Narratives on nature, beauty, and public land: A search for an elusive environmental ethics

Ethics has been a topic of inquiry for over 2,000 years. In general the continuing project of ethics has attempted to determine what is right and wrong or good and bad with respect to our fellow humans. More recently, a new breed of philosophers, environmental philosophers, have attempted to reconsider the scope of ethics as prescriptions concerned either directly or indirectly with non-humans. Various iterations of environmental ethics have been proposed in the past 30 years. Positions including animal rights, ecosystem ethics, Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism represent four of the standard views today.; Very few empirical treatments of environmental ethics have been done and even fewer have attempted a more pluralistic approach to the topic. For instance, one of the persistent views in environmental ethics is that of justice-based obligatory ethics. While this view may be reasonable, it excludes other, perhaps, equally deserving views such as care-based ethics and supererogatory ethics. In an attempt to address these underrepresented areas of ethical inquiry, this study explicitly attempted to document the opportunities when both justice and care as well as obligatory and supererogatory ethics emerged from narratives. These narratives were constructed in reference to natural areas of varying familiarity.; Four themes emerged from the data that go some ways towards documenting the nature of environmental ethics discourse. These four themes are: (1) Beauty in Nature; (2) Responsibilities to ‘The Other;’ (3) Public Lands; and (4) On Becoming a Moral Agent. Each theme individually highlights some aspect of environmental ethics discourse that is in need of further consideration. Collectively the four themes combine to paint a picture of how environmental ethics is discussed by a sample of people in southeastern Kentucky. But more, this collection of themes questions some of the foundations of existing environmental ethics positions.; The four themes do not simply deconstruct the edifice of environmental ethics, rather they offer a new hope for overcoming some of the challenges environmental ethics continues to face. Beauty in Nature and Public Lands are two themes of environmental ethics in that they exist within the boundaries of the field. Responsibilities to ‘The Other’ and On Becoming a Moral Agent are themes about environmental ethics because they combine to challenge those boundaries.; Collectively, the four themes are features of a moral filter. Recalibrating the moral filter is one means to overcoming the challenges faced by environmental ethics today. In detailing how this moral filter might be recalibrated, a new iteration of environmental ethics is proposed.