Environmental Justice & Kantian Ethics

• The exam includes true/false questions, short answer questions, and one essay.

Essay Prompt

• Explain five features of the environmental justice framework by Bullard in "Environmental Justice in the 21st Century: Race Still Matters."
• Detail how these features respond to environmental racism.
• Clarify how Bullard’s three forms of equity help in understanding the framework's five features.
• In the answer, define environmental racism and discuss the three equity forms.

Kantian Ethics

• Kant believed morality is a priori, thus pure practical reason should be investigated.
• A priori means independent of experience.
• Moral law is categorical, not hypothetical, and acts as an imperative, a command or order.
• Hypothetical imperative is a contingent command
• Categorical imperative binds regardless of desires.
• First Formulation: Act only according to principles that can be willed into universal law.
• Second Formulation: Treat humanity as an end, not merely as a means.
• Kant doesn't view positive emotions as bad, but they lack moral worth.
• People who are naturally benevolent may not act morally admirable when acting out of benevolence.
• Overcoming temptation with good will is worthy of respect and special valuing.
• Kant's categorical imperative formulations appeal to fairness: no rational being is more special than another.
• If something is acceptable for one, it must be acceptable for all.
• The second formulation aligns with the sense of special respect for people as rational beings.
• It is wrong to use someone merely to achieve goals.
• People are ends in themselves.
• Slavery, deception, and manipulation are wrong.
• Kant's view is associated with absolutism regarding rights; some things are simply wrong.

Stocker's Criticism

• A purely dutiful approach to emotions feels cold.
• Kant is criticized for demoting significant emotions; who wants to be loved out of duty?
• Michael Stocker argues that viewing finer emotions like love and friendship as duties is harmful.

Bentham's Utilitarianism

• The basic good is pleasure, having intrinsic value, while the basic bad is pain, having intrinsic disvalue, and pleasure is a sensation measured by:
  • Intensity
  • Duration
  • Certainty/uncertainty
  • Propinquity/remoteness
  • Fecundity
  • Purity
  • Extent
• Bentham held an egalitarian view, pleasures counted the same, with only quantitative differences.

Mill's Utilitarianism

• People would choose the life of a dissatisfied Socrates over a happy fool, because some pleasures are better.
• Socrates experiences intellectual satisfaction from philosophical interests.
• Mill distinguishes higher (intellectual) and lower (bodily) pleasures to solve the "animal problem" missing in Bentham.

Virtue Ethics

• Aristotle views virtue as a quality that leads to "eudaimonia," or human well-being.
• Virtue is a mean state, avoiding excess in either direction.
• Aristotle is a particularist; moral judgment depends on training/education.
• A virtuous person can see the right course of action.
• Virtue lies between two opposed vices, known as the doctrine of the mean.
• Bravery is between cowardice and foolhardiness; temperance is between gluttony and abstinence.
• Honesty is difficult to model this way, as is the question of telling too much truth.
• The virtuous person does the right thing in the right way and emotional state.

Features of the Ethics of Care

• Focus on dependency
• Valuing emotions
• Respecting relationships with particular others
• Rethinking the public and the private spheres
• Relational conception of the self

Implications for Society

• A caring society would prioritize child-rearing, education, meeting needs, achieving peace, and environmental care.
• Legal constraints and police enforcement may be needed for special cases but can be decreased with a focus on care.

Leopold

• The Golden Rule integrates the individual to society; democracy integrates social organization to the individual.
• There's no ethic for man's relation to land, animals, and plants.
• Land is still property with privileges but no obligations.
• Extending ethics to the human environment is an evolutionary possibility.
• A land ethic includes soils, waters, plants, animals, or the land collectively.
• A land ethic changes Homo sapiens from conqueror to a plain member and citizen.
• It implies respect for fellow members and the community.
• Obligations beyond self-interest are taken for granted in rural community enterprises.
• Land use ethics are governed wholly by economic self-interest, like social ethics a century ago.
• No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis.
• In attempting to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
• A conservation system based on economic self-interest tends to ignore elements lacking commercial value.
• The system assumes the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts.
• It relegates too many functions to government.
• An ethical obligation is the only visible remedy.
• A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

Taylor

• The well-being of individual organisms with inherent worth determines our moral relations with Earth's wild communities.
• Life-centered environmental ethics opposes human-centered ones.
• We have moral obligations to wild plants and animals because they are members of the Earth's biotic community.
• Obligations include protecting or promoting their good, respecting natural ecosystems, preserving species, and avoiding pollution.
• Such obligations are due those living things out of recognition of their inherent worth and are additional to human obligations.
• The well-being of both is an end in itself.
• Every organism, species population, and community has a good which moral agents can affect.
• An entity's good means it can be benefited or harmed, where conditions can be advantageous or disadvantageous.
• Trees can be harmed or benefited, even without knowledge or desires.
• Respect for nature means willing it to be a universal law for all rational beings.

The Biocentric Outlook

• The attitude of respect for nature is underlied by a belief system called ‘the biocentric outlook on nature.'
• The belief system relies on the interdependence of all living things in an organically unified order.
• Four main components:
  • Humans are on the same level of the Earth's community of life.
  • Earth's ecosystems are interconnected.
  • Each organism is a teleological center.
  • Claiming humans are superior is an irrational bias.

Whyte

• Crisis epistemologies validate harm and violence.
• Epistemologies of coordination emphasize moral bonds and kinship relationships.
• Coordination generates the capacity to respond to change.
• Crises are believed to be real, genuine, or perceived and are related to different problems.
• A crisis is oriented in the assumption of imminence of something harmful or inequitable.
• People question neither their own perspective nor where their perspective may derive its social origins.
• Presumption of unprecedentedness exists which are narratives that obscure historical injustices.
• Actions run the risk of colonial re-enactment that retrenches colonial power.
• Presumption of urgency suggests action is needed with swiftness to avoid moral sacrifices.
• Epistemologies of coordination emphasize knowing through kin relationships. Kinship relates to moral bonds for mutual responsibilities.
• Examples of kinship relationship are care, consent, and reciprocity.

Bullard's General Characteristics of the Framework

• The framework incorporates the 'right' of individuals to be protected from environmental degradation, based on the
  • Civil Rights Act of 1964
  • Fair Housing Act of 1968 (amended in 1988)
  • Voting Rights Act of 1965
• Adopts a public health model of prevention, to eliminate the threat before harm occurs.
• Framework shifts the burden of proof to polluters/dischargers that do harm or discriminate.
• Requires parties applying for permits to prove operations are not harmful, will not disproportionately impact racial groups, and are nondiscriminatory.
• Framework allows disparate impact and statistical weight to infer discrimination, and not "intent."
• Redresses disproportionate impact through targeted action and resources, for greatest environmental and health problems.

What is Equity

• Equity is categorized into procedural, geographic, and social equity.
• Procedural equity describes rules applied uniformly and in a nondiscriminatory manner in the questions of fairness.
• Geographic equity describes location and spatial configuration proximity to environmental hazards.
• Social equity describes the role of sociological factors in environmental decision making, and how the groups live.
• Environmental racism exists via policies affecting groups based on race/color.

Thomson

• It's valuable to consider if the premise is allowed.
• Imagine connection to a violinist. To unplug the violinist from yourself would kill him.
• Would you be morally obligated to accede to situation for nine months or longer?
• It is kind if one does allow them to use them but not something you owe them.
• Having a right to life does not guarantee a right to one's body for life itself.
• Details make a difference, if I open a window and a burglar enters, this does not mean he can stay.
• People-seeds may enter houses if mesh screens defect, but this does not entail anything.

Marquis

• Killing primarily affects the victim, as it deprives one of their future.
• The value of one's future could justify abortion only with the most compelling reasons.
• Abortion could be justified if consequent loss outweighs the loss of the future.
• Abortion is presumptively very seriously wrong, as strong as the presumption of killing another adult.
• Since a fetus possesses the property to make killing an adult human being wrong, abortion is wrong.
• The argument rests on an ethics of killing which is self-evident and is compatible with the moral permissibility of euthanasia and contraception.

Hursthouse

• When discussing moral issues, the virtue theorist asserts certain actions are honest, dishonest, charitable, uncharitable, or neither.
• Actions may be hard to decide and not easy to apply.
• Action-guiding theory must provide clear guidance to act well.
• Acting rightly is hard and asks for moral wisdom that builds on moral knowledge by Aristotle.
• Virtue ethics builds its rules in terms of application.
• People mention a woman's rights to own lives and happiness, and the discussion stops there. Then we ask if this life is a good one.
• Opting for abortion is a flawed grasp of what life is especially when it's childish, materialistic, and shortsighted.
• A woman may fear that more children will affect capacity to be a good mother. She may want adoption, or had worthwhile activities.

Luna and Luker

• Reproductive Justice takes into consideration that the right to have a child and the right to parent are as important as the right to not have children.
• Issues of importance regarding the right to have children include population control and criminalization of reproduction.
• Eugenics and forced sterilization happened between 1900 and the late 1970s.
• Laws permitted sterilization of criminal and the 'feeble-minded', 'degenerate,' and 'hereditarily insane'.
• The three generations of imbeciles are Carrie Buck as well as her mother and her out-of-wedlock daughter.
• Buck v. Bell legitimated eugenic sterilization for civil reasons, and the laws persisted into 1970s.
• A critique emerged presuming experiences stem from a middle-class.