One of philosophy's aims is a search
for the good life. This course focuses
on the environment’s role in
that search. Our first task will be
a brief overview of the history of
ethics, followed by an examination
of relations between theoretical and
applied ethics. In particular we will
concentrate of the roles humans should
play in their environments.
Particular attention will be given
to Mary Clark's claim that the peril
of global technology must force us
to reexamine and change our systems
of value if we are to survive. Her
efforts to establish correlations between
cultures and world-views and her insistence
on the need for cultural pluralism
as the indispensable ground for criticism
of environmental ethics will be given
special attention. A more generalized
justification of cultural pluralism
will be examined in the work of Alain
Locke.
Langdon Winner's claim that technologies
of extreme power and complexity must
finally seize control of the societies
that choose to deploy them will also
be examined. He proposes four guidelines
for accepting or rejecting technologies:
(1) "technologies [must] be given
a scale and structure that would be
immediately intelligible to non-experts";
(2) they must have "a high degree
of flexibility and mutability";
(3) they must "be judged according
to the degree of dependency they tend
to foster, those creating a greater
dependency being held inferior";
(4) "they must only be employed
with a fully informed sense of what
is appropriate."
