Exploring Environmental Ethics
Go to Ethics Updates, a survey of selected resources on environmental ethics maintained by the University of San Diego at ethics.sandiego.edu/ index.html. On this site you'll find a wealth of resources related to environmental ethics, including audio and video files, discussion groups, homepages for environmental groups with ethical interests, and governmental and legal resources on the environment. Follow a few of these links to sample current issues and debates about environmental ethics. Analyze the positions you find on these web pages with respect to the categories described in your textbook. Which philosophical worldviews do you find represented? Do the assignments of intrinsic and instrumental values and roles of humans described in this book fit with what you find in material on the Internet? Why or why not, in your opinion? Do these authors seem to be universalists, relativists, nihilists, or utilitarians? What underlying view of environmental ethics do you find to be most common in this collection?
