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The moral status of nature: reasons to care for the natural world
Umeå University, Faculty of Arts, Department of historical, philosophical and religious studies.
2008 (English)Doctoral thesis, monograph (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

The subject-matter of this essay is the moral status of nature. This subject is dealt with in terms of normative reasons. The main question is if there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in addition to the numerous indirect normative reasons that there are for doing so. Roughly, if there is some such reason, and that reason applies to any moral agent, then nature has direct moral status as I use the phrase. I develop the notions of direct normative reason and direct moral status in detail and identify and discuss the two main types of theory according to which nature has direct moral status: analogy-based nature-considerism (AN) and non-analogy-based nature-considerism (NN). I argue for the plausibility of a particular version of the latter, but against the plausibility of any version of the former.

The theory that is representative of AN claims that nature has direct moral status in virtue of possessing interests. Proponents of this theory fail to show (i) that nature has interests of the kind that they reasonably want to ascribe to it, and (ii) that interests of this kind are morally significant. In contrast to AN, NN comes in a variety of different forms. I elaborate a version of NN according to which there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in virtue of (i) its unique complexity, and (ii) its indispensability (to all moral agents). I argue that even if these reasons should turn out not to apply to any moral agent, they are still genuine direct normative reasons: there is nothing irrational or misdirected about them.

Finally, I show how the question of whether there are direct normative reasons to care for nature is relevant to private and political decision-making concerning nature. This is exemplified with a case from the Swedish mountain region.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Umeå: Institutionen för idé- och samhällsstudier, Umeå universitet , 2008. , p. 237
Series
Umeå studies in philosophy, ISSN 1650-1748 ; 9
Keywords [en]
Environmental ethics, ecocentrism, reasons, reason for action, normative reason, moral status, moral standing, moral considerability, final value, intrinsic value, biocentrism, nature-considerism, nature, nature as a whole, the natural world, complexity, indispensability, interests
National Category
Philosophy
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-1612ISBN: 978-91-7264-547-9 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-1612DiVA, id: diva2:141556
Public defence
2008-05-02, Dramastudion, Humanisthuset, Umeå universitet, Umeå, 13:00
Opponent
Supervisors
Available from: 2008-04-11 Created: 2008-04-11 Last updated: 2018-06-09Bibliographically approved

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Samuelsson, Lars

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf