The Intrinsic Value of Nature
The Intrinsic Value of Nature

Author: Leena Vilkka

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9789042003255

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What is intrinsic value? What is the origin of value? Are people always superior to nature? This book is a philosophical analysis of the human relationship to the non-human world. It is a pioneering study of the philosophy of nature-conservation in relation to the discussion of intrinsic value. Vilkka develops a naturalistic or naturocentric theory of value that is based on ethical extensionism and pluralism. Vilkka analyzes natural values and environmental attitudes: zoocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. This book forms a taxonomy for nature having intrinsic value. The theory of intrinsic value is based on naturocentric and naturogenic values. The book questions the thesis of weak anthropocentrism that denies the existence of naturogenic values. In Vilkka's theory, animals and nature are the origin of value. She defends the existence of zoogenic and biogenic values in the non-human world and discusses the possibility of ecogenic value, nature as a whole having value independent of human or animal minds. Vilkka analyzes the goodness and rights of nature, the problem of priorities, and ecological humanism. A naturocentric recommendation is that the well-being of animals and nature should have priority over human values at least in some real decision contexts. Ecological humanism recommends an attitude of respect for people, animals, and nature. The book includes an extensive glossary, index, and bibliography.

Just Work
Just Work

Author: Russell Muirhead

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2004-10-15

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780674015586

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This elegant essay on the justice of work focuses on the fit between who we are and the kind of work we do. Russell Muirhead shows how the common hope for work that fulfills us involves more than personal interest; it also points to larger understandings of a just society. We are defined in part by the jobs we hold, and Muirhead has something important to say about the partial satisfactions of the working life, and the increasingly urgent need to balance the claims of work against those of family and community. Against the tendency to think of work exclusively in contractual terms, Muirhead focuses on the importance of work to our sense of a life well lived. Our notions of freedom and fairness are incomplete, he argues, without due consideration of how we fit the work we do. Muirhead weaves his argument out of sociological, economic, and philosophical analysis. He shows, among other things, how modern feminism's effort to reform domestic work and extend the promise of careers has contributed to more democratic understandings of what it means to have work that fits. His account of individual and social fit as twin standards of assessment is original and convincing--it points both to the unavoidable problem of distributing bad work in society and to the personal importance of finding fulfilling work. These themes are pursued through a wide-ranging discussion that engages thinkers from Plato to John Stuart Mill to Betty Friedan. Just Work shows what it would mean for work to make good on the high promise so often invested in it and suggests what we--both as a society and as individuals--might do when it falls short.

Faking Nature
Faking Nature

Author: Robert Elliot

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-02-21

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1134833393

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Faking Nature explores the arguments surrounding the concept of ecological restoration. This is a crucial process in the modern world and is central to companies' environmental policy; whether areas restored after ecological destruction are less valuable than before the damage took place. Elliot discusses the pros and cons of the argument and examines the role of humans in the natural world. This volume is a timely and provocative analysis of the simultaneous destruction and restoration of the natural world and the ethics related to those processes, in an era of accelerated environmental damage and repair.

The Summa Contra Gentiles
The Summa Contra Gentiles

Author: Saint Thomas Aquinas

Publisher: Aeterna Press

Published:

Total Pages: 1516

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Fifteen years ago the English Dominican Fathers embarked on what was considered by many the hazardous and even useless venture of translating the Summa Theologica of the Angelic Doctor. Yet although there were critics adverse to the project, there were others, not a few, who approved and encouraged; these and the favour with which the effort, notwithstanding its many deficiencies, was received, heartened the translators to persevere, and enabled them to bring their work to a happy conclusion. For the venture has proved a success beyond the most sanguine expectations; and already the work has entered into a second edition.

Environmental Rights
Environmental Rights

Author: Steve Vanderheiden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 575

ISBN-13: 135156806X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The essays selected for this volume present critical viewpoints from the debate about the need to establish rights on behalf of greater environmental protection. Three main areas for developing environmental rights are surveyed, including: extensionist theories that link existing rights (for example to subsistence or territory) to threats of harm from exacerbated resource scarcity, pollution or rapid environmental change; proposals for rights to specified environmental goods or services, such as rights to a safe environment and the capacity to assimilate greenhouse gas emissions; and rights that protect the interests of parties not currently recognized as having rights, including nonhuman subjects, natural objects and future generations. This volume captures the potential for and primary challenges to the development of rights as instruments for safeguarding the planet's life-support capacities and features proposals and analyses which argue the need to create an avenue of recourse against ecological degradation, whether on behalf of human or nonhuman right holders.

Can God Be Free?
Can God Be Free?

Author: William L. Rowe

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2004-04-22

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 0191513482

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the three major religions of the West, God is understood to be a being whose goodness, knowledge, and power is such that it is impossible for any being, including God himself, to have a greater degree of goodness, knowledge, and power. This book focuses on God's freedom and praiseworthiness in relation to his perfect goodness. Given his necessary perfections, if there is a best world for God to create he would have no choice other than to create it. For, as Leibniz tells us, 'to do less good than one could is to be lacking in wisdom or in goodness.' But if God could not do otherwise than create the best world, he created the world of necessity, not freely. And, if that is so, it may be argued that we have no reason to be thankful to God for creating us, since, as parts of the best possible world, God was simply unable to do anything other than create us - he created us of necessity, not freely. Moreover, we are confronted with the difficulty of having to believe that this world, with its Holocaust, and innumerable other evils, is the best that an infinitely powerful, infinitely good being could do in creating a world. Neither of these conclusions, taken by itself, seems at all plausible. Yet each conclusion appears to follow from the conception of God now dominant in the great religions of the West. William Rowe presents a detailed study of this important problem, both historically in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz, Samuel Clarke, Thomas Aquinas, and Jonathan Edwards, as well as in the contemporary philosophical literature devoted to the issue. Rowe argues that this problem is more serious than is commonly thought and may require some significant revision in contemporary thinking about the nature of God.

The Philosophy of International Law
The Philosophy of International Law

Author: Samantha Besson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-04

Total Pages: 626

ISBN-13: 0199208581

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This text contains 29 cutting-edge essays by philosophers and lawyers which address the central philosophical questions about international law. Its overarching theme is the moral and political values that should guide and shape the assessment and development of international law and institutions.

Adorno on Nature
Adorno on Nature

Author: Deborah Cook

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-11

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1317548035

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Decades before the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, Adorno condemned our destructive and self-destructive relationship to the natural world, warning of the catastrophe that may result if we continue to treat nature as an object that exists exclusively for our own benefit. "Adorno on Nature" presents the first detailed examination of the pivotal role of the idea of natural history in Adorno's work. A comparison of Adorno's concerns with those of key ecological theorists - social ecologist Murray Bookchin, ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant, and deep ecologist Arne Naess - reveals how Adorno speaks directly to many of today's most pressing environmental issues. Ending with a discussion of the philosophical conundrum of unity in diversity, "Adorno on Nature" also explores how social solidarity can be promoted as a necessary means of confronting environmental problems.