Should Environmental Ethicists Fear Moral Anti-Realism?

Environmental Values 28 (4):405-427 (2019)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Environmental ethicists have been arguing for decades that swift action to protect our natural environment is morally paramount, and that our concern for the environment should go beyond its importance for human welfare. It might be thought that the widespread acceptance of moral anti-realism would undermine the aims of environmental ethicists. One reason is that recent empirical studies purport to show that moral realists are more likely to act on the basis of their ethical convictions than anti-realists. In addition, it is sometimes argued that only moral realists can countenance the claim that nature is intrinsically valuable. Against this, we argue that the acceptance of moral anti-realism is no threat to the environmentalist cause. We argue, further, that the acceptance of moral realism is potentially an obstacle to delivering on a third core environmental ethicist demand: namely, that successful action on climate change and environmental destruction requires us to change some of our commonly-held ethical views and to achieve a workable consensus.

Other Versions

No versions found

Similar books and articles

Against Grand Theory in Environmental Ethics.Roger Paden - 1994 - Environmental Values 3 (1):61 - 70.
Facts, Values and Moral Realism.David Schejbal - 1991 - Dissertation, The University of Connecticut
On the Alleged Laziness of Moral Realists.Daniel Weltman - 2020 - Journal of Value Inquiry 54 (3):511-518.
Moral Steadfastness and Meta-ethics.James Fritz & Tristram McPherson - 2019 - American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (1):43-56.
Environ-Moral Realism.John Mizzoni - 2003 - Journal of Philosophical Research 28:191-221.
Can Moral Anti-Realists Theorize?Michael Zhao - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (3):693-709.

Analytics

Added to PP
2018-06-27

Downloads
1,479 (#11,523)

6 months
194 (#18,392)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Michael Rubin
University of Western Australia
Anne Schwenkenbecher
Murdoch University

Citations of this work

Questions of Knowledge and Non-Knowledge.Marion Hourdequin - 2019 - Environmental Values 28 (4):397-403.

Add more citations

References found in this work

A Treatise of Human Nature.David Hume & A. D. Lindsay - 1958 - Philosophical Quarterly 8 (33):379-380.
The Myth of Morality.Richard Joyce - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wise Choices, Apt Feelings.Alan Gibbard - 1990 - Ethics 102 (2):342-356.
Kantian constructivism in moral theory.John Rawls - 1980 - Journal of Philosophy 77 (9):515-572.

View all 84 references / Add more references