Ethics Today Research Articles

The Face of the Good Death: Euthanasia and Levinas

SOMETHING IS AMISSThe philosopher and medical ethicist Margaret P. Battin has published, adopting the term used in a well-known New York Times Magazine article about her life and work, 'wheelbarrows full' of book and articles championing the cause of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide since entering the debate in the early 1980s.1 It might be somewhat surprising, then, that she began her article on the topic for the 2003 Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics with the statement: 'Something is amiss with the debate over euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide'.2What makes this claim stand out is that those who support the legalisation of euthanasia, simply using this word from now on, tend to sound quite satisfied with a debate that they seem convinced they are winning or have effectively already won. Organisations in the UK such as the Campaign for Dignity in Dying champion statistics such as 82 per cent of the British population supporting a change in the law on assisted dying for terminally ill adults, rising to 86 per cent among the disabled and only falling to 79 per cent among those who identify as religious.3 The former chairwoman of that of that group, Margaret Branthwaite, expressed a common sentiment among campaigners when she stated that 'it's only a matter of time before it's legalised'.4 While rival organisations such as Care Not Killing marshal rather different statistics and the UK parliament recently rejected a proposed 'right to die' in England and Wales by a significant enough majority that the issue is unlikely to return for some time, the tone of campaigning in the legalisation movement remains that the march of history is on their side and inexorable. If it is only a matter of time, what, then, is amiss?According to Battin, the primary problem with the ongoing debate relates to established patterns of discourse in which the issue is posed in for-andagainst terms. While adversarial debate is vital for social and ethical issues that are 'just breaking open' - a situation where for-and-against analysis isolates, identifies, catalogues and critiques relevant elements - 'once a debate begins to mature, it becomes time to pursue attempts at resolution'.5 Rather than an interminable back and forth over already well-churned ground that promises at best to unearth only an occasional new subtlety, the call for the debate to move from infancy to maturity is a push for not only theoretical but practical consensus. The obvious obstruction to such a development is that the euthanasia debate barely merits its definite article, being highly stratified between a public debate where the strong majority support change and specialised debates in legal, political and medical circles where such consensus is lacking. For example, while the British Medical Association shifted its position on assisted dying to neutrality in 2005, it returned to opposition in 2006 and since then the proposal for adopting a neutral stance has been put to the vote and rejected a further five times.In such a situation, it is not uncommon to hear philosophers promoting their own block of the debate as the keystone around which harmony might be established. As Thomas Nagel wrote in his review of L.W. Sumner's Assisted Death: A Study in Ethics and Law, such a book:provides a superb example of the relevance of philosophy of public policy. The reason is that public policy governing treatment at the end of life is to a great extent shaped by philosophical confusions. It may not be too much to hope that a book such as this will help to rectify the situation.6Indeed, such a hope does not seem entirely unrealistic when sources ranging from the public-facing website NHS Choices to Medical Ethics Today: The BMA's Handbook of Ethics and Law do indeed engage with the issues and a vocabulary that was developed in the adversarial debates of philosophers. However, without giving too much credence to traditional divisions between analytic and continental philosophy, it is notable that both public and specialised discussions engage with a relatively limited spectrum of thought in terms of its provenance, style and range of references. …

Medical Ethics Today. The BMA’s Handbook of Ethics and Law

Medical Ethics Today. The BMA’s Handbook of Ethics and Law

Investigating the Mediating Effect of Ethical Climate on Organizational Justice and Burnout: A Study on Financial Sector

The literature suggests that ethical climate today is more critical in organizations to sustain positive attitudes and behaviours of employees. Ethical climate is considered to be highly relevant to the financial industry, since it enhances service-providers’ contact with customers. This paper examines the interaction between burnout and organizational justice as well as the mediating effect of ethical climate on this relationship. For this purpose, the data (N=543) was collected from the employees working in the financial services, operating in Istanbul. All research hypotheses including mediation were tested by multiple regression analyses to determine whether the conditions of mediation outlined by Baron and Kenny (1986) were addressed. Empirical results indicate that, ethical climate has a partial mediating effect on the relationship between employees’ organizational justice perception and burnout. This effect appears particularly for the dimension of distributive justice and depersonalization relation. It can be inferred from the findings that ethical climate plays an important role in governing the relationship between distributive justice and depersonalization. The findings do not show any mediating effect of ethical climate on procedural justice and burnout relation.

Triangulating an Ethos: Ethical Criticism, Novel Alterity, and Mori Ōgai's “Stereoscopic Vision”

This essay offers a new reading of a pivotal and controversial novella, “Gan” (“The Wild Geese,” 1911), by major modern Japanese writer Mori Ōgai. Scholars (such as Dennis Washburn and Shiokawa Tetsuya) have argued that Ōgai's formal experimentation and aesthetic ideals led him to discover deep flaws in the novel's capacity for mimesis. I agree, but not with their conclusions that he therefore abandoned the form. On the contrary, I suggest that it was the very power of the novel to hold competing conventions of representation in tension, and to work through the epistemic and ethical problems of perspective raised by the act of narration itself, that also epitomized the strengths of the genre for Ōgai. His work throughout his career engages readers in moving stories of ethically complex interactions, while at the same time demanding a reflexive critical consciousness that disrupts the very illusion of mimesis on which those stories depend for their effects. In “Gan” and other works, Ōgai does not merely fail to produce an aesthetically coherent world in the process of telling an ethically unsatisfying story. Rather, he explores the ethical and aesthetic limits of the conventions of novel narration itself, with unnerving success. “Gan” represents a culmination of his critical explorations of the ethics of novel form, and not the radical break from his former methodologies that has been theorized. This essay examines the method of self-conscious critique Ōgai employs in “Gan” to suggest its benefits as a model for contemporary ethical criticism in Western academia. Ōgai's reflexive experimentation in this work shuttles readers between absorption in novelistic pathos and reflection on its ethos, exploring both the possibilities and limitations of immanent ethical self-critique in the novel. Rather than taking up “Gan” as an object of ethical inquiry, then, I propose that we compare its reflexive mode of self-critique with the methods employed by ethical criticism today. Contemporary theories of literary ethics in the West often turn to the novel for its representations of alterity—its compelling portraits of others. They generally share a tacit assumption that the novel presents a site of immersive experience whose powerful pathos requires critical intervention to elucidate in ethical terms. Attending to the “ethics of self-consciousness” in modern Japanese novels might help Western critics rethink these assumptions, while at the same time it may revise conventional wisdom about Ōgai's career trajectory.

Sport and Authenticity

This article focuses on the concept of authenticity as understood by Heidegger, Taylor, and Ferrara and its relationship to sport. I divide Heidegger’s unusual terms (existentiales) from“Being and time” into the categories of authenticity and inauthenticity and provide examples of each from the field of sport. In further I analyse the ethical standpoint of authenticity which is in the centre of both ethical and sociological discourse today. Taylor´s conceptions of moral ideal and culture of authenticity are critically assessed. Ferrara´s models of authenticity appear to me as a good basis for various utilization in the area of sport. Finally, I argue for a mixed model of authenticity that includes both antagonistic and integrative elements.

Karl Barth and the liberation theology. Directions for Christian ethics today

Karl Barth and the liberation theology. Directions for Christian ethics today

“Admiration of Nelson Mandela, or The Laws of Reflection”: Translator's Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. Jacques Derrida, “Ethics and Politics Today,” in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 300.2. Mustapha Tlili, “The Meaning of an Act of Compassion and Rigor: Preface to the American Edition,” trans. Franklin Philip, in For Nelson Mandela, ed. Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili (New York, NY: Seaver, 1987), x. An earlier translation of “Admiration of Nelson Mandela,” by Mary Ann Caws and Isabelle Lorenz, appeared in this volume under the title “The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration,” and later in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. II, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Likewise, the French text was also published in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, vol. II (Paris: Galilée, 1987-2003). I will take this opportunity to note that my own effort has doubtless benefited from the consultation of Caws and Lorenz's translation, though many of my own decisions have, of course, for better or for worse, differed from theirs. I should also note, moreover, that behind the idea of retranslating this text there lay no polemical intention; in other words, this new translation is by no means intended to “replace” what is all in all, in my opinion, an excellent, a rigorous and an attentive, rendering.3. Jacques Derrida, “Racism's Last Word,” trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 290–9. For the debate that followed, see Ann McClintock and Rob Nixon, “No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida's ‘Le Dernier Mot du Racisme,’” Critical Inquiry 13 (1986): 140–54; and Jacques Derrida, “But, Beyond… (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon),” trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 13 (1986): 155–70.4. Tlili, “The Meaning of an Act of Compassion and Rigor,” xi.5. I note in passing that this gesture already anticipates Derrida's 1999–2001 seminar on the death penalty, in which he will attempt to ally, in a philosophically rigorous fashion, “the reasons of the heart” – compassion, for example – with those of principle, in other words, with “reason itself”; Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). See also Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 89f.6. Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 375.7. Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” trans. Avital Ronell with Christine Roulston, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 210; my emphasis.8. Cf. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 184. “Irony and history seem to be curiously linked to each other,” notes de Man, “but this can only be tackled when the complexities of what we could call performative rhetoric have been more thoroughly mastered.”9. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 84.

La Cura, An Open Source Cure for Cancer.

When I was diagnosed with brain cancer, I opened up my medical records to the Web, asking for help. The response was incredible: a global source of crowd-generated information about how to cure my own cancer. This work explores the many issues involved in handling such a peculiar form of information (including privacy, preserving the complexity of the human being, the reliability of responses, and more) and the outcomes of the overall process. "[Critique] does not aim to make possible metaphysics which becomes, in the end, science; its aim is to look as more as possible beyond and beside at the infinite work of freedom." -M. Foucault, "What is Illuminism" "Maybe today the most important objective is not to understand what we are, but to refuse it. We must imagine and build what we could be, to drop that political double bind which is constituted by the simultaneous individualization and totalitarianization of the structures of modern powers. The conclusion might be that the political, ethical, social and philosophical issue today is not to liberate individuals from the State and its institutions, but to free ourselves from the State and from the individualization which is bound to the State. We must promote new ways for subjectivity through the refusal of that kind of individuality which has been imposed to us for so many centuries." -M. Foucault, "Why Study Power: The Question of the Subject" (1).

Ethics in Corporate Social Responsibility

Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility are recognized as important concerns in making decision in all aspects of our life. And it's contributing to accelerate process of overall development of a nation. India being second most populous country in world, and have largest number of people in need of basic amenities call for more intensive efforts as part of such initiatives in health care space of nation. We all know that people engage in business to earn profit. However, making profit is not sole function of business. It performs number of social function as it is a part of society. It takes care of those who are instrumental in securing its existence and survival. Business ethics are nothing but application of ethics in business. It proves that business can be and have been ethical and still make profits. Today more and more interest is being given to application of ethical practices in business dealings and ethical implications of business. The paper delves into a comprehensive understanding of how Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility involves as concept and reason that encourage company in India to be socially responsible. Keywords - Corporate Social Responsibility, Economic growth, GDP, Amenity, health. I. Introduction In any organization, from top management to employees at all levels, ethics is considered as everybody's business. It is not just only achieving high levels of economic performance, but also to conduct one of business's most important social challenges, ethically. Ethics in business is nothing but do's and don'ts by business users in business. It is based on a set of moral and ethical values. These values must be absolute - that is, you must take them seriously enough to have priority over any human rationalization, weakness, ego, or personal faults. When all else fails, you will always look back to these core values to guide you or take you through. Unfortunately, life is not that easy and there's always disagreement about what values should reign supreme. A moral or ethical statement may assert that some particular action of certain kind is right or wrong, which may offer a distinction between good and bad characters or dispositions; thereof, may propound some principle from which more detailed judgments of these sorts might be inferred - instance one ought to always aim at general happiness or try to minimize total suffering of all sentient beings, or ... That it is right and proper for everyone to look after himself. All such statements express first order ethical judgments of different degrees of generality (Mackie, 1977). If we examine current literature on ethics, focus is on lines given by philosophers, academics and social critics. However, leaders, managers and engineers require more practical information about managing ethics. Ethical management in workplace holds tremendous benefit to all including engineers, managers, organizations and society. This is particularly true today when it is critical to understand and manage highly diverse groups, with different values at workplace and operating in globalize economic conditions of Socrates and Plato guidelines for ethical behavior (Moore, 2004). Ethics involves learning what is right or wrong, and then doing right -- but the right thing is not nearly as straightforward as conveyed. Most ethical dilemmas in workplace are not simply a matter of yes or no, on situation? Business Ethics denotes not only how business interacts with world at large, but also their one- on-one dealings with a single customer, resulting in business justification in terms of economic, ecological and social spheres. Today, we live in an age where businesses and society are more connected and interactive than ever before. The triple bottom line approach has been, and remains, a useful tool for integrating sustainability into business agenda. It has now become imperative that sustainability forms an integral part of strategic planning of contemporary business organization. To be precise, ethics is considered to be Science of Conduct.‖ Ethics includes fundamental ground rules by which we live our lives. Philosophers such as Socrates and Plato have given guidelines for ethical behavior. Many ethicists consider emerging ethical beliefs to be legal principles, i.e., what becomes an ethical guideline today is made into to a law, regulation or rule. Therefore following law of land is one of basic virtues of ethics.Infact, Values, which guide us how to behave, are moral values, values such as respect, honesty, fairness, responsibility (Spence, 2003). Many of

Cruelty and Austerity. Philip Hallie’s Categories of Ethical Thought and Today’s Greek Tragedy

In this paper, 20th-century ethicist Philip Hallie’s research on cruelty is outlined and explained in order to determine and discuss categories of thought that make cruelty attributable to social forms of agency. The semantic ambiguity of “cruelty” and its cognate “cruel” are acknowledged and also discussed, but Hallie’s understanding is upheld nonetheless as technically articulate and, above all, as reasonable. As such, his understanding can be utilised to interpret and assess in ethical terms the recent austerity policies pursued in many countries of the world after the 2008 economic crash, which was induced by unsustainable deregulated trade of financial assets, particularly of toxic assets. The case of Greece is examined as exemplary, referring especially to the Loan Agreements of May 2010 between the representatives of the Greek State and those of the Euro-area Member States under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund.

The egg, the vessels and the words.From Izdubar toAnswer to Job1For an imaging thinking

This essay on The Red Book seeks to underscore a characteristic specific to Jung's approach to psychoanalysis. In this book, and more generally, in all of his writings, Jung's thinking is based on his personal experience of the unconscious, in which he leaves himself open to progressive encounters. Some of them, in the years 1913-14 and 1929-30, particularly his meeting with the giant Izdubar, were quite threatening. As a result, he forged an original way of thinking that is qualified here as 'imaging' and 'emergent'. The Red Book served as the first vessel for theories Jung would later express. His way of thinking, with its failures and semi-successes, all of which are always temporary, of course, is compared to the art of the potter. The author shows the kinship between the formation of the main Jungian concepts and the teachings of the French poet, professor, and art critic Yves Bonnefoy. He also considers certain recurrent formal themes in the work of contemporary German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. Lastly, this epistemological study, constantly aware of the demands of Jungian clinical practice, demonstrates the continuity in Jung's work, from The Red Book to Answer to Job, where Jung ultimately elaborated a conception of history that defines our ethical position today.

Ethical vulnerabilities in nursing history: Conflicting loyalties and the patient as ‘other’

The purpose of this article is to explore enduring ethical vulnerabilities of the nursing profession as illustrated in historical chapters of nursing's past. It describes these events, then explores two ethical vulnerabilities in depth: conflicting loyalties and duties, and relationships with patients as 'other'. The article concludes with suggestions for more ethical approaches to the other in current nursing practice. The past may be one of the most fruitful sites for examining enduring ethical vulnerabilities of the nursing profession. First of all, professional identity, which includes moral identity, comes in part from knowledge of the nursing profession's past. Second, looking to the past to understand better how events and ideologies have brought vulnerabilities to the fore raises questions about ethical nursing practice today.

The Contemporaneity of God for Ethics Today: Paul Lehmann’s Contribution to a Neglected Theme, in Dialogue with Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Ethics edifies to the extent it takes seriously the munus propheticum Jesu Christi. Though many assume ethical action indicates behaviour realising Jesus Christ, this is problematic because it implies he is otherwise mute and absent. Paul Lehmann offers a refreshing alternative when he argues that the principal concern of ethics is alignment with all that God in Christ is doing now to make and keep human life human. Lehmann thus recasts the question ‘What am I to do?’ by taking seriously the presence and activity of the One who summons human beings to participate in his work. In a manner consistent with the christological foundations of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics , Lehmann’s proposals evoke an ethic shaped by and subject to the self-disclosure and radiance of the triune God.

The Neuroscience of Certainty

Within the past decade, the current research of neuroscientists has been summarized and made accessible to the non-specialist. I want to focus in this essay on the work of Timothy Wilson, Robert Burton, and Jonah Lehrer. Their scholarship has illuminated for many the relationship between the emotional unconscious brain and the rational conscious brain. Moreover, their elucidation of the role of dopamine in the brain's reward system has helped highlight the strange paradox of pleasure that exists regarding our complementary passions for both certainty and uncertainty. I want to argue that such empirical findings shed light on some of the more controversial issues in ethical philosophy today. First, I will summarize their conclusions, and then I will show how the principles of Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics are supported by this current research. The Role of the Adaptive Unconscious Timothy Wilson argues that the new discoveries of neuroscience today require that we distinguish the Freudian notion of the unconscious from that of the newer concept of the adaptive unconscious. ' If Freud thought we repressed certain insights and memories because they were anxiety-provoking, contemporary empirical psychologists conclude that our lack of awareness of certain internal processes is rather due to their more efficient manner of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action. Because our conscious mind can only attend explicitly to roughly forty pieces of information per second, we need the unconscious part of our brain to handle implicitly the rest of the eleven million pieces of information per second we take in, if we are to be better able to survive in an ever changing environment. Wilson points out that this unconscious gatekeeper not only filters information but also serves as a spin doctor that interprets data and teaches us to in such a way that we are moved to make appropriate decisions. In other words, the adaptive unconscious is a detector (24) that allows us to predict what to expect, make ongoing corrections of our expectations, and make more attractive certain courses of action over others. Wilson acknowledges that this efficiency, i.e., speed, by which we are able to assess unconsciously our environment, has a price we must pay: our unconscious makes us liable to prejudices that we are not even aware that we have. Our past successes in pattern detection become habitual and can even become addictive. Instead of accurately identifying threats, our unconscious can sometimes deceive us by giving in to our need to feel good about ourselves. We discount evidence that may be threatening to our self-esteem. Nevertheless, our conscious brain, for its part, can all too often construct a coherent notion of ourselves that is out of touch with the real needs of our emotional brain. Its fictions and tendency to over-analysis can be as misleading as the dictates of our unconscious. Still, Wilson considers that such dangers can be compensated for by means of the complementarity that exists between the adaptive unconscious and the rational conscious brain. The unconscious emotional brain is made up of multiple systems, while the rational brain is a single system. The emotional brain is an on-line pattern detector, while the rational brain is an after-the-fact check and balancer. The emotional brain is concerned with the here-and-now, while the rational brain can take the longer view. The emotional brain is automatic, while the rational brain is controlled and intentional. The emotional brain is more rigid, while the rational brain is more flexible. Finally, the emotional brain is more sensitive to negative while the rational brain is more sensitive to positive information. Thus, while the emotional and rational brains may appear to be simply redundant and parallel ways of processing information, they each tend to make up for the weaknesses inherent in the other. …

9. Human Rights: Historical Learning in the Shadow of Violence

AbstractThis paper emphasizes the historical dimension of human rights understood as a social ethic. Rather than timeless principles, human rights and the universality proper to them emerge in a process of suffering, conflict, political assertion, and institutional change. We can understand them as historical yet also universal by seeing that human rights arise in processes of social learning that take place in an increasingly globalized world. Such learning often has advanced in the face of dramatic violence, for example, the bombing of Hiroshima. But the demands on a global social ethic today are not only a matter of responding to threats and acts of dramatic violence in isolation. Attention to the example of Hiroshima suggests that the problem of violence is bound up with other questions about the regulation of emerging technical powers in a context of inequality and social conflict. To what extent can an ethic centered on human rights provide an ethics that can inform effective responses to these problems? To consider the promise of human rights, we look more closely at the kind of social learning they involve and explore in particular the role of social movements in forging new identities and reciprocities along with normative claims proper to a global public sphere (the anti‐apartheid movement provides an example). We go on to see that these political experiences can inform interpretations of historical experience that can inform a widened sense of historical possibilities, both those missed in the past and those that confront us today. While this argument may thicken our sense of the promise of a human rights ethic, it remains speculative, not least because of the limited effectiveness of these norms in practice today. We close with the suggestion that nonetheless a coherent ethical response is possible, one that in the wealthy parts of the globe might take the form of an ethic of democratic responsibility. This would both represent a distinctive kind of learning and perhaps contribute to a wider advance of human rights.

Neuroscience Advances Force New Thinking on Ethics

Neuroscience Advances Force New Thinking on Ethics

The Christian living in two worlds?

This article discusses the possibilities for and the point of using religious and moral arguments in current public, political discourse. A solution building upon the concept of overlapping consensus is critically analyzed. The author finds that this Rawlsian idea fails to see the close relation between justifying arguments and the conclusions reached. It also emphasizes justifying reasoning too much. The article points at a need to start in concrete social practice. Related to that, a discussion between Jeffrey Stout and Stanley Hauerwas concerning the relation between religion, ethics and democratic life is analyzed. The final section of the article deals with some implications of the main arguments for an understanding of Nordic Lutheran social ethics today.

Consent and the law

In the article ‘Consent in Practice: a case review’ in the June issue (PN 19, 5, 34-37) the terms Gillick competence and Fraser Guidelines were used as if they were interchangeable – they are not. Lord Fraser specifically addressed the issues of contraception and minors. When referring to the provision of contraceptive advice in Medical Ethics Today, the British Medical Association refers to his judgment as the Fraser Guidelines. Leading legal reference sources make no reference to Fraser Guidelines.

Power and Self-Cultivation: Aesthetics, Development Ethics and the Calling of Poverty

AbstractIn this paper, I explore the ideal of self-cultivation as it confronts the holders of power and our practice and understanding of ethics and aesthetics. I begin with the field of social development as an illustrative case of field of power that is in urgent need of a reconstructive and transformative practice of self-development. I take the ethical deliberations in the field of development, that is, development ethics as an exemplar of ethical reflection today, and look at aesthetics through the contemporary quest of and reflections on self-cultivation. Then, I discuss the challenge of recognizing the face of the other that the radical alterity of poverty presents to the quest for freedom, exercise of power and the ideal of self-cultivation. Through a dialogue with the face of the other, I wish in this paper to move from a self-congratulatory view of freedom as an assertion of one's rights to the terrain of what Emmanuel Levinas calls "difficult freedom", and reiterate the imperative of responsibility that knocks at our door — an imperative that disturbs our slumber and urges for a "permanent wakefulness" in us.The mission of development ethics is to keep hope alive. By any purely rational calculus of future probabilities, the development enterprise of most countries is doomed to fail. Poor classes, nations, and individuals can never catch up with their rich counterparts as long as they continue to consume wastefully and to devise ideological justifications for not practicing solidarity with the less developed. Only some transcultural calculus of hope, situated beyond apparent realms of possibility, can elicit the creative energies and vision which authentic development for all requires.

All About EVE: A Report on Environmental Virtue Ethics Today

In this paper I examine and assess an important developing trend in environmental ethics, environmental virtue ethics. I begin by providing a thorough survey of influential and representative contributions to environmental virtue ethics. Along with explaining these contributions to environmental virtue ethics I discuss their various strengths and weaknesses. In the second section I explain what I believe an environmental virtue ethic needs to do to complement other perspectives in environmental ethics. Then, using the best aspects of previously published work along with some additional argument and analysis, I provide a concise portrait of an environmental virtue ethic that combines the advantages of Aristotelian virtue theory with the insights of contemporary environmental ethics. The environmental virtue ethic that emerges from this analysis and discussion is primarily a philosophical praxis. It provides a model of living well in which an understanding of and a concern for the environment human is constitutive of human flourishing. As a praxis this environmental virtue ethic articulates an account of human flourishing with a view to suggesting how a person can improve her own life by working to preserve wild nature.