Syllabus-Environmental Ethics

Environmental studies represents a growing and diverse field of research and reflection, an area as enriched by ideas from scientists and professional conservationists as it is from writers, gardeners, bloggers, and urban farmers-today's incarnations of the naturalists of yesteryear. As in the case with bioethics, an environmental ethics aims to apply the particular insights and acumen of a philosophical perspective to a broader field by contributing its own kinds of questions to the discussion, questions that can be abstract-'what makes something an object of moral consideration'-or concrete-'how do your food choices implicate you as a moral being?' In the latter case, it is an obvious but easily overlooked fact that the food you put into your mouth begins with the soil and ends up as either a plant or an animal. In this sense, the food you choose to eat is your most constant ethical contact with the environment. The first part of the course will focus on the concrete environmental impact of food production in terms of sustainability, worker safety, animal welfare, and corporate responsibility. The second half of the semester will move to a larger theoretical framework and consider the position advanced by ecological ethics and its call for a new ethical paradigm, one responsive to ecocriticism's concerns with both the biocentrism of the animal welfare movement and the managerialist anthropocentrism of the mainstream response to the current Eco crisis facing the earth. Throughout the semester we will use environmental racism-the way environmental harms are disproportionately borne by politically disenfranchised communities of colour-as an important lens for us when focusing on the ethics of corporate regulation, worker safety, chemical disposal, and affordable food and housing.