing as
such, virtue ethics may seem unavoidably anthropocentric and unable to
support a genuine moral concern for the non-human environment. But
just as Aristotle has argued that a flourishing human life requires
friendships and one can have genuine friendships only if one genuinely

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values, loves, respects, and cares for one‘s friends for their own sake,
not merely for the benefits that they may bring to oneself, some have
argued that a flourishing human life requires the moral capacities to
value, love, respect, and care for the non-human natural world as an end
in itself (see O‘Neill 1992, O‘Neill 1993, Barry 1999).

Supplementary Document:

Biodiversity Preservation

5. Wilderness, the Built Environment, Poverty and Politics

Despite the variety of positions in environmental ethics developed over

the last thirty years, they have focused mainly on issues concerned with
wilderness and the reasons for its preservation (see Callicott and Nelson
1998 for a collection of essays on the ideas and moral significance of
wilderness). The importance of wilderness experience to the human
psyche has been emphasized by many environmental philosophers.
Næss, for instance, urges us to ensure we spend time dwelling in
situations of intrinsic value, whereas Rolston seeks ―re-creation‖ of the
human soul by meditating in the wilderness. Likewise, the critical
theorists believe that aesthetic appreciation of nature has the power to
re-enchant human life. As wilderness becomes increasingly rare,
people‘s exposure to wild things in their natural state has become
reduced, and according to some authors this may reduce the chance of
our lives and other values being transformed as a result of interactions
with nature. An argument by Bryan Norton draws attention to an analogy
with music. Someone exposed for the first time to a new musical genre
may undergo a transformation in musical preferences, tastes and values
as a result of the experience (Norton 1987). Such a transformation can
affect their other preferences and desires too, in both direct and indirect
ways (see Sarkar 2005, ch. 4, esp. pp. 82–7). In the attempt to preserve
opportunities for experiences that can change or enhance people‘s
valuations of nature, there has been a move since the early 2000s to find
ways of rewilding degraded environments, and even parts of cities
(Fraser 2009, Monbiot 2013).

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By contrast to the focus on wild places, relatively little attention has been
paid to the built environment, although this is the one in which most
people spend most of their time. In post-war Britain, for example, cheaply
constructed new housing developments were often poor replacements
for traditional communities. They have been associated with lower
amounts of social interaction and increased crime compared with the
earlier situation. The destruction of highly functional high-density
traditional housing, indeed, might be compared with the destruction of
highly diverse ecosystems and biotic communities. Likewise, the loss of
the world‘s huge diversity of natural languages has been mourned by
many, not just professionals with an interest in linguistics. Urban and
linguistic environments are just two of the many ―places‖ inhabited by
humans. Some philosophical theories about natural environments and
objects have potential to be extended to cover built environments and
non-natural objects of several sorts (see King 2000, Light 2001, Palmer
2003, while Fox 2007 aims to include both built and natural environments
in the scope of a single ethical theory). Certainly there are many parallels
between natural and artificial domains: for example, many of the
conceptual problems involved in discussing the restoration of natural
objects also appear in the parallel context of restoring human-made
objects.

The focus on the value of wilderness and the importance of its

preservation has overlooked another important problem—namely that
lifestyles in which enthusiasms for nature rambles, woodland meditations
or mountaineering can be indulged demand a standard of living that is far
beyond the dreams of most of the world‘s population. Moreover, mass
access to wild places would likely destroy the very values held in high
esteem by the ―natural aristocrats‖, a term used by Hugh Stretton (1976)
to characterize the environmentalists ―driven chiefly by love of the
wilderness‖. Thus, a new range of moral and political problems open up,
including the environmental cost of tourist access to wilderness areas,
and ways in which limited access could be arranged to areas of natural

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beauty and diversity, while maintaining the individual freedoms central to
liberal democracies.

Lovers of wilderness sometimes consider the high human populations in

some developing countries as a key problem underlying the
environmental crisis. Rolston (1996), for instance, claims that (some)
humans are a kind of planetary ―cancer‖. He maintains that while
―feeding people always seems humane, ... when we face up to what is
really going on, by just feeding people, without attention to the larger
social results, we could be feeding a kind of cancer.‖ This remark is
meant to justify the view that saving nature should, in some
circumstances, have a higher priority than feeding people. But such a
view has been criticized for seeming to reveal a degree of misanthropy,
directed at those human beings least able to protect and defend
themselves (see Attfield 1998, Brennan 1998a). The empirical basis of
Rolston‘s claims has been queried by work showing that poor people are
often extremely good environmental managers (Martinez-Alier 2002).
Guha‘s worries about the elitist and ―missionary‖ tendencies of some
kinds of deep green environmentalism in certain rich western countries
can be quite readily extended to theorists such as Rolston (Guha 1999).
Can such an apparently elitist sort of wilderness ethics ever be
democratised? How can the psychically-reviving power of the wild
become available to those living in the slums of Calcutta or São Paolo?
These questions so far lack convincing answers.

Furthermore, the economic conditions which support the kind of

enjoyment of wilderness by Stretton‘s ―natural aristocrats‖, and more
generally the lifestyles of many people in the affluent countries, seem
implicated in the destruction and pollution which has provoked the
environmental turn in the first place. For those in the richer countries, for
instance, engaging in outdoor recreations usually involves the motor car.
Car dependency, however, is at the heart of many environmental
problems, a key factor in urban pollution, while at the same time central
to the economic and military activities of many nations and corporations,
for example securing and exploiting oil reserves. In an increasingly
crowded industrialised world, the answers to such problems are

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pressing. Any adequate study of this intertwined set of problems must
involve interdisciplinary collaboration among philosophers and theorists
in the social as well as the natural sciences.

Connections between environmental destruction, unequal resource

consumption, poverty and the global economic order have been
discussed by political scientists, development theorists, geographers and
economists as well as by philosophers. Links between economics and
environmental ethics are particularly well established. Work by Mark
Sagoff (1988), for instance, has played a major part in bringing the two
fields together. He argues that ―as citizens rather than consumers‖
people are concerned about values, which cannot plausibly be reduced
to mere ordered preferences or quantified in monetary terms. Sagoff‘s
distinction between people as consumers and people as citizens was
intended to blunt the use of cost-benefit analysis as the final arbiter in
discussions about nature‘s value. Of course, spouses take out insurance
on each others‘ lives. We pay extra for travel insurance to cover the cost
of cancellation, illness, or lost baggage. Such actions are economically
rational. They provide us with some compensation in case of loss. No-
one, however, would regard insurance payments as replacing lost limbs,
a loved one or even the joys of a cancelled vacation. So it is for nature,
according to Sagoff. We can put dollar values on a stand of timber, a
reef, a beach, a national park. We can measure the travel costs, the
money spent by visitors, the real estate values, the park fees and all the
rest. But these dollar measures do not tell us the value of nature any
more than my insurance premiums tell you the value of a human life
(also see Shrader-Frechette 1987, O‘Neill 1993, and Brennan 1995). If
Sagoff is right, cost-benefit analysis of the kind mentioned in section 5
above cannot be a basis for an ethic of sustainability any more than for
an ethic of biodiversity. The potentially misleading appeal to economic
reason used to justify the expansion of the corporate sector has also
come under critical scrutiny by globalisation theorists (see Korten 1999).
These critiques do not aim to eliminate economics from environmental
thinking; rather, they resist any reductive, and strongly anthropocentric,
tendency to believe that all social and environmental problems are
fundamentally or essentially economic.

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Other interdisciplinary approaches link environmental ethics with biology,
policy studies, public administration, political theory, cultural history,
post-colonial theory, literature, geography, and human ecology (for some
examples, see Norton, Hutchins, Stevens, Maple 1995, Shrader-
Frechette 1984, Gruen and Jamieson (eds.) 1994, Karliner 1997,
Diesendorf and Hamilton 1997, Schmidtz and Willott 2002). Many
assessments of issues concerned with biodiversity, ecosystem health,
poverty, environmental justice and sustainability look at both human and
environmental issues, eschewing in the process commitment either to a
purely anthropocentric or purely ecocentric perspective (see Hayward
and O‘Neill 1997, and Dobson 1999 for collections of essays looking at
the links between sustainability, justice, welfare and the distribution of
environmental goods). The future development of environmental ethics
depend on these, and other interdisciplinary synergies, as much as on its
anchorage within philosophy.

6. Sustainability and Climate Change

The Convention on Biological Diversity discussed in section 5 was

influenced by Our Common Future, an earlier United Nations document
on sustainability produced by the World Commission on Environment
and Development (WCED 1987). The commission was chaired by Gro
Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway at the time, and the report
is sometimes known as the Brundtland Report. This report noted the
increasing tide of evidence that planetary systems vital to supporting life
on Earth were under strain. The key question it raised is whether it is
equitable to sacrifice options for future well-being in favour of supporting
current lifestyles, especially the comfortable, and sometimes lavish,
forms of life enjoyed in the rich countries. As Bryan Norton puts it, the
world faces a global challenge to see whether different human groups,
with widely varying perspectives, can perhaps ―accept responsibility to
maintain a non-declining set of opportunities based on possible uses of
the environment‖. The preservation of options for the future can be
readily linked to notions of equity if it is agreed that ―the future ought not

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to face, as a result of our actions today, a seriously reduced range of
options and choices, as they try to adapt to the environment that they
face‖ (Norton 2001: 97). Note that references to ―the future‖ need not be
limited to the future of human beings only. In keeping with the non-
anthropocentric focus of much environmental philosophy, a care for
sustainability and biodiversity can embrace a care for opportunities
available to non-human living things.

However, when the concept ―sustainable development‖ was first

articulated in the Brundtland Report, the emphasis was clearly
anthropocentric. In face of increasing evidence that planetary systems
vital to life-support were under strain, the concept of sustainable
development is constructed in the report to encourage certain globally
coordinated directions and types of economic and social development.
The report defines ―sustainable development‖ in the following way:

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the

present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

1. The concept of ―needs‖, in particular the essential needs

of the world‘s poor, to which overriding priority should be
given; and
2. The idea of limitations imposed by the state of
technology and social organization on the environment‘s
ability to meet present and future needs.

Thus the goals of economic and social development must be defined in

terms of sustainability in all countries—developed or developing, market-
oriented or centrally planned. Interpretations will vary, but must share
certain general features and must flow from a consensus on the basic
concept of sustainable development and on a broad strategic framework
for achieving it. (WCED 1987, Ch. 2, paragraphs 1–2)

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The report goes on to argue that ―the industrial world has already used
much of the planet‘s ecological capital. This inequality is the planet‘s
main ‗environmental‘ problem; it is also its main ‗development‘ problem‖
(WCED 1987, Overview, paragraph 17). In the concept of sustainable
development the report combines the resource economist‘s notion of
―sustainable yield‖ with the recognition that developing countries of the
world are entitled to economic growth and prosperity. The notion of
sustainable yield involves thinking of forests, rivers, oceans and other
ecosystems, including the natural species living in them, as a stock of
―ecological capital‖ from which all kinds of goods and services flow.
Provided the flow of such goods and services does not reduce the
capacity of the capital itself to maintain its productivity, the use of the
systems in question is regarded as sustainable. Thus, the report argues
that ―maximum sustainable yield must be defined after taking into
account system-wide effects of exploitation‖ of ecological capital (WCED
1987, Ch. 2, paragraph 11).

There are clear philosophical, political and economic precursors to the

Brundtland concept of sustainability. For example, John Stuart Mill
(1848, IV. 6. 1) distinguished between the ―stationary state‖ and the
―progressive state‖ and argued that at the end of the progressive state
lies the stationary state, since ―the increase of wealth is not boundless‖.
Mill also recognized a debt to the gloomy prognostications of Thomas
Malthus, who had conjectured that population tends to increase
geometrically while food resources at best increase only arithmetically,
so that demand for food will inevitably outstrip the supply (see Milgate
and Stimson 2009, Ch. 7, and the discussion of Malthus in the Political
Economy section of the entry on Mill in the Spring 2016 Edition).
Reflection on Malthus led Mill to argue for restraining human population
growth:

Even in a progressive state of capital, in old countries, a conscientious or

prudential restraint on population is indispensable, to prevent the
increase of numbers from outstripping the increase of capital, and the
condition of the classes who are at the bottom of society from being
deteriorated (Mill 1848, IV. 6. 1).

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Such warnings resonate with more recent pessimism about increasing
human population and its impact on the poorest people, as well as on
loss of biodiversity, fresh water scarcity, overconsumption and climate
change. In their controversial work The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne
Ehrlich, argue that without restrictions on population growth, including
the imposition of mandatory birth control, the world faced ―mass
starvation‖ in the short term (Ehrlich 1968). In a subsequent defence of
their early work, the Ehrlichs declared that the most serious flaw in their
original analysis ―was that it was much too optimistic about the future‖,
and comment that ―Since The Bomb was written, increases in
greenhouse gas flows into the atmosphere, a consequence of the near
doubling of the human population and the near tripling of global
consumption, indicate that the results will likely be catastrophic climate
disruption caused by greenhouse heating‖ (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2009, 66).
It was also in 1968 that Garrett Hardin published his much cited article
on the ―tragedy of the commons‖ showing that common resources are
always subject to degradation and extinction in the face of the rational
pursuit of self interest. For Hardin, the increasing pressure on shared
resources, and increasing pollution, are inevitable results of the fact that
―there is no technical solution to the population problem‖ (Hardin 1968).
The problem may be analysed from the perspective of the so-called
prisoner‘s dilemma (also see the free rider problem). Despite the
pessimism of writers at the time, and the advocacy of setting limits to
population growth, there was also an optimism that echoes Mill‘s own
view that a ―stationary state‖ would not be one of misery and decline, but
rather one in which humans could aspire to more equitable distribution of
available and limited resources. This is clear not only among those who
recognize limits to economic growth (Meadows et al. 1972) but also
among those who champion the move to a steady state economy (Daly
1991) or at least want to see more account taken of ecology in
economics (Norgaard 1994).

The Brundtland report puts less emphasis on limits than do Mill, Malthus
and these more recent writers. It depicts sustainability as a challenge
and opportunity for the world to become more socially, politically and
environmentally fair. In pursuit of intergenerational justice, it suggests

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that there should be new human rights added to the standard list, for
example, that ―All human beings have the fundamental right to an
environment adequate for their health and well being‖ (WCED 1987,
Annexe 1, paragraph 1). The report also argues that ―The enjoyment of
any right requires respect for the similar rights of others, and recognition
of reciprocal and even joint responsibilities. States have a responsibility
towards their own citizens and other states‖ (ibid., chapter 12, paragraph
83). Since the report‘s publication, many writers have supported and
defended the view that global and economic justice require that nations
which had become wealthy through earlier industrialization and
environmental exploitation should allow less developed nations similar or
equivalent opportunities for development especially in term of access to
environmental resources (Redclift 2005). As intended by the report the
idea of sustainable development has become strongly integrated into the
notion of environmental conservation. The report has also set the scene
for a range of subsequent international conferences, declarations, and
protocols many of them maintaining the emphasis on the prospects for
the future of humanity, rather than considering sustainability in any wider
sense.

Some early commentators on the notion of sustainable development

have been critical of the way the notion mixes together moral ideas of
justice and fairness with technical ideas in economics. The objection is
that sustainability as, in part, an economic and scientific notion, should
not be fused with evaluative ideals (Beckerman 1994). This objection has
not generally been widely taken up. Mark Sagoff has observed that
environmental policy ―is most characterized by the opposition between
instrumental values and aesthetic and moral judgments and convictions‖
(Sagoff 2004: 20). Some non-anthropocentric environmental thinkers
have found the language of economics unsatisfactory in its implications
since it already appears to assume a largely instrumental view of nature.
The use of notions such as ―asset‖, ―capital‖ and even the word
―resources‖ in connection with natural objects and systems has been
identified by some writers as instrumentalizing natural things which are in
essence wild and free. The objection is that such language promotes the
tendency to think of natural things as mere resources for humans or as

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raw materials with which human labour could be mixed, not only to
produce consumable goods, but also to generate human ownership
(Plumwood 1993, Sagoff 2004). If natural objects and systems have
intrinsic value independent of their possible use for humans, as many
environmental philosophers have argued, then a policy approach to
sustainability needs to consider the environment and natural things not
only in instrumental and but also in intrinsic terms to do justice to the
moral standing that many people believe such items possess. Despite its
acknowledgment of there being ―moral, ethical, cultural, aesthetic, and
purely scientific reasons for conserving wild beings‖ (WCED 1987,
Overview, paragraph 53), the strongly anthropocentric and instrumental
language used throughout the Brundtland report in articulating the notion
of sustainable development can be criticised for defining the notion too
narrowly, leaving little room for addressing sustainability questions
directly concerning the Earth‘s environment and its non-human
inhabitants: should, and if so, how should, human beings reorganise their
ways of life and the social-political structures of their communities to
allow sustainability and equity not only for all humans but also for the
other species on the planet?

The preservation concern for nature and non-human species is

addressed to some extent by making a distinction between weaker and
stronger conceptions of sustainability (Beckerman 1995). The distinction
emerged from considering the question: what exactly does sustainable
development seek to sustain? Is it the flow of goods and services from
world markets that is to be maintained, or is it the current—or some
future—level of consumption? In answering such questions, proponents
of weak sustainability argue that it is acceptable to replace natural capital
with human-made capital provided that the latter has equivalent
functions. If, for example, plastic trees could produce oxygen, absorb
carbon and support animal and insect communities, then they could
replace the real thing, and a world with functionally equivalent artificial
trees would seem just as good as one with real or natural trees in it. For
weak sustainability theorists, the aim of future development should be to
maintain a consistently productive stock of capital on which to draw,
while not insisting that some portion of that capital be natural. Strong

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sustainability theorists, by contrast, generally resist the substitution of
human for natural capital, insisting that a critical stock of natural things
and processes be preserved. By so doing, they argue, we maintain
stocks of rivers, forests and biodiverse systems, hence providing
maximum options—options in terms of experience, appreciation, values,
and ways of life—for the future human inhabitants of the planet (Norton
2005). The Brundtland report can also be seen as advocating a form of
strong sustainability in so far as it recommends that a ―first priority is to
establish the problem of disappearing species and threatened
ecosystems on political agendas as a major resource issue‖ (ibid.,
chapter 6, paragraph 57). Furthermore, despite its instrumental and
economic language, the report in fact endorses a wider moral
perspective on the status of and our relation to nature and non-human
species, evidenced by its statement that ―the case for the conservation of
nature should not rest only with development goals. It is part of our moral
obligation to other living beings and future generations‖ (WCED 1987,
chapter 2, paragraph 55). Implicit in the statement is not only a strong
conception of sustainability but also a non-anthropocentric conception of
the notion. Over time, strong sustainability has come to be focused not
only on the needs of human and other living things but also on their
rights (Redclift 2004, 218). In a further development, the discourses on
forms of sustainability have generally given way in the last decade to a
more ambiguous usage, in which the term ―sustainability‖ functions to
bring people into a debate rather than setting out a clear definition of the
terms of the debate itself. As globalization leads to greater integration of
world economies, the world after the Brundtland report has seen greater
fragmentation among viewpoints, where critics of globalization have
generally used the concept of sustainability in a plurality of different ways
(Sneddon, Howarth and Norgaard 2006). Some have argued that
―sustainability‖, just like the word ―nature‖ itself, has come to mean very
different things, carrying different symbolic meaning for different groups,
and reflecting very different interests (Redclift 2004, 220). For better or
for worse, such ambiguity can on occasion allow different parties in
negotiations to claim a measure of agreement.

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The preservation of opportunities to live well, or at least to have a
minimally acceptable level of well being, is at the heart of population
ethics and many contemporary conceptions of sustainability. Many
people believe such opportunities for the existing younger generations,
and also for the yet to arrive future generations, to be under threat from
continuing environmental destruction, including loss of fresh water
resources, continued clearing of wild areas and a changing climate. Of
these, climate change has come to prominence as an area of intense
policy and political debate, to which applied philosophers and ethicists
have much to contribute. An early exploration of the topic by John
Broome shows how the economics of climate change could not be
divorced from considerations of intergenerational justice and ethics
(Broome 1992), and this has set the scene for subsequent discussions
and analyses. More than a decade later, when Stephen Gardiner
analyses the state of affairs surrounding climate change in an article
entitled ―A Perfect Moral Storm‖ (Gardiner 2006), his starting point is also
that ethics plays a fundamental role in all discussions of climate policy.
But he argues that even if difficult ethical and conceptual questions
facing climate change (such as the so-called ―non-identity problem‖
along with the notion of historic injustices) could be answered, it would
still be close to politically and socially impossible to formulate, let alone
to enforce, policies and action plans to deal effectively with climate
change. This is due to the multi-faceted nature of a problem that involves
vast numbers of agents and players. At a global level, there is first of all
the practical problem of motivating shared responsibilities (see the entry
on moral motivation) in part due to the dispersed nature of greenhouse
gas emissions which makes the effects of increasing levels of
atmospheric carbon and methane not always felt most strongly in the
regions where they originate. Add to this the fact that there is an un-
coordinated and also dispersed network of agents—both individual and
corporate—responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, and that there
are no effective institutions that can control and limit them. But this tangle
of issues constitutes, Gardiner argues, only one strand in the skein of
quandaries that confronts us. There is also the fact that by and large only
future generations will carry the brunt of the impacts of climate change,
explaining why current generations have no strong incentive to act.

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Finally, it is evident that our current mainstream political, economic, and
ethical models are not up to the task of reaching global consensus, and
in many cases not even national consensus, on how best to design and
implement fair climate policies.

These considerations lead Gardiner to take a pessimistic view of the

prospects for progress on climate issues. His view includes pessimism
about technical solutions, such as geoengineering as the antidote to
climate problems, echoing the concerns of others that further domination
of and large scale interventions in nature may turn out to be a greater
evil than enduring a climate catastrophe (Gardiner 2011, ch 11,
Jamieson 1996). A key point in Gardiner‘s analysis is that the problem of
climate change involves a tangle of issues, the complexity of which
conspires to encourage buck-passing, weakness of will, distraction and
procrastination , ―mak[ing] us extremely vulnerable to moral corruption‖
(ibid., 397; cf. Gardiner 2011; also see the concept of ―wicked problem‖
in Brennan 2004). Because of the grave risk of serious harms to future
generations, our failure to take timely mitigating actions on climate isseus
can be seen as a serious moral failing, especially in the light of our
current knowledge and understanding of the problem. Summarizing
widespread frustration over the issue, Rolston writes: ―All this inability to
act effectively in the political arena casts a long shadow of doubt on
whether, politically or technologically, much less ethically, we humans
are anywhere near being smart enough to manage the planet‖ (Rolston
2012, 216). In the face of such pessimism about the prospects for
securing any action to combat climate change other writers have
cautioned against giving in to defeatism and making self-fulfilling
prophecies. These latter behaviours are always a temptation when we
confront worrying truths and insufficient answers. Whatever the future
holds, many thinkers now believe that solving the problems of climate
change is an essential ingredient in any credible form of sustainable
development and that the alternative to decisive action may result in the
diminution not only of nature and natural systems, but also of human

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dignity itself (see Nanda 2011, especially chapters by Heyd, Balafrej,
Gutrich and Brennan and Lo).17

17
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental/#IntChaEnvEth

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REFERENCE:

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