John Post

John gave me my first footnote citation, in his book "Faces of Existence"... He was a kind man, and a humane philosopher. https://t.co/uOPyLWJzU6

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) August 31, 2020

"Hawk. Lizard. Mole. Human"

Because William Blake was right: Every living thing is holy.

...How lucky I am to live in a home with windows. Against all odds — the encroachments of construction companies and lawn services and exterminators — these windows still open onto a world that stubbornly insists on remaining wild. I love the bluebirds, and I also love the fierce hawk who reminds me that the peace of the backyard is only a fiction. I love the lizard who looks so much like a snake, and I also love the snake who would eat her if it could.

And my friend the mole, oh how I love my old friend the mole. In these days that grow ever darker as fears gather and autumn comes on, I remember again and again how much we all share with this soft, solitary creature trundling through invisible tunnels in the dark, hungry and blind but working so hard to move forward all the same. Margaret Renkl, nyt

Environmental Ethics: Blog Post 1: Introduction

Environmental Ethics: Blog Post 1: Introduction: Hey!! My Name is Markham Overton. I am a transfer student from Tennessee State University.   Im from Nashville Tennessee and I'm a History Major. To be honest the reason I choose this course was out of curiosity. The title of this  course seemed interesting. I've  taken a medical ethics course but I've never heard of environmental ethics before . As.  far. as the. environment goes I feel that the environment is what fuels our existence as a species.  We need the environment to stay healthy in order for us as human beings to survive.  Its like a domino effect , if we tear down and pollute the environment we as humans will have a poor quality of life to look forward to. Im really looking forward to learning more and understanding different aspects of peoples perspectives on  Environmental issues.

A Tale of Two Books - A Critique of Anthropocentric Environmentalism

Going through this weeks reading, I was struck Rolston's argument that environmentalism preservation had an intrinsic value.  Most of the circles I run in tend to view environmentalism through the lens of stewardship (a moderate anthropocentric view).  While I don't have a hard firm understanding on the boundaries of moral standing in regards to ecosystems and wildlife, I do believe that maintaining the world around us is intrinsically valuable.  To argue that we (as humans) ought to preserve nature to simply milk more resources from nature seems (to me) to be remarkably arrogant and self-centered.  

The best way I can illustrate why I find the anthropocentric  view distasteful on a personal level is best illustrated by comparing two of my favorite books from my childhood: Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen and My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George.  In Hatchet, the protagonist is an airplane that crashes into the Canadian wilderness.  He has to survive until rescue arrives.  Comparatively, in My Side of the Mountain, the protagonist runs away from the city to live in the Catskill mountains on New York.   Both books discuss and explore the beauty of nature, but through different lenses.  Hatchet is a story of man overcoming nature, while Mountain is a story of man living in harmony with nature. Both characters recognize that nature is harsh, but in Hatchet, nature is a puzzle to beat like a level in a Bear Grylls video game, while in Mountain, nature is seen as beautiful and worth enjoying as-is despite the difficulties.  

A anthropocentric approach to environmentalism feels very much like the protagonist's approach to nature in Hatchet. Nature and man have a rivalry-like relationship--butting heads in a mutually beneficial fashion.  However, the character in Hatchet is seeking to escape the wild and return to the comfort of civilization.  There is this underlying assumption throughout the book that civilization is better than the wild beauty of nature.  The protagonist simply sees nature as means to an end, that is, means to leave the wilderness behind.

Therein lies my issue with this mindset: this world is our home.  There is no escaping earth (space colonies aside).  I'm not whitewashing life here on earth; there are environmental disasters we must address as well as natural calamities that wreck havoc.  In My Side of the Mountain, the protagonist must learn how to cope with the harsh realities of foraging and northern winters, but he does so by joining the circle of life--not beating it.  

“See that falcon? Hear those white-throated sparrows? Smell that skunk? Well, the falcon takes the sky, the white-throated sparrow takes the low bushes, the skunk takes the earth...I take the woods.”

-Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain  

P.S. I know it seems like I am highly critical of Hatchet, but the book is a Newberry Honor winning book, and I highly recommend both Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain, they were both childhood favorites of mine.

This Week's activity:

- Wrote essay

- Commented on Ed's post

- Added additional DQ's

Questions Mon31-Wed2

You don't have to answer my questions, if you have enough to say without them...  But I would like to know what you think. You can reply in the comments section below, or in your weekly essay. Get all your posts for each week in by Thursday midnight, but don't wait 'til the last minute... we need the benefit of your thoughts prior to class. You can always go back and edit earlier author posts, and add new comments as new thoughts arise.

And, I encourage everyone to suggest Discussion Questions of your own, so we can talk about what you want to talk about too.

W 2 - EE 5-6
LISTEN-Sustained (Wednesday @dawn)

• Do you think there are inherent "limits to growth" that should constrain cultural and personal behaviors that cannot be sustained indefinitely? What present practices of your own and of our culture do you think unsustainable? 
• Do you feel any obligation to "become the change you want to see in the world," to set sustainable examples for your peers and your children? Do you (for instance) drive a hybrid or e-vehicle? Do you have solar panels on your roof? Do you diligently recycle, consume "green" products, pay attention to your carbon footprint, etc.?
• Do you think it's more, less, or as important to live sustainably yourself, as to exert and support activist pressure against fossil fuel companies and their investors, etc.?
• Does Beckerman have a point, about some forms of "strong sustainability" being "morally repugnant"? 63
• Are wind turbines like those on p. 68 "ugly," as some of their opponents charge?
• How do you feel about the Trump administration's withdrawal from international climate agreements and general refusal to join cooperative global efforts to combat climate change?
• Is it possible to be a good global citizen, when your own nation has withdrawn support from global cooperation with regard to the environment?
• Is it possible to be a nationalist AND a good environmentalist?
• Do you like the Ehrlichs' rivet analogy? 73
• What do you think of the argument that human development often results in an increase in biodiversity, so we don't need to do anything else to promote it? 75
• Does the Deep Ecology emphasis on a feeling of deep identity with, and relatedness to, all of nature, necessarily undermine "other kinds of motivation" for being environmentally aware? 78
• Are you an Ecofeminist? (And can an Ecofeminist also be a Deep Ecologist?) 79
• Is atomistic individualism a big problem in America? 82
• Are you a Peter Singer fan? Do you support "animal liberation"? What does that mean to you? 83
• Have you read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, or his shorter essay "An Animal's Place"? (Or any of his other books, like Food Rules or How to Change Your Mind? Comments? Do you eat what you think you should? Do you feel bad about eating animals, processed "food" your grandmother wouldn't have recognized, or anything else?
• Does Tennessee's Environmental Justice candidate for the U.S. Senate stand a chance against her Trump-endorsed opponent?
• Are you partial to any of the four forms of Green opposition to growth? 88
• Are you an active advocate (or passive practitioner) of walking, cycling, public transport, etc.?  

Following up discussion last week...

The Case for Not Being BornThe anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar argues that it would be better if no one had children ever again.

By Joshua Rothman

David Benatar may be the world’s most pessimistic philosopher. An “anti-natalist,” he believes that life is so bad, so painful, that human beings should stop having children for reasons of compassion. “While good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place,” he writes, in a 2006 book called “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence.” In Benatar’s view, reproducing is intrinsically cruel and irresponsible—not just because a horrible fate can befall anyone, but because life itself is “permeated by badness.” In part for this reason, he thinks that the world would be a better place if sentient life disappeared altogether.

For a work of academic philosophy, “Better Never to Have Been” has found an unusually wide audience. It has 3.9 stars on GoodReads, where one reviewer calls it “required reading for folks who believe that procreation is justified.” A few years ago, Nic Pizzolatto, the screenwriter behind “True Detective,” read the book and made Rust Cohle, Matthew McConaughey’s character, a nihilistic anti-natalist. (“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution,” Cohle says.) When Pizzolatto mentioned the book to the press, Benatar, who sees his own views as more thoughtful and humane than Cohle’s, emerged from an otherwise reclusive life to clarify them in interviews. Now he has published “The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions,” a refinement, expansion, and contextualization of his anti-natalist thinking. The book begins with an epigraph from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”—“Humankind cannot bear very much reality”—and promises to provide “grim” answers to questions such as “Do our lives have meaning?,” and “Would it be better if we could live forever?”

Benatar was born in South Africa in 1966. He is the head of the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town, where he also directs the university’s Bioethics Centre, which was founded by his father, Solomon Benatar, a global-health expert. (Benatar dedicated “Better Never to Have Been” “to my parents, even though they brought me into existence.”) Beyond these bare facts, little information about him is available online. There are no pictures of Benatar on the Internet; YouTube videos of his lectures consist only of PowerPoint slides. One video, titled “What Does David Benatar Look Like?,” zooms in on a grainy photograph taken from the back of a lecture hall until an arrow labelled “David Benatar” appears, indicating the abstract, pixellated head of a man in a baseball cap.

After finishing “The Human Predicament,” I wrote to Benatar to ask if we could meet. He readily agreed, then, after reading a few of my other pieces, followed up with a note. “I see that you aim to portray the person you interview, in addition to his or her work,” he wrote:

One pertinent fact about me is that I am a very private person who would be mortified to be written about in the kind of detail I’ve seen in the other interviews. I would thus decline to answer questions I would find too personal. (I would be similarly uncomfortable with a photograph of me being used.) I understand entirely if you would rather not proceed with the interview under these circumstances. If, however, you would be happy to conduct an interview that recognized this aspect of me, I would be delighted.

Undoubtedly, Benatar is a private person by nature. But his anonymity also serves a purpose: it prevents readers from psychologizing him and attributing his views to depression, trauma, or some other aspect of his personality. He wants his arguments to be confronted in themselves. “Sometimes people ask, ‘Do you have children?’ ” he told me later. (He speaks calmly and evenly, in a South African accent.) “And I say, ‘I don’t see why that’s relevant. If I do, I’m a hypocrite—but my arguments could still be right.’ ” When he told me that he’s had anti-natalist views since he was “very young,” I asked how young. “A child,” he said, after a pause. He smiled uncomfortably. This was exactly the kind of personal question he preferred not to answer... (continues)

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M 31 - EE 3-4
LISTEN [But, CORRECTION re: William Blake--Bull Durham, not Field of Dreams]...Moving forward (my Monday dawn post)

• Do you agree that when people say they don't care about the long-term future of humanity they're effectively declaring that their death obliterates the moral universe? (29)
• Is Derek Parfit right, do we have future-related duties extending to whoever lives then? (32)
• Do you personally have a harder time caring about your great-grandchildren (etc.) than your children and grandchildren? If so, do you see that as a deficiency, a failure of imagination, or just human nature?
• What should we be doing to promote "widespread environmental education" (40) that we're not doing?
• Is concern for theaters, museums, and libraries an environmental issue? (41)
• Who should appoint an environmental ombudsman? (42) Should that individual be subject to executive dismissal, removal by plebiscite, or what other form of accountability?
• Would anyone but a professional philosopher ever deny that "it must sometimes be possible for moral claims to be true or correct"? (44)
• Do you imagine you'd support strong environmental protections if you were to participate in a Rawls-style deliberation behind a "veil of ignorance"? (46) Would most people?
• Are Benhabib's criticisms of Rawls's approach as "disembedded and disembodied" fair and on target? (47)
• How can a democracy increase the likelihood that virtuous people who were "well brought up" will succeed in attaining and effectively discharging positions of leadership? 
• Is there any reason why a Kantian wouldn't also value the well-being of non-human animals? (52)
• Are eco-pragmatists the best consequentialists? (55) Are they right to resist theorizing?
• Add yours

Blog Post 1: Introduction

Hi there! My name is Savana Mezquiriz. I am a senior at MTSU majoring in philosophy and minoring in psychology and sociology. I am also apart of the Honors College and am currently finishing up my thesis. For this project, I decided to research child custody laws in Tennessee, deontological theories philosophers presented hundreds of years ago, and how they are intertwined with each other. I am 21 years old, grew up in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and live a pretty easy going life for the most part. I got married in August of 2019 and we just bought a house in Shelbyville, Tennessee. It is about 35-40 minutes south of Murfreesboro. I plan to use my degree to go to law school. I work for a small law firm in Shelbyville, Rambo and Trott. I have been there for going on 3 years so I am learning the ropes and what to expect once I graduate with my JD. I would like to be an in-house attorney for a company somewhere close to where I live. As far as why I took this course, my main focus within philosophy is ethics. It is what I find most interesting and applicable to my future career. I have no idea what in-house company I will be offered to work for and would like to apply ethics to as many areas as possible.  I not only want to focus on ethics but think about environmental rights and wrongs we as humans are taking part in. I am excited about all we will learn and the critical thinking it will provide us in our daily choices that affect Earth. 

Five Etiquette Tips for the Zoom Classroom*

The provost sent this. "Clothing is NOT optional." To quote my colleague, "WHAT???? Umm... I have not run into that one on a Zoom call, but I guess I have another 14 weeks." Let's not  run into it, either.

I do have a tip to add: if you've turned off your video, please turn it on whenever you speak. Disembodied voices on Zoom are disconcerting. jpo


While classroom etiquette in a face-to-face environment is second nature to us, the Zoom classroom is a bit different. Here are a few tips to make both students and faculty more comfortable.

Be aware of your location

Where are you participating in your Zoom? Consider what viewers can see. Might things located near you – people, piles of laundry, pictures, etc. -- distract others in the class? Try to find a space with few distractions. While your bedroom may be the only quiet location, consider placing your device on a side table or desk, and sit up as you would in a classroom rather than lounging on the bed. Virtual backgrounds may seem to be a solution, but they slow down connection speeds and tend to make hands, ears, and hair disappear when you move.

Use Mute early and often

The microphone setting is in the bottom left corner of your Zoom screen when you enter each meeting. If it is not automatically enabled, please mute yourself when you aren’t speaking. This allows for greater ease of conversation by both faculty and students and blocks out other background noises such as children, pets, etc.

Raise your hand or wait to speak

In a face-to-face class, we customarily raise our hand to speak. You should do the same in a Zoom classroom to prevent talking over others. Physically raising your hand works in smaller courses where everyone fits on the gallery view. In the Participants pop-up (click Participants on the bottom of your Zoom screen), students can click Raise Hand to indicate that they have a question.

Be respectful

Think about facial expressions, tone, and words when communicating on Zoom, just as you would in a face-to-face course. Discussions and debates are encouraged, but they should be done respectfully and with an awareness of diversity and inclusivity.

Clothing is NOT optional

Clothes should be worn at all times. (Everyone can see everyone else!) It’s considered to be best practice to dress and to clean up appropriately for a Zoom class, as you would if the class were face-to- face.

* With thanks to the DePaul University College of Education

Some good news

	Bill McKibben ⁦‪@billmckibben‬⁩ On a hard day, some good news: Researchers painted one blade of a wind turbine black, and it cut bird deaths 70% (and raptor deaths to zero). (h/t ⁦‪@mzjacobson‬⁩) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…   8/26/20, 12:34 PM

Week One Essay - Shooting Turtles

 

A few thoughts on chapters one and two of the short introduction and Dr. Oliver’s post on How the World Thinks. First of all, I am very much into the idea of applied philosophy (p. 4). In our world today it is difficult to reach a shared understanding of problems and solutions because we all live in our own righteous bubble. I confess that I just don’t want (usually) to talk with people that hold views different from mine. I am into confirmation bias. Philosophy can help us with that. For example, Spinoza, as you will see, has made a great impact my own appreciation of environmental matters, and a joint discussion of Spinoza, regardless of whether you are an anthropocentrist or biocentrist or have no position at all, will profit everyone. Spinoza and Plato can help us deal with this crisis. I hope that in this class some of you do have different views from us tree huggers. “Amicable conversation” with people holding views different from mine, is what, I have found, makes college fun and profitable.

Secondly, I think that having an understanding of the concepts of nature, moral standing, and value discussed in chapter two are critical to having a discussion of the ethics, or the morality, of actions affecting the environment. I read every day something about the effects of climate change (in the Guardian this morning, this article: Unless We Change Course, the US Agricultural System Could Collapse). I suspect that most people reading those articles think about the science of the causes and effects, but not about the morality of the actions that led to the causes.

Here is a confession. I remember as a boy, probably in the 10 to 12 range, sitting on the porch of my grandfather’s lake house, high above the lake, and shooting swimming turtles with a pellet gun. I’m not proud of this, more ashamed really. I could never ever do that today. Why not? Because I have come to believe that I have a relationship with nature, and that those turtles have moral value. I believe that I am a part of nature, that the turtle and I have a kinship. Now, of course, there are many people out there who don’t make this connection. They see themselves as apart from nature.  Maybe some of you shoot turtles for fun, and think that people like me are just wimps. But whether we see ourselves as apart from nature or a part of nature, we both benefit from discussing the morality of whatever we are talking about.

Week One activity:

Wed. 8/26, this post

Thur 8/27 Reply to Levi DQ re: value of environmental preservation

Thur 8/27 Comment on DQ re: "true self"

 

Questions Aug 26

W 26 EE 1-2. How the World Thinks, and other things (including some discussion of today's reading, in my Wednesday dawn post... there's also video in two parts, because I dropped the camera...)
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IMPORTANT UPDATE: I gave you guys the wrong Meeting ID... (no wonder I got emails indicating that people were waiting for me at all hours!)... And apparently all my emails have been going to D2L mail, look there if you haven't yet.

I've emailed the correct ID Tuesday morning. Sorry for the confusion. jpo

==

*Some questions for you to ponder, and write about in your weekly essay if you wish. But you can write about anything in or prompted by our texts you'd like. I encourage you to formulate and respond to your own and your classmates' discussion questions, and not just mine.

(You get 3 points for that weekly essay, and up to 2 more each week if you've commented on at least two classmates' posts. Include a brief summary of all your online activity with each weekly essay (you can go back and edit those, if you've posted or commented or just had new thoughts you want to share late in the week.) Your weekly summary can look something like this:

• Tuesday: posted an essay called [Your title here]-3 points
• Wednesday: commented on Joe Blow's essay called [Whatever]-1 point
• Thursday: commented on Sue Who's essay called [Whatever]-1 point
• Thursday" commented on Bill Chill's essay called [Whatever]

Notice, you max out at 5 points each week... but additional comments look good and earn your professor's respect (which could come in handy, at grading time).

==

CORRECTION: I read McKibben's The End of Nature in the late '80s, not 70s. Still a long time ago, though, he was still quite prescient. “There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.” (As I'm sure we'll see the GOP confirm this week.)

==

*Discussion Questions (DQs)

• Do you adhere to biospherical egalitarianism and Deep Ecology (see p.7)? Why or why not?
• Does your "true self" extend to the whole of nature (8)? In practical terms, what does that mean?
•  What's wrong with anthropocentrism, ethically, ecologically, pragmatically, or otherwise?

• In what senses are we apart from and a part of nature? Do any of those exempt us from ethical responsibility to future generations of humans and non-humans?
• Is Stoicism the wrong philosophy for this moment, if indeed it counsels that we should "follow nature" and comply with the status quo? (17) [What about Stoic Pragmatism?]
• If you don't feel "at home" anywhere, do you lack an environment? (18) [But shouldn't we feel at home everywhere, given our cosmic identity as creatures of the stars? -as Neil Tyson said.]
• Are you an anthropocentrist, biocentrist, ecocentrist, or something else?
• What do you think about "needlessly cutting down a healthy tree"? (26)
• [Yours]

Neighbors committing arboricide, felling perfectly healthy trees to make way for a gratuitous circle drive. Where’s the Lorax when you need him? pic.twitter.com/R1vBbROrXG

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 15, 2020

   

More voters are passionate about climate change, but “Environmental groups are acutely aware of the fact that their agendas are not going to be accomplished if the vote is not free, fair and accessible,” said Myrna Pérez of the Brennan Center for Justice. https://t.co/J3JTT13cQP

— NYT Climate (@nytclimate) August 25, 2020

My gap year from school is over, and it feels so great to finally be back in school again! pic.twitter.com/EKDzzOnwaI

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) August 24, 2020

An environmentally-"woke" writer you should know. 
Margaret Renkl is a Nashville resident who writes a wise weekly column for the national newspaper of record, the New York Times. Here's how she concludes her latest essay.

We may be in the middle of a story we don’t know how will end, or even whether it will end, but we are not helpless characters created and directed by an unseen novelist. We have the power, even in this Age of Anxiety, to enfold ourselves in small comforts, in the joy of tiny pleasures. We can walk out into the dark and look up at the sky. We can remind ourselves that the universe is so much bigger than this fretful, feverish world, and it is still expanding. And still filled with stars.

Her essays are consistently good, as is her first book Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. I don't know if she'd say so herself, but she's a worthy philosopher.
==

Wednesday in Environmental Ethics we commence our look at Robin Attfield's Very Short Intro, which announces early on: "the environment that our grand-children inherit will be vastly different from that of our early ancestors, and even from the environment we were born into ourselves." He's not talking about the pandemic or the political swamp-pit of our present moment, but he could be. ("Origins" and "Key Concepts" are his opening chapters.)

The world is awash in change, uncertainty, and executively-orchestrated chaos. It would be hard to dispute or dissuade a younger person who'd concluded that the older generations have saddled theirs with an irretrievable climate catastrophe. I've had more than a few conversations with young "anti-natalists" whose present intent is to stop propagating our species altogether, saying they find it unconscionable to contemplate bringing new life into such a world. How sad. 

But I'm still wearing my rally cap, hoping for the right kind of change. That astronauts' image of the Earth hanging beautifully and vulnerably in space is still transformative and inspiring for me, still a powerful reminder that we're one species on a small rock with every incentive to bridge our differences and make a habitable, sustainable world for our children's children (etc., ad infinitum).

The heedless, voracious, unsustainably anthropocentric "Last Man" cannot be our paradigm. Right? He's a Onceler. A one-off. The world will happily lose him.

At one point in our Zoom conversation Monday we discussed The World Without Us, both the concept and Alan Weisman's book.

He asks us to envision our Earth, without us... our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence... everyday items may become immortalized as fossils... copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock... plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe... just days after humans disappear, floods in New York's subways would start eroding the city's foundations... asphalt jungles would give way to real ones... organic and chemically treated farms would revert to wild... billions more birds would flourish... cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us. g'r

“Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.”

Well at least the cockroaches would miss us.
==

“It’s really important for us to feel that nature is a place that we can feel comfortable in, and very empathetic and caring towards” @RSAMatthew speaks to author of The Book of Trespass, @nickhayesillus1 on the latest episode of our podcast. Listen now: https://t.co/PLiuXoGZYb

— The RSA (@theRSAorg) August 25, 2020