Ethics and Philosophy in Environmental Care

Environmental ethics is the discipline that studies the moral relationship of
human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and
its nonhuman contents. This course covers: (1) the challenge of environmental
ethics to the anthropocentrism (i.e., human-centeredness) embedded in
traditional western ethical thinking; (2) the early development of the
discipline in the 1960s and 1970s; (3) the connection of deep ecology, feminist
environmental ethics, and social ecology to politics; (4) the attempt to apply
traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and
virtue ethics, to support contemporary environmental concerns; and (5) the
focus of environmental literature on wilderness, and possible future
developments of the discipline.