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Books

Ecological Ethics by Patrick Curry

Vincent Di Norcia looks at various approaches to ecological ethics.

Naturalists begin with the fundamental truth that humans are a primate species, and so part of nature, which means we should respect natural environments and other species. In Ecological Ethics Patrick Curry explores different moral theories from a naturalist standpoint: anthropocentric, ecocentric, biocentric, feminist, pluralist, pragmatist, and political. He begins with a chapter on ‘The Earth in Crisis’, which crisis is due to the interconnected phenomena of global warming, overpopulation, and species extinction. Today we are slaughtering so many species that, Richard Leakey argued, we are now in the midst of our planet’s sixth mass extinction epoch – and the first to have been caused by human beings.

Peter Singer contended in The Expanding Circle (1981) that “Neither evolutionary theory nor science can provide the ultimate premises of ethics” (p.

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