Relational Agency and Environmental Ethics: A Journey beyond Humanism as We Know It

Suvielise Nurmi

doi:10.5771/9781666904550

Summary

Why does ethics only weakly contribute to the most crucial problems of the current world? Relational Agency and Environmental Ethics: A Journey Beyond Humanism as We Know It explores how the concept of moral agency embedded in modern humanist ethics, in its reliance on environmentally harmful and scientifically implausible presuppositions, prevents ethics from efficiently supporting a sustainability transition. The modernist individualist notion of agency includes conceptual dichotomies between moral agency and human nature, mind and body, reason and emotion, and knowledge and will, yet it should be revised without dismissing responsibility, normativity, and a shared ground for critical assessment. Suvielise Nurmi proposes an agential shift resting on a relational concept of agency, combining ecofeminist and evolutionary criticisms of modernism together with various interdisciplinary discussions involving philosophy of mind, cognitive science, anthropology, social ontology, and developmental biology and psychology. This book argues that the relational shift can resolve the dilemma and bring environmental relationships to the core of ethical discourse: there is no ethics distinct from environmental ethics. Environmental responsibilities can be justified as responsibilities for one’s relationally considered agency.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2023
Copyright Year: 2023
ISBN-Print: 978-1-6669-0454-3
ISBN-Online: 978-1-6669-0455-0
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 306
Product Type: Monograph

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 6
1. Exceptional Humanism‌‌ and Its Extensional Counterparts in Environmental Ethics No access
2. Moral Agency in Evolutionary Environmental Ethics No access
3. Moral Agency in Feminist Environmental Ethics No access
4. Relational Agendas No access
1. Being Relational No access
2. Knowing Relationally No access
3. Acting Relationally No access
1. Shifted Naturalisms No access
2. Constructivism Chastened by the Natural Relationships of Agency No access
1. Relational Foundations for Environmental Ethics No access
2. Responsibilities for Relational Agency No access
Bibliography No access Pages 271 - 292
Index No access Pages 293 - 304
About the Author No access Pages 305 - 306