Pragmatism And Explore Environmental Sustainability

With the version of pluralism and utilitarianism in pragmatism, also combined with the standing of modern anthropocentrism of environmental ethics, environmental pragmatism avoided the discussion of intrinsic value theories since the beginning of environmental ethics. There are two points which may prescribe the relationship between environmental pragmatism and sustainability: first, environmental pragmatism (especially the representative of the Norton’s classical environmental pragmatism) considered sustainability as the platform that ecological and relevant areas of environmental science can exchange and cooperate; Second, environmental protection, one of the important key points in sustainability, has also been troubled by the conflict value stands that similar to the anthropocentric and the non-anthropocentric, so environmental pragmatism endeavored to avoid this controversy by establishing policy-oriented theory of environmental protection in sustainability. However, when environmental pragmatism negated ethical monism approach which based on the non-anthropocentric viewpoint of intrinsic value and the whole of "good", it also abandoned the core concept of the environmental ethics between humans and nature. Thus environmental pragmatism confronted with paradox of pluralism approach and natural integrity in its own method, and the practical cases of policies of environmental protection in sustainability also proved the inevitable function of nature value theories. So after analyzed the bases of feasibility of Sustainability, including the hierarchical nature and its corresponding concept of objects as well as values in sustainability, and with the perspective of pluralistic method, we can classify the scope of application in different ways and value stands of environmental protection and reveal the indispensible dimension in sustainability.