PROFESSOR: John Nolt
OFFICE PHONE: 974-7218
OFFICE: 818 McClung Tower
HOME PHONE: 573-4135
OFFICE HOURS: 9-10 MWF
E-MAIL: nolt@utk.edu
and by appointment
WEBSITE: web.utk.edu/~nolt
REQUIRED TEXTS
Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, University of California Press, 1983.
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, revised edition, Avon Books, 1990.
Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, Princeton University Press, 1986.
Mark Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law and the Environment, Cambridge University Press, 1988
J. Baird Calicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, SUNY Press, 1989.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac with Essays on Conservation from Round River, Ballantine, 1970. [The original statement of Leopold's land ethic.]
John Nolt, et.al., What Have We Done? The Foundation for Global Sustainability’s State of the Bioregion Report for the Upper Tennessee Valley and the Southern Appalachian Mountains, Earth Knows, 1997. [A synoptic assessment of the ecological health of the Southern Appalachian region; if you are unfamiliar with the current environmental situation, read this.]
Peter S. Wenz, Environmental Justice, SUNY Press, 1988 [Excellent account of how classical theories of justice fail in environmental contexts.]
Peter S. Wenz, Environmental Ethics Today, Oxford University Press, 2001. [An overview, like Des Jardins' book, but so new I haven't read it yet (it came in the mail on January 2). Wenz is one of the clearest writers in the field; I'm betting this is really good.]
Michael J. Zimmerman, et. al., Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, 3rd ed., Prentice-Hall, 2001. [Seminal essays by various authors in environmental philosophy.]
This is a graduate seminar in environmental ethics. I define environmental ethics broadly as the attempt to expand the attribution of intrinsic moral worth beyond now-living human beings to include one or more of the following:
(B) Higher non-human animals. Many animals have some of the characteristics (e.g. sentience or self-concern) that justify our ascription of moral worth to humans. To what extent, then, are such higher animals intrinsically worthy of moral consideration? This is a delicate question, since its answer may have disruptive and unpopular implications—e.g. vegetarianism, the reduction or elimination of animal agriculture, restrictions on research uses of animals, or an end to hunting and fishing.
(C) Nature in general. Moral consideration for nature itself is environmental ethics in the strictest sense. Some thinkers (biocentrists) argue that each living organism is intrinsically valuable and so extend fundamental moral consideration even to lower animals and to plants. Others (ecocentrists) ascribe intrinsic moral value not only to individual organisms but to natural wholes or systems—e.g. wetlands, forests, rivers, soils, the atmosphere, species, ecosystems or the biosphere. But this holism threatens our well-entrenched western individualism.
The course is divided into three sections corresponding to this threefold division of environmental ethics. I will introduce each section with one or more lectures, but after the initial lectures individual members of the class will be responsible for presenting the reading material and initiating discussion. We will follow a rotating schedule for class presentations. With each presentation, the presenter should turn in a brief (maybe 3-page), well-edited summary of the day's reading. These summaries should present the author's main points and provide a critical analysis of the author's arguments for them.
In addition to the reading summaries, each student must write a term paper, the final draft of which is due at the end of the semester.
GRADES
Grades will be based on the following:
COURSE CALENDAR
Readings should be competed by the
date for which they are listed.