The Eco-Genesis of Ethics and Religion
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v5i3.263Keywords:
Environmental ethics, origins of meaning, origins of religion, value-neutrality of science, normativity of ecology, storyAbstract
In face of environmental crisis we urgently need global agreement on the moral significance of the biosphere. Environmental philosophers have tried to reason their way toward such moral accord by devising arguments for environmental ethics. But moral ‘truth’ does not ultimately emanate from reason; rather it is hatched inside stories, the kind of primal stories that have been the province of myth and religion. Historically, such stories have been inescapably culturally specific and relative. Is it possible in the modern world to imagine a common story, one that could emanate in a global moral commitment to our increasingly stricken natural world? Science may constitute a universal form of knowledge but it does not afford a story because stories are inherently normative, and science is normatively neutral. Yet a universal story, one that can be seen to subtend religion and ethics and meaning itself, is indeed currently coming into view.References
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Feinberg, Joel. 1974. ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’, in W.T. Blackstone (ed.), Philosophy and Environmental Crisis (Athens: University of Georgia Press): 43-68.
Fox, Warwick. 2006. A Theory of General Ethics: Human Relationships, Nature, and the Built Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Gare, Arran. 2007. ‘The Primordial Role of Stories in Human Self-Creation’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 3.1: 93-114.
Grieves, Vicki. 2009. Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy, the Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing (Discussion Paper Series, 9; Darwin: Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health).
Guruswamy, Lakshman. 1998. ‘The Convention on Biological Diversity: A Polemic’, in L. Guruswamy and J. McNeely (eds.), Protection of Global Biodiversity: Converging Strategies (Durham: Duke University Press): 351-59.
Holldobler, Bert, and E.O. Wilson. 2009. The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.).
Jaspers, Karl. 1953. The Origin and Goal of History (trans. Michael Bullock; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).
Johnson, Lawrence. 1991. A Morally Deep World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Lyotard, Jean F. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1977. ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science’, Monist 60: 459-67.
———. 1984. After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2nd edn).
Maeterlinck, Maurice. 1928. The Life of the Bee (trans. Alfred Sutro; New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.).
Mathews, Freya. 1991. The Ecological Self (London: Routledge).
———. 2010a. ‘Planetary Collapse Disorder: Honeybees as Portent of the Limits of the Ethical’, Environmental Ethics 32.4: 353-68.
———. 2010b. ‘On Desiring Nature’, Indian Journal of Ecocriticism 3: 1-9.
Naess, Arne. 1973. ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-range Ecology Movement’, Inquiry 16: 95-100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201747308601682.
Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London and New York: Routledge).
Ricoeur, Paul. 1983. Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Rodman, John. 1983. ‘Four Forms of Ecological Consciousness Reconsidered’, in D. Scherer and T. Attig (eds.), Ethics and the Environment (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice–Hall): 82-92.
Rolston III, Holmes. 1986. Philosophy Gone Wild: Essays in Environmental Ethics (Buffalo: Prometheus).
———. 1988. Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press).
Rose, Deborah B. 1992. Dingo Makes us Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Routley, Richard. 1973. ‘Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?’, in Proceedings of the 15th World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Bulgaria: Varna): 205-10.
San Roque, Craig. 2006. ‘On Tjukurrpa: Painting Up, and Building Thought’, Social Analysis 50.2: 148-72. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/015597706780810862.
Schmidtz, David, and Elizabeth Willot. 2002. Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works (New York: Oxford University Press).
Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation (New York: Random House).
———. 1981. The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
Taylor, Bron. 2010. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Taylor, Paul. 1986. Respect for Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Wilson, Edward O. 2006. The Creation (New York: W.W. Norton).
Published
2011-10-18
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Mathews, F. (2011). The Eco-Genesis of Ethics and Religion. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 5(3), 263-283. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v5i3.263
