How Robin Attfield Work Has Influenced Current Environmental Thinking - Book Report/Review Example

 How Robin Attfield Work Has Influenced Current Environmental Thinking Introduction Robin Attfield presented an analysis of how crisis within the environment has offered people with new ethical implications as well as consequences for their moral thinking (Attfield, 2011). According to Attfield, the environmental crisis entails the whole thing from global warming, to climate change, to the degradation of environments and natural resources. This has currently reached the crisis level as a result of its international extent, considering that it originates from the build up of myriad more and big inconsequential actions, and which have an effect on natural systems in addition to present and upcoming persons (Dunlap et al., 2000). Following this environmental crisis, Attfield admits that this connotes that not just happiness is in jeopardy, but also the life of other species. For that reason, people require a value theory that is deeper and extends further than happiness/pleasure as well as soreness/anguish. Being part of moral consequences, Attfield posits that the environmental crisis as well needs people to make bigger the scope of those persons who bear ethical standing to future generations as well as non-human creatures. The essay seeks to discuss how Robin Attfield work has influenced current environmental thinking. Discussion According to Yang (2000), by acknowledging the environmental crisis as a disaster, will connote that several of other aspects for contemporary moral thinking, which includes an acknowledgment of the mutual reliance as well as interconnectedness of living things. These days’ people can no more be satisfied with a disregard for the anticipated but inadvertent consequences. Therefore, as asserted by Attfield the acknowledgment of the environmental crisis indicates the recognition of the necessity for sustainability with regard to production, supply, as well as utilization. Attfield maintained that the ethical outcome of the environmental crisis needs a transformation in people’s moral attitude as well as how they consider themselves and their deeds, particularly in the developed nations (Attfield, 2011). This point out that people must employ a defensive principle, only for the reason that science could be full of loopholes, but as mentioned in Attfield’s work this does not indicate that people must just go on with the status quo. Rather, people must acknowledge possible harms, and as a result take action. In his work, Attfield argued that people must espouse mitigation policies, like those that could sustainably control their environmental activities (Attfield & Belsey, 1994). For example, the best system for greenhouse gases (GHG) regulation could be to divide the permissible emissions for all nations in line with their population. However, this needs not just worldwide agreement, but as well backing from civil society as well as individuals (Brennan & Lo, 2008). Besides that, Attfield argued that the environmental crisis moral consequences are the boost of ecological awareness in politics, attitudes, and beliefs, particularly for developed nations. In this case, green values such as autonomy, frugality, simplicity, support; green virtues like wilderness preservation, vegetarianism, and recycling,; and green politics such as the policies’ institution that fight against emissions of carbon all are a sign of a cultural change (Brennan & Lo, 2008). Maybe in the contemporary society, such are more direct cases of how cultural change begins with a moral change based on how people see themselves. In Attfield’s literature of environmental ethics, the difference between intrinsic value as well as instrumental value has been of substantial consequence (Holmes Rolston, 1996). The former is as per Woods (2010) are the things’ value as ‘ends in themselves’ in spite of if they are as well helpful as way to the other ends while the latter are things’ value as ‘means’ to advance a number of other ends. For example, particular crops possess instrumental value for animals which feed on them, given that feeding on these crops is the survival means for these animals. For an additional example, a particular fruit could have instrumental value for the reason that it offers the medical ingredients for aboriginal persons (Brennan & Lo, 2008). However, if the fruit as well possess some value separately in itself of its potentials for advancing a number of other ends like people; in that case the fruit as well has intrinsic value. Based on Attfield’s work there are two noteworthy essential moral principles in deep environmentalism. The first principle, ecosphere egalitarianism principle posits that every entity as well as organisms in the ecosphere, as an element of the unified whole, are equivalent in intrinsic value (Attfield, 1998). The principle further states that everything in ecosphere has an equivalent right to subsist and flourish as well as to arrive at their individual forms of self-realization and unfolding. On the other hand, Attfield’s principle of Self-realization maintains that for the morally full-grown individual, the true personality is the character that is in concurrence with the environment, not the separated personality that concentrates on egoistical contentment (Attfield, 1995). According to Smith (2005), Self-realization process involves making people perceptions of themselves bigger to contain recognition with environment. Therefore, to harm environment is like harming themselves, and to protect the environment is akin to self-protection. However, as noted by Attfield scores of past ethical point of views are human-centered or anthropocentric such that either they allot intrinsic value to humans only or they allot a considerably smaller amount of intrinsic value to nonhuman things as compared to human beings to the extent that the promotion or protection of people interests or welfare without regard for nonhuman things become almost at all times warranted (Guha, 2000). For instance Attfield (2011) posits that the environment has made everything purposely for the benefit of man and that the nonhuman things value is naturally only instrumental. By and large, modern people anthropocentric positions endure challenges figuring out why people are cruelly treating nonhuman animals, terming the present treatment as an appalling consequence for people and environment in general (Brennan & Lo, 2008; Woods, 2010). For example, Guha (2000) points out that brutality towards a dog could motivate the individual to generate a personality which may be desensitized to unkindness towards human beings. Therefore, from this point of view, Attfield’s work indicates that cruelty towards environment as well as nonhuman things living within the environment may be instrumentally, instead of intrinsically, incorrect. Similarly, anthropocentrism time and again distinguishes a number of non-intrinsic inequalities of anthropogenic human-caused ecological destruction. This devastation could harm the happiness/comfort of people at the moment and in the coming days, given that their happiness is fundamentally reliant on a sustainable environment (Paehlke, 1995). Brennan and Lo (2008) argues that when environmental ethics surfaced as a new-fangled philosophy sub-discipline, it happened by posing a setback to conventional anthropocentrism. Foremost, it questioned the presumed ethical dominance of humans to other species members globally. Secondly, it analyzed the likelihood of rational disagreements for assigning Attfield’s purported intrinsic value to the environment as well as its contents apart from humans. Attfield work as well supports a type of consequentialism which considers, and tries to stabilize the probably differing goods of diverse creatures. Still, a number of critics such as Brennan and Lo (2008) have indicated that the perception of biological well-being or good is not prescriptive, but merely descriptive. For example, the verity that environment preservation possesses a good of its own fails to connote that people should allocate any encouraging ethical weight to the acknowledgment of that good. Wilderness enthusiasts from time to time believe the high populations of human beings in a number of developing countries, particularly Africa as the main setback core to the environmental crisis. For example, Paehlke (1995) argues that (a number of) human beings are a type of environmental “melanoma”. They further argue that whilst feeding humans at all times appear humanitarian, but when people realize what is actually taking place, by only feeding humans, devoid of concentrating on the bigger social consequences, they may be feeding a sort of cancer. This argument is destined to validate the perception that saving environment must, in a number of situations, have a superior priority as compared to feeding people (Attfield, 1995). However, contemporary theorists have criticized this perception sourced from Attfield’s for appearing to expose a level of misanthropy, shown to people who are unable to defend as well as protect themselves. Conclusion In conclusion, it has been argued that changing the relationship between environment and humans remains to be the most primary setbacks experienced by these days. With the heightening fall of environmental systems which people and non-humans depend for continued existence as well as the worsening of Attfield’s alleged environmental crisis, modern entities have recognized that they cannot depend on judicial as well as economic techniques single-handedly to resolve the setbacks of ecological imbalances and environmental pollution; instead they are employing Attfield’s suggestion, that is to appeal to peoples’ boundless internal moral resources. Attfield has argued that the capability of an organism to thrive and to use its basic abilities offer it intrinsic value, which people have to extend ethical thoughtfulness to it; however, most of his work has been criticized as impractical and unfeasible in the contemporary society. References Attfield, D. R. (2011, 22 Marc). What Moral Consequences Does the Environmental Crisis Have. Retrieved from The Pennsylvania State University: http://sites.psu.edu/rockblogs/2011/03/29/robin-attfield-on-the-moral-consequences-of-environmental-crisis/ Attfield, R. (1995). Value, obligation, and meta-ethics. Haskovo: Rodopi. Attfield, R. (1998). Saving Nature, Feeding People and Ethics. Environmental Values, 7, 291-304. Attfield, R. (2011). The Ethics of Environmental Concern. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Attfield, R., & Belsey, A. (1994). Philosophy and the Natural Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brennan, A., & Lo, Y.-S. (2008, January 3). Environmental Ethics. Retrieved from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental/ Dunlap, R. E., van Liere, K. D., Mertig, A., & Jones, R. E. (2000). Measuring Endorsement of the New Ecological Paradigm: a Revised NEP Scale. Journal of Social Issues, 56, 425-4. Guha, R. (2000). Environmentalism: A Global History. Journal of Political Ecology: Case Studies in History and Society, 8, 161. Holmes Rolston, I. (1996). Feeding People versus Saving Nature? In W. Aiken, & H. LaFollette, World Hunger and Morality (2nd ed., pp. 248–267). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall . Paehlke, R. (1995). Conservation and Environmentalism: An Encyclopedia (Vol. 33). New York: Taylor & Francis. Smith, M. J. (2005). Thinking Through the Environment: A Reader. New York: Routledge. Woods, K. (2010). Human Rights and Environmental Sustainability. Dewey Court Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Yang, T. (2000). Toward a Deep Environmentalism: The Basic Ideas of. Chengdu: Sichuan People's Press. Read More