The Atrocity Paradigm Applied to Environmental Evils

Bibliographic Data

ID15021804
AuthorsKathryn J Norlock (0000-0002-8262-7047, Indiana University, corresponding author), Kathryn Norlock
Year2004
Volume9
Issue1
Pages85-93
Publication date2004-03-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthics & the Environment (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1085-6633 • E-ISSN: 1535-5306
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/ete.2004.9.1.85
OpenAlexW2021742782
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited7

Environmental ethicists have been remarkably reticent to use the word in describing ecological ills. This is not to say that we are somehow behind the curve in the wider world of philosophy. Claudia Card has rightly noted (2000, 9), Until the past two decades, surprisingly few secular moral philosophers have attended specifically to the concept of evil. Shortly thereafter she notes that her own list of atrocities includes evils done to animals who are raised on factory farms and butchered in mass-production slaughterhouses, and elsewhere she mentions that some might consider the widespread use of pesticides and nuclear power as evils (8,14). I take it as uncontroversial that we can identify ecological evils, at least on an intuitive level. I remember my shock at learning of the near-decimation of the buffalo of the American West, my creeping horror at being told every person on the earth stores trace amounts of DDT in their bodies, and the depression from reading a quote by someone who said merrily, in the nineteenth century, that hundreds of years of logging could not begin to deforest south central Wisconsin.1 While I am persuaded both by the theory of evil advanced by Claudia Card in The Atrocity Paradigm and by the idea that there are evils done to the environment, I argue that the theory of evil she describes has difficulty

Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Paradigm shift · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Philosophy · Psychology

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