Facts, Values, and Analogies: A Darwinian Approach to Environmental Choice

Abstract

Most writing on environmental ethics concerns the dichotomy between humans and non-humans, and much of the work in the field has been motivated by the effort to escape #x201C;anthropocentrism#x201D; with respect to environmental values. Resulting debates about whether to extend #x201C;moral considerability#x201D; to various elements of non-human nature have been, to say the least, inconclusive. In this paper, a new approach to re-conceptualizing our responsibilities toward nature is proposed, an approach that begins with a re-examination of spatio-temporal scaling in the conceptualization of environmental problems and human responses to them.