Mich "Adapting Environmental Ethics to Climate Change: In Favour of a Nuanced View on Change"

Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Anna Wienhues (KULeuven)

Climate change arguably poses a dual challenge to non-anthropocentric environmental ethics. For one, environmental ethics needs to provide action guidance for climate change related environmental problems, such as on how to theorise conservation ethics under these new conditions. One of the new areas of development in the literature is the body of work surrounding non-anthropocentric climate adaptation ethics. Secondly, climatic changes put the limelight on the need to theorise non-anthropocentric ethics in the context of an ever-changing world in which the past cannot be replicated and the future is uncertain. Against the background of these two challenges, I aim to make the case in favour of a particular methodological view on how environmental ethics ought to be orientated towards the notion of change itself by arguing in favour of grounding appropriate environmental theorising on a nuanced and self-critical view on material and value change. The upshot is that such a view on change can aid the adaptation of environmental ethics as a field to climate change.