Conference Participants
 

Abstracts of Presentations
 

About Bertram Morris and the Morris Colloquium
 

University and City of Boulder Information
 

Morris 2002 home

University of Colorado at Boulder

Eric Katz, “Genocide and Ecocide: Reflections on Environmentalism and Nazism”

In this paper I consider the importance of the concept of place for an understanding of value.  In contrast to many standard treatments of this topic which focus on the meaning of natural habitats, bioregions, or human communities embedded in a specific natural and physical space, I concentrate on understanding the importance of the Jewish community of Venice as survivors of the Holocaust.  This is a highly speculative and personal essay, combining elements of environmental ethics, philosophy of technology, the ethical analysis of restoration ecology,  the meaning of authenticity, the concept of place, and the philosophical and historical meaning of the Holocaust.  The overarching theme is the moral significance of historical continuity in both nature and culture.

Carolyn Merchant, “Partnership Ethics: Humanity and the Environment”

For the twenty-first century, I propose a new kind of environmental ethic—a partnership ethic, based on the idea that people and nature are equally important.  If both people and nature are acknowledged as actors, we have the possibility of a mutually beneficial situation.

A partnership ethic holds that the greatest good for the human and nonhuman communities is in their mutual living interdependence.

A partnership ethic entails a viable, sustainable relationship between a human community and a nonhuman community in a particular place, a place in which connections to the larger world are recognized through economic and ecological exchanges.  It is an ethic in which humans act to fulfill both humanity's vital needs and nature's needs by restraining human hubris. As humans, we need to cultivate a new ability to hear nature's voice. Although, as partner, Nature's language differs from our own, we nevertheless have the possibility of working cooperatively with it. The result is a healthier, more aesthetically pleasing environment for our own and future generations.

Tom Regan, “Work, Hypocrisy, and Integrity”

James Sterba, “What Ecology Can’t Do: The Importance of Ethics to Environmental Policy”

However we conceive of the science of ecology, it cannot tell us what to do. It can tell us what is, what has been, what will be; it can help us  explain and understand our environment, and ideally predict what that environment will be like in the future, but it cannot tell us what we should do. Hume's fork holds; we cannot derive an "ought" from an "is." To get to an "ought" we must begin with one. Hence, the relevance of ethics. Ethics can help by supplying moral oughts that we cannot reasonably reject. When these moral oughts are then combined with the facts and theories of a defensible ecology, we will then be able to determine how we ought to relate to our natural environment. In this paper, I propose to develop just such an ethics to provide the appropriate grounding for a defensible environmental policy. It is an ethics that succeeds in appropriately grounding a defensible environmental policy because its foundational "oughts" are rationally inescapable.

Peter Wenz, “Environmental Synergism: A New Triangular Affair”

Some anthropocentrists, such as Bryan Norton, claim that intergenerational anthropocentrism provides the best rationale for protecting biodiversity.  Some nonanthropocentrists, such as J. Baird Callicott and Eric Katz, disagree.  The present paper analyzes different varieties of anthropocentrism, argues for adopting what is here called multi-cultural anthropocentrism, and then advances the following thesis of environmental synergism: Combining multi-cultural anthropocentrism with nonanthropocentrism enables synergists to argue more cogently and effectively than either anthropocentrists or previous nonanthropocentrists for policies that both protect biodiversity and maximize long-term welfare for human beings as a group.