This chapter presents some co-ordinates for thinking philosophically about morality in conditions where some central valuations guiding action and conceptions of good personhood are undergoing change. The core cases or examples presented here deal with making place for environmental values and moral demands relating to environmental protection in everyday practices at home and at work. We draw upon ethnographic and interview studies made with people involved in such practical negotiations: providing for a family, working as environmental specialist in a municipality and scavenging for food. We highlight how change of ethical standards in relation to the environmental impact of our form of life requires complex renegotiations of practices, roles, duties and tasks in multiple areas of the lives of people in a community, and how the outcomes are dependent on how such negotiations pan out, individually and collectively. We also argue that the very content of the new values and ethical standards that come to be realised through practice are responsive to and dependent on the practices that uphold them and the implicit or explicit negotiations that led up to them. Environmental ethics provides a thankful area for studying moral conceptions in motion because it offers recognisable cases of moral imperatives that people do not quite yet know how to realise in their day-to-day lives and that seem to be at odds with things they value or take for granted, such as productivity at work, spacious housing, air travel and a range of seemingly innocuous everyday consumer items. What we want to draw attention to is the complex practice dependency of moral life. Novel ideals and goals engender concern, creativity and problem solving through often arduous and constant processes. Values feed into practices and get transformed and rearticulated on the way. The perspective we lay out is of theoretical import, with implications for both metaethics and normative ethical theory, suggesting substantial reconsiderations to what moral life has been taken to be like in mainstream moral theory. But it also sheds light on the practical vicissitudes of dealing with changing ethical frameworks and novel matters of ethical concern, which we hope can be helpful for individuals, organisations and political communities negotiating their way through rapid communal ethical changes.

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Working Values into Practice and Transforming Them on the Way: Some Examples from Environmental Ethics

  • Nora Hämäläinen,
  • Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen

摘要

This chapter presents some co-ordinates for thinking philosophically about morality in conditions where some central valuations guiding action and conceptions of good personhood are undergoing change. The core cases or examples presented here deal with making place for environmental values and moral demands relating to environmental protection in everyday practices at home and at work. We draw upon ethnographic and interview studies made with people involved in such practical negotiations: providing for a family, working as environmental specialist in a municipality and scavenging for food. We highlight how change of ethical standards in relation to the environmental impact of our form of life requires complex renegotiations of practices, roles, duties and tasks in multiple areas of the lives of people in a community, and how the outcomes are dependent on how such negotiations pan out, individually and collectively. We also argue that the very content of the new values and ethical standards that come to be realised through practice are responsive to and dependent on the practices that uphold them and the implicit or explicit negotiations that led up to them. Environmental ethics provides a thankful area for studying moral conceptions in motion because it offers recognisable cases of moral imperatives that people do not quite yet know how to realise in their day-to-day lives and that seem to be at odds with things they value or take for granted, such as productivity at work, spacious housing, air travel and a range of seemingly innocuous everyday consumer items. What we want to draw attention to is the complex practice dependency of moral life. Novel ideals and goals engender concern, creativity and problem solving through often arduous and constant processes. Values feed into practices and get transformed and rearticulated on the way. The perspective we lay out is of theoretical import, with implications for both metaethics and normative ethical theory, suggesting substantial reconsiderations to what moral life has been taken to be like in mainstream moral theory. But it also sheds light on the practical vicissitudes of dealing with changing ethical frameworks and novel matters of ethical concern, which we hope can be helpful for individuals, organisations and political communities negotiating their way through rapid communal ethical changes.