PHL302: Environmental Ethics
Professor: Craig DeLancey
Office: Campus Center 212A
Email: craig.delancey@oswego.edu
Office Hours: MWF 3:00-4:00 and by appointment
What this course is for
Environmental ethics is a broad field of study, but our main theme will be questions like:
- What kinds of organisms deserve moral respect? What about them is deserving of respect?
- Do species deserve moral respect? Do ecosystems? Does land?
- What is sustainability?
- What is wilderness?
We will narrow our focus in two ways. First, we will primarily be concerned with ethical problems and conceptual problems. Philosophy is not a discipline to settle questions about, for example, how severe global warming will be. It is a discipline to tell us how we should react, given different estimates of how severe global warming will be. Second, we will focus on non-anthropocentric approaches, because these are the most interesting and most demanding theories to develop and clarify. This means we will be spending less time on issues like which human groups suffer the most from environmental degradation. That's an issue best discussed by classical ethics.
Your commitment: What you must do to achieve these goals
Most of our readings will be articles that I will make available using BlackBoard.
We'll be using the following text:
Cradle to Cradle, by Michael Braungart and William McDonough
Don't worry about grades, except to use them as an indicator of what
you need to keep working on. But, to generate a final grade, the work
will be weighed in the following way:
Reading assignments: 30%
Quizes: 40% (20% each)
Final paper: 30%
If you have a disabling condition which may interfere with your
ability to successfully complete this course, please contact the
Disability Services Office.
A rough schedule
These will likely change, but here is a draft schedule:
- Week 1: Methods of philosophy. Basic issues. Anthropocentric ethics.
- Week 2: Sentiest views and Animal Rights.
- Week 3: Biocentric views.
- Week 4: Metaphysical conundrums of biocentrism.
- Week 5: What is a species? Do species deserve moral respect? Species versus individual organisms.
- Week 6: Do ecosystems deserve moral respect? Does land deserve moral respect? What is wilderness?
- Week 7: Economics and environmental ethics.
- Week 8: Global warming.
- Week 9: Global warming and responsibility to future generations.
- Week 10: What is sustainability?
- Week 11: What is sustainability? Continued. (truncated week--sorry!)
- Week 12: Sustainability implemented. Cradle to Cradle design.
- Week 13: A Green political economy?
- Week 14: Ecopolitics and social ecology. Final thoughts.
Attendance
SUNY mandates attendance for your classes. However, I do not grade
you for attendance. There could be, indirectly, some grading for
attendance in the sense that I might give points for answering some of
questions; but my motive there is only to recognize that
the questions are important and to grade them so that you have some
feedback on those questions. But this part of your grade will be small
if existent.
Please note the following very important fact: I respect you and
believe you should be allowed to manage your own time. But because I
treat you with respect I demand that you act like you deserve that
respect. That is: do not come to class to talk to the person next to
you, to text message your friends back in the dorm, to surf Youtube,
to read the newspaper. I consider this profoundly disrespectful, it
distracts me a great deal, and it distracts the people around you.
You can do these things somewhere else and I won't penalize you for
doing so; so just stay in your dorm room, or go to the cafeteria, or
anywhere else, if you want to do these things. Class time is for
logic.
Of course, I understand that people like to talk to each other during
class about class, asking their neighbor "What did DeLancey just say?"
and so on. That's good -- in the best of all worlds we would all be
doing that often during class. But manners require some taste and I'm
sure you can show good taste in not overdoing that kind of talk to the
point where I can't tell whether you're discussing logic or discussing
lunch plans.
Similarly, don't come to class simply to leave after you hand in your
homework, or come twenty minutes late, and so on. That's very
distracting also. You can hand your work in at the Philosophy Department
Office, if you only want to do that.
If you miss an exam and have an excused absence for the day you miss
the exam, you may make it up, by special appointment with me, when you
are able to come back to class. It is your responsibility to arrange
any make-up exams as soon as you know you are going to miss the
exam. Otherwise you may lose the opportunity to take the test, since I
cannot give make-up exams after the class has gone over the
answers.
Here is how you secure an excused absence: Only prior notification
with credibly documented or easily verifiable reasons (e.g., medical
visits to Mary Walker, documented participation in official sporting
events, etc.) will result in excused absences. You must notify in
writing, call, or email me prior to your absence from class. You must
notify the Philosophy Dept. secretary, Lori Reitmeier, before you are
going to be absent, via email at lori.reitmeier@oswego.edu, or by phone at
x2249. However, you must make sure she knows your name, the number of
the course, the date, and your easily verifiable reason, along with a
request to forward the information to me. It is better to give your
information to me, except when you are unable to communicate with my
phone or email for some reason.
A note about late homework: I go over homeworks in the class
after you hand them in. That means I can't accept a homework after
that review, since it would be impossible to assess how you would have
done on your own at that point. If you give me a homework late but
before we review it in class, I will accept it, but it goes into my
LATE pile, and I get to it someday--but it may take me a long while,
and sometimes I won't grade late homeworks until finals week. So,
it's much less useful for you because you might not receive timely
feedback that way.
College Policy on Intellectual Integrity
Intellectual integrity on the part of all students is basic to
individual growth and development through college course work. When
academic dishonesty occurs, the teaching/learning climate is seriously
undermined and student growth and development are impeded. For these
reasons, any form of intellectual dishonesty is a serious concern and
is therefore prohibited.
The full intellectual integrity policy can be found at
www.oswego.edu/administration/registrar/policy_text.html#cpii
Schedule
I will frequently update an online schedule of readings and
yassignments. It is your responsibility to check the www pages for
the class at least every other day!
Phones
Please leave your phones and pads somewhere packed away. They are
just a distraction to you and the people around you. I would ask you
not bring a computer either (you can't really take notes on it,
because we use strange symbols) but some people claim to need them.
Since I don't grade for attendance, this is not a tough policy: stay
in your dorm room if you want to text message or check Facebook.
Office Hours
In addition to the listed office hours, I encourage you to make
appointments. I am available quite a bit. Please try to come to
office hours with specific questions in mind. You can of course come
with a general request for help, but it is always helpful if you spend
a little time thinking about how I can best help you out.