Refounding Environmental Ethics
Subtitle
Pragmatism, Principle, and Practice
Providing a bold and original rethinking of environmental ethics, Ben Minteer's "Refounding Environmental Ethics" will help ethicists and their allies resolve critical debates in environmental policy and conservation practice. Minteer considers the implications of John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy for environmental ethics, politics and practice. He provides a new and compelling intellectual foundation for the field — one that supports a more activist, collaborative and problem-solving philosophical enterprise. Combining environmental ethics, democratic theory, philosophical pragmatism and the environmental social sciences, Minteer makes the case for a more experimental, interdisciplinary and democratic style of environmental ethics — one that stands as an alternative to the field's historically dominant "nature-centered" outlook. Minteer also provides examples of his pragmatic approach in action, considering a wide range of application and issues, including invasive species, ecological research, biodiversity loss, protected area management and conservation under global climate change.
Bio
Ben A. Minteer is associate professor of environmental ethics and policy in the School of Life Sciences and is a senior sustainability scholar in the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. He is author of "The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America" and the editor of "Nature in Common."
Praise for this book
Minteer’s new book lives up to its title: 'Refounding Environmental Ethics.' [Minteer] builds his search for environmental values on a firm foundation in social science, which is essential to his pragmatist approach. He builds on Dewey's conception of democracy to deepen and broaden the intellectual base for environmental pragmatism, supporting a pluralistic way to determine and pursue environmental values, and he intertwines his argument with case studies and real situations. This book will be especially useful for environmental ethics classes...
Bryan G. Norton, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology
