A Companion to Public Philosophy

12Public Philosophy, Sustainability, and Environmental Problems

ZACHARY PISO

1 Environmental Ethicists’ Crisis of Conscience

Environmental ethics has persistently aspired to be public philosophy. As a discourse and practice, it has always understood itself to be a response to a very public crisis – environmental degradation and biodiversity loss on a global scale. Plenty of philosophical investigations have aimed at validating and valorizing the moral intuitions of environmentalism, the social movement and political advocacy that bore fruit in legislation like the Endangered Species Act and the Montreal Protocol. And it’s environmentalists, not philosophers, that the subfield claims as its patron saints: theorists endlessly debate over who shall be the true heir to land manager‐turned‐land ethicist Aldo Leopold, and see in Rachel Carson’s ornithology an epistemic practice that rivals the sophistication of formally trained epistemologists (Stephens 2018; Code 2006). On its telling, environmental ethics can trace its lineage to the public disputes over a dam in Yosemite National Park, where John Muir and like‐minded protesters called on policymakers to value the natural landscape over economic development (Minteer and Pyne 2013). Among bona fide philosophers, only Henry David Thoreau can claim ubiquity in the anthologies of environmental ethics, yet it seems safe to say that the essayist would find academic philosophy anathema to his own sauntering (Mooney 2009).

Against this ...