Search Results

This chapter considers the medieval and scholastic context of Descartes's theory of causation. It starts with a brief account of the origins of occasionalism in medieval Islamic theology, and then turns to two different alternatives to occasionalism in the later medieval period, namely, the “concurrentism” of Thomas Aquinas, according to which God “concurs” in the action of secondary causes, and the “mere conservationism” of Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, according to which God merely creates and conserves secondary causes that act on their own. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the metaphysical framework for efficient causality in the work of the early modern scholastic Francisco Suárez that prepares the way for a transition from a more traditional Aristotelian view of causality to what we find in Descartes.

This chapter concerns the treatment in Descartes's physics of body-body interaction. There is an extended argument against an occasionalist reading of his physics, on which God is the only real cause of changes in motion due to collision. The alternative view here is that Descartes offers a “conservationist” physics on which God's contribution to such changes is restricted to a “concursus” that consists simply in the continued creation of a constant total quantity of motion. Local changes in that motion are to be explained by appeal not to this concursus but rather to the features of bodies that correspond to the “forces” that Descartes posits in his physics.

This chapter argues that current work on racial cognition is relevant to many of philosophers' concerns about race. It first examines several positions within the philosophy of race, pointing out where facts about the psychology of race could have an impact upon the feasibility of reform proposals offered by philosophers. It then reviews two relatively separate sets of psychological literature. The first shows that the content of racial thought is not a simple product of one's social environment, but is also shaped by the operation of certain evolved psychological mechanisms. After drawing out implications of this work for several types of proposals made by philosophers, it turns to the question of racial evaluation. Recent studies suggest that implicit racist biases can exist and influence behavior even in persons sincerely professing tolerant or even anti-racist views, and that implicit racial evaluations can be insulated in important ways from more explicitly held beliefs. The chapter then argues that these findings bear on the feasibility of proposals made in the philosophical literature on race, and may be useful in shaping novel proposals.

This chapter identifies a strategy to pursue a more adequate theistic explanation of moral law. The problem of how God is related to the moral law is structurally identical to the problem, explored in amazing detail among the medieval and early modern philosophers, of how God is related to the laws of nature. The chapter shows that natural law theory and theological voluntarism correspond closely, in their strengths and weaknesses, to two theories of God's relationship to the laws of nature: mere conservationism and occasionalism, respectively. But there is not extant a theory of God's relationship to the moral law that corresponds to an influential third theory of God's relationship to the laws of nature: concurrentism. Thus it is worth asking whether there is a moral analog to concurrentism that is more successful than natural law theory and theological voluntarism in providing a theistic explanation of moral law.

This chapter considers recent defences of moral fictionalism by Daniel Nolan, Greg Restall and Caroline West (2005) and Richard Joyce (2001, 2005, 2006, 2007). It first explains the route from moral error theory to revisionary moral fictionalism. It then argues against Nolan, Restall, and West that both hermeneutic and revisionary versions of moral fictionalism have trouble accommodating moral disagreement and that they face a version of the Frege-Geach problem. Three objections to Joyce’s defence of revisionary moral fictionalism are developed. First, the claim that false beliefs have detrimental effects, which is supposed to motivate the transition to pretence moral discourse, is subject to counterexamples. Second, the mechanism by which pretence moral belief is supposed to bolster self-control is unclear. Third, moral fictionalism gives conflicting practical recommendations. Finally, an alternative to moral fictionalism — moral conservationism — is elaborated and defended.

This introductory chapter discusses culture, ethnicity and authority, differentiating conservationism from contributionism and providing a brief outline of the chapters that follow. It also presents Matthew Arnold, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Dean Howells and W. B. Yeats, whose works are examined in greater detail in this book.

This chapter discusses what is learned from a maritime perspective of the Caribbean and explore how a study of the Caymanian turtle fishery informs our understanding of contemporary boundary disputes. It also notes the consequences of sea turtle conservationism in the western Caribbean. In doing so, the chapter insists that undergirding stories about mariners on small islands in peripheral parts of the world have much to tell us about modern-day concerns related to border control systems, migration, and environmental conservationism.

There were three stages in the development of environmental thought in the United States. The first stage occurred in the 1960s, when the environmental movement focused on protecting human health, safety, and welfare from visible harms caused by pollution. The second stage encompassed less visible and less demonstrable dangers, such as smaller amounts of hazardous wastes and toxic substances that were possibly carcinogenic, whose sources and effects could not be easily identified and quantified. In the third and current stage, the emphasis shifts to maintaining biodiversity and the “health” or “integrity” of biological systems. The new conservationism poses problems known as “wicked” problems, which value-neutral science is unable to state or answer. This chapter first considers the distinction between science and “trans-science” as well as the concept of “wicked” problems, along with risk assessment and environmental regulation. It then examines the new environmentalism and its limitations, including an emphasis on the “health of ecosystems”.

Summarises the roots of alarm over the misuse of natural resources in the United States and their connection to both European and American imperial expansion, both informal and formal from the 1890s to 1910, and to American ideas of an inland empire of a rationalized settler society type comparable with settler nations developing in the British Empire. Analyses opposition to conservation, while stressing the degree of consensus over the issue. Explains the different types of “empire”: insular, formal and informal, and continental; qualifies the idea of an Open Door policy and its implications for resource use, and advances the concept of neo-mercantilism as an aspect of conservationist concern. Argues that conservation evolved over time, widened in scope and became central to the Progressive agenda by 1909. The relationship of conservation to transnational themes such as efficiency and waste is critically assessed.

In this chapter, Brian Hudson explores the effects of tourism on the Caribbean landscape, focusing on the transformation of the Negril area in Jamaica in the latter half of the twentieth century. His study not only shows how development projects driven by the tourist industry have physically remade the landscape, but also considers how this landscape has been aestheticized and ‘repackaged’ in newspapers, travel guides, and other media. Hudson witnessed the early phase of Negril’s development during his period of service with the Jamaican Government Town Planning Department. Later he became involved in the conservation movement in Jamaica, responding to the baleful effects of poorly designed and inadequately controlled development. While the chapter throws light on the problematic tendency for the Caribbean to be portrayed in terms of ‘unspoiled’ beaches and paradisiacal beauty spots, it also reveals the way in which the rhetoric of ‘the pristine’ versus ‘the degraded’ can be mobilized in the cause of resisting unsustainable development.

“Women Who Will—Do” catalogues the nonfiction writings by Ellen Glasgow and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings that detail their shared interest in social activism. Many of these writings were included in the material collected by Rawlings for the Glasgow biography or shared in correspondences between the two women writers. This chapter focuses on Rawlings’s interest in conservationism and Glasgow’s work with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). Both women found ways to use their fame and wealth to influence others about the social issues they supported.

Previously, in Chapters 1 to 15, I outlined the nature and scope of information ethics. My goal in this chapter is not to convince the reader that no reasonable disagreement is possible about the value of IE as a specific approach to computer ethics or, more generally, as a macroethics. On the contrary, several of the theses defended in this book might be interesting precisely because they are also open to discussion. Rather, my goal is to remove some ambiguities, possible confusions, and mistaken objections that might prevent the correct evaluation of IE in its various interpretations, so that disagreement can become more constructive.

This chapter traces the rise of an international movement to protect sea turtles during the postwar period. It explains how the economic changes brought on by the Second World War led the Caymanian government to envision and develop an alternative economy for its subjects when the turtle industry showed signs of distress. It also charts the development of oceanography and marine science in the years during and after the Second World War. This shift spurred awareness of ocean ecosystems and shaped the nascent marine environmentalism of the first wave of turtle scientists, including Archie Carr. It concludes with Carr's sea turtle research in Costa Rica and, more broadly, the greater Caribbean. The chapter argues that macrolevel changes coupled with the depletion of sea turtles forced turtlemen to end their generations' pursuit of green and hawksbill turtles in the 1970s.

Bradley Brewster and Antony Puddephatt propose that Mead was one of the most thoroughgoing bio-social thinkers in the classical sociological canon, and they criticize those who lump him together with some of his later followers who showed little interest in the natural world and the relationships between the human organism and its environment. This relationship, according to Mead, can be understood neither as a determinism where all the causality lies on the side of the environment nor as an unfettered construction of environment by organism. Brewster and Puddephatt see Mead in a revolt against dualism and idealism. The authors propose that Mead’s theory of fundamental sociality and the objective location of perspectives in nature provides an avenue for linking the social sciences with environmental studies. There are affinities of Mead’s theory to the thinking of early conservationists. They clearly find anticipated in Mead what is presently debated as a new view of the social—that is, a view that includes nonhumans. Mead’s theory could, therefore, provide the foundation for contemporary claims about the obligation of human communities to multiple forms of ecology.

The final chapter considers the upshots of moral error theory for ordinary moral thought and discourse. Moral abolitionism, i.e. the view that in the wake of the realization that morality involves systematic error it should be abolished, is considered and rejected. Richard Joyce’s recent case for moral fictionalism is considered and rejected. An alternative view, moral conservationism, which recommends continued engagement in ordinary moral thought and discourse, is proposed and defended. Finally, the implications of moral error theory for normative ethics are discussed.