POSSIBILITÀ E VALIDITÀ DELL'ETICA AMBIENTALE. UNA RIFLESSIONE CRITICA

Abstract

The Possibility and Legitimacy of Environmental Ethics. A Critical Survey Several environmental problems are currently seriously undermining the traditional belief that the moral community should be restricted to human beings only. New scientific theories, especially in the fields of biology, ethology, and ecology, together with recent scientific discoveries demonstrating how human activities are jeopardizing ecosystem services urge for a paradigmatic change in our moral convictions. Environmental ethics has taken up the challenge and opened an extremely urgent and inspiring call for philosophical research. This is the call for extending moral values and moral status to non-human and non-paradigmatic entities, regarding them as moral patients. I accepted this call with great enthusiasm and with a strong personal commitment to issues of extreme relevance for the global agenda. Moral value and moral standing express a variety of meanings and refer to different fields of study. This means that the two concepts pose different questions. Regarding the former notion – the value of nature – we should thoroughly answer three questions at least: ‘what is value?’, ‘what is the origin of value?’, and ‘what is of value?’. In reference to the latter – the moral status of nature – we should ask: ‘which entities should we consider?’, ‘what should we consider about these entities?’ and ‘how much weight should we give to these considerations?’. Most arguments on environmental ethics still conflate the two concepts and their relative questions. I claim that providing separate answers to the different questions behind the two concepts is a required step toward the rethinking of the way in which we should relate with nature, as well as the way we should handle matters of policy regulations concerning nature. Indeed, this is the only way to reserve to natural entities the same respect we owe to moral patients. The main aim of my research is to analyze the possibility and the legitimacy of a non-anthropocentric environmental ethic. In pursuing this aim, I primarily demonstrate the possibility and need to extend the status of moral patient beyond the ideal paradigmatic human being. I also provide an original categorization of several theoretical projects that have been proposed in the last few decades. In this perspective, I demonstrate the originality and relevance of environmental ethics in the broader contemporary philosophical debate. While its originality consists in the decentering of ethical reflection from an exclusively human scope, its relevance is based mainly on its questioning of the notions of moral value and moral status when applied to new categories of moral patients, thus leaving open the possibility to construct ethical systems able to respect them. Secondly, my study comprises a constructive critique of the most significant moral theories debated in the field and outlines a personal theoretical proposal for a new environmental ethic. My claim is that the refusal of ethical and ontological supremacy of human beings…