This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This Science, Technology, and Society project supports scholarship that will result in a book about ethics and ecology, in particular, the concept of harm to nature. The conceptual and normative analysis will focus on the recent history of attempts to identify, measure, and regulate harms to the natural environment--harms not necessarily tied to or ultimately analyzable in terms of human health, safety, or welfare. The goal of the project is to provide philosophical context for conceptions of the value of nature that arise in controversies such as: disputes about ecological risk assessment, the measurement of damages for losses of wildlife caused by industrial accidents, the regulation of genetically manipulated organisms, the cloning of endangered species, the control of invasive species, and the intentional relocation of organisms in anticipation of climate change.
People may perceive activities as harmful to nature even if these activities are not harmful to human beings. The project analyzes the conceptual and normative problems scientists have encountered when they have sought to help policy makers define ecological endpoints for regulation and to identify ecological "services" that are not primarily economic but aesthetic or spiritual ways of valuing nature. The project examines the democratic and deliberative processes though which scientists and citizens engage each other in understanding conceptions of intrinsic value that apply to the natural world. In this way, the research seeks to clarify and explain ways people attach value to the course of natural history for what they regard as its intrinsic aesthetic, ethical, spiritual, and moral properties and thus for reasons that reflect more on their obligations toward the natural world than on the uses they may make of it. Thus, the project stands to have broader impacts for public participation in discussion of climate change and other ecological issues.
