11/12/2022 0 Comments No dogs or philosophers allowed![]() ![]()
The Philosophers On series contains group posts on issues of current interest, with the aim being to show what the careful thinking characteristic of philosophers (and occasionally scholars in related fields) can bring to popular ongoing conversations. ![]() Philosophers and ethicists really ought to be engaged in these global environmental problems, they really ought to be speaking up in policy debates… because if they don’t, then the entire suite of solutions will be left to our engineers, our scientists, and our cynics.In light of this recent legislative activity, the political intensity of the subject, and the complex moral and legal questions surrounding it, I took the advice of a few readers and put together this entry for the Philosophers On series on the ethics and politics of abortion. What you should be arguing is that philosophers oughtn’t to kick environmental ethicists off the bus, which they have been doing for decades. Better, in my view, just to approach this in a “big tent” sorta way. Not all of the problems, granted, but many. A lot of the problems are “how to get things done” style problems, and those are in some respects anti-philosophical. I appreciate your nod to the importance of these topics and I do wish that other more centrally located philosophers would take the time to read up on these topics and take them seriously as matters for investigation and discussion.īut the truth is, many of these environmental problems are not necessarily all that deep or mind bending, and they simply don’t interest philosophers. As someone who has spent his entire career working on planetary and environmental issues, I do think these issues are existentially and philosophically important. Just got a h/t over here from Schliesser. Don’t you think that this sort of approach will be theoretically and rhetorically justified? He hopes that, by using Buddhist sources, he will make Japanese Buddhist fishermen aware that killing whales (etc.) is against their own religion (I discussed S’s work here: ). Nonetheless, I wonder ifĪ) is not it better to focus on, say, improving the critical edition of Hume’s works in a great way, rather than on doing a bad job about the two topics you mentioned (because one is not interested in them, because one is more precise than broad or because of any other possible reason)?ī) do not you think that working on Kant or Wittgenstein (or many other philosophers) CAN have an impact on the two topics you mention? To name an example, the philologist and Buddhologist Lambert Schmithausen (working on Sanskrit, Pāli and Chinese) wrote several books on our obligations towards the environment and especially plants, and had them also translated into Japanese. ![]() NO DOGS OR PHILOSOPHERS ALLOWED FREEAnyone who wants to spend their lives paddling around in the philosophical shallows, along with Kant and Wittgenstein, should of course be free to do so, but should realise that it will condemn them to a life of penury and obscurity. By the time they have reached the top of the tree, that’s all they should be doing. As their experience, status and salary rises, they should increasingly specialise in problems (a) and (b). The junior members should cut their teeth on lesser subjects such as the mind-body problem. So: University philosophy departments should be restructured. It safeguards the right to life, without which enjoyment of any of the other rights and freedoms in the Convention is rendered nugatory” 1 (Emphasis added) “The Court’s case law accords pre-eminence to Article 2 as one of the most fundamental provisions of the Convention. In Pretty v UK (2002) 35 EHRR 1, the Strasbourg court said: There’s a good parallel in the way the European Court of Human Rights approaches the question of the relationship between the various articles in the ECHR. If we can’t live here at all, it’s pointless trying to draft the small print of living. A habitable planet is a prerequisite for all the rest of our ethical cogitation. My concern in this post is mainly with (a). NO DOGS OR PHILOSOPHERS ALLOWED HOW TOIt is: (a) Whether or not we should be allowed to destroy our planet (and if not, how to stop it happening) and (b) Whether or not it is fine to allow 20,000 children in the developing world to die daily of hunger and entirely avoidable disease (and if not, how to stop it happening). What really matters now is not the nuance of our approach to mitochondrial manipulation for glycogen storage diseases, or yet another set of footnotes to footnotes to footnotes in the debate about the naturalistic fallacy. However entertaining the sideshow, sideshow performers do not deserve the same recognition or remuneration as those performing on our philosophical Broadways. NO DOGS OR PHILOSOPHERS ALLOWED PROFESSIONALMany ethicists spend their professional lives performing in sideshows. Not all ethical issues are equally important. ![]()
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