Earth Ethics

Catalog description

Offered intermittently. Prereq., ENST 230H or PHL 112E . We often think of environmental issues primarily as issues of science and politics: what does science tell us about problems facing the environment, and how can politics help us respond? But environmental issues are simultaneously ethical issues with several moral dimensions: because each issue raises questions of how we should respond, exploring the moral dimensions of environmental issues can help us to discern better or worse responses, and to understand why we choose to respond as we do. In this course we will develop broad familiarity with different approaches within the field of environmental ethics in order to use a case study approach to examine a range of contemporary environmental issues. Students will have the opportunity to develop their own responses within a moral framework. By the end of the course students will have learned how to examine the moral dimensions of a range of environmental issues and how to ground their own perspectives within an ethical framework.