Specializing in Environmental Ethics

At the University of Tennessee, we construe environmental ethics broadly.  It includes, of course, familiar issues that arise with respect to the relations among now-living human beings and their environment—issues of environmental justice, risk and resource allocation and the like.  But environmental ethics also includes attempts to think morally and philosophically about:

1. Future humans.  Many new technologies are capable of harming even distant future generations.  Yet traditional ethical theories have been concerned chiefly with our relations to contemporaries.  Attempts to expand moral consideration to future generations, however, quickly run into perplexing practical and conceptual problems.
   
   
2. Nonhuman animals.  Sentience and cognitive capacity are among the reasons we ascribe moral status to humans.  Given changing conceptions of nonhuman animals and rapidly advancing biotechnology, the need to determine which animals are worthy of direct moral consideration and how that moral consideration should affect individual action and public policy has emerged as a central philosophical problem for our time.    
   
   
3. Nature in general.  If environmental ethics is about the moral relations between humans and nature, it must concern itself with the value, perhaps even apart from any relationship to human beings, of organisms, species, ecosystems or even the biosphere.  Understanding such value may have significant implications for public policy.

Whether traditional ethics can be so extended and remain a consistent and coherent whole is an open question, providing fertile ground for philosophical work.

We offer graduate level courses in environmental ethics and environmental philosophy.  Students may, in addition, use relevant courses from other departments (Environmental Policy, Environmental Sociology, Ecology, Conservation Biology, etc.) toward the M.A. or Ph.D. degree.  In the tradition of our medical ethics practica, we also help students to find internships and service learning opportunities that provide hands-on experience with environmental problems and policy.