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28 Res Publica 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/respub28 and id is 1 raw text is: Res Publica (2022) 28:1-16 https://doi.org/1 0.1007/si 1158-021-09520-5 The Failure of Traditional Environmental Philosophy Joseph Heath' Accepted: 28 May 2021 / Published online: 23 June 2021 ©The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021 Abstract A notable feature of recent philosophical work on climate ethics is that it makes practically no reference to 'traditional' environmental philosophy (of the sort that has dominated the curriculum on environmental ethics for decades). There is some irony in this, since environmental ethics arose as part of a broader movement within philosophy, starting in the 1960s, aimed at developing different fields of applied phi- losophy, in order to show how everyday practice could be enriched through philo- sophical reflection and analysis. The major goal of this paper is to explain why this branch of practical ethics has, for the most part, failed the test of practicability when it comes to formulating a response to global climate change. The central problem is that debates in environmental philosophy became absorbed by a set of metaphysical questions about the nature of value. The result has been a field dominated by views that provide unsuitable foundations for the development of public policy. Keywords Environmental ethics - Anthropocentrism - Moral expansionism- Intrinsic value - Climate change Introduction One of the most striking features of recent work on the ethics of climate change is how little reference it makes to, and how little it depends upon, traditional work in environmental philosophy. If one considers major contributions to the debates over climate change by philosophers as various as John Broome (2012), Simon Caney (2010, 2012), Stephen Gardiner (2011), Catriona McKinnon (2011) and Henry Shue (2014), it is rather noticeable that none of it draws upon the body of philosophi- cal work that has been considered central to the discipline of environmental ethics for the past five decades (e.g. Kernohan 2012; Williston 2016). Although none of these authors provide a reason for the decision to pass over this literature in silence, it is not difficult to imagine why they might have chosen to do so. The problem of E Joseph Heath joseph.heath@utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada I_) Springer

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