Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Ethics & the Environment

Abstract

Although debates over carbon taxes and trading schemes, over carbon offsets and compact fluorescents are important, our efforts to address the environmental challenges that we face will fall short unless and until we also set about the difficult work of reconceiving who we are and how we are related to our processive cosmos. What is needed, I argue, are new ways of thinking and acting grounded in new ways of understanding ourselves and our relationship to the world, ways of understanding that recognize our fundamental interdependence and interconnection with everyone and everything in the cosmos, ways of understanding that recognize the intrinsic beauty and value of every form of existence. What is needed, I suggest, is a moral philosophy grounded in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism. It is the primary aim of this essay to defend the value of a moral philosophy inspired by Whitehead's organic, beauty-centered conception of reality.

Pages

101-28

html

DOI

http://doi.org/10.2979/ete.2009.14.1.101

Volume

14

Issue

1

Publication Date

2009

Disciplines

Philosophy

ISSN

1085-6633

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