PHL-363 Environmental Ethics examines the philosophical question of what defines 'nature,' human obligations to animals, plants, and nonliving things, and the debate between conservation and preservation approaches to endangered species, oil spills, wildfires, and water contamination. The course draws on Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and requires a final paper analyzing a real environmental disaster, such as Australia's Black Summer fires or the Red Hill crisis.
Defining 'nature' as a genuine philosophical starting point
The course begins by philosophically examining what actually counts as 'nature,' recognizing that this seemingly simple term carries genuine philosophical complexity that shapes every subsequent ethical question about environmental obligation.
Conservation versus preservation as a genuine ethical fork
PHL-363 explicitly examines the conservation-versus-preservation debate, teaching students that even well-intentioned environmental ethics contains genuine internal disagreement about the right approach to protecting nature.
Key topics in PHL363
- Defining 'nature' philosophically
- Human obligations to animals, plants, and nonliving things
- Conservation versus preservation
- Endangered species ethics
- Environmental disaster case analysis
- Aldo Leopold's land ethic
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Worked example: conservation and preservation as genuinely different ethical stances
- Single-approach assumption: Assuming 'protecting the environment' means one single, agreed-upon approach
- PHL-363's approach: Examining the genuine ethical disagreement between conservation (managed use) and preservation (leaving nature untouched)
- Lesson: PHL-363 teaches that environmental ethics contains real, substantive internal debate about the right approach, not a single unified environmental ethic
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Frequently asked questions
How a person defines 'nature' — whether it includes only wilderness untouched by humans, or also managed landscapes, or nonliving elements like rivers and mountains — genuinely shapes every subsequent question about human obligations to the environment, meaning skipping this definitional question would leave later ethical arguments built on an unexamined and potentially inconsistent foundation. PHL-363 starts here because environmental ethics genuinely depends on first clarifying what exactly we mean by 'nature' before debating our obligations to it.
Conservation (managing natural resources for sustainable human use) and preservation (protecting nature from human alteration entirely) represent genuinely different ethical commitments about humanity's proper relationship to the natural world, and treating environmental ethics as one unified position would obscure this real philosophical tension. PHL-363 examines this debate explicitly because understanding environmental ethics accurately requires recognizing this genuine internal disagreement, not assuming all environmentally-minded positions agree on the right approach.