Special Issue: Environmental and animal ethics
Special Issue: Environmental and animal ethics (Euphyía Vol. 18 Num. 34)
Guest editors: Víctor Hugo Salazar Ortiz (UAA) and Daniel Oviedo Sotelo (INAES)
Submission deadline: July 21, 2024
Expected publication: December 2023
Language: English, Spanish, and Portuguese
Send proposals: via the website https://revistas.uaa.mx/index.php/euphyia or by email vhsalaza@corre.uaa.mx
The question posed by Plato “How should we live?”, which constitutes one of the origins of ethics, is becoming increasingly valid and extensive. Although it was originally intended in exclusive terms for human relationships, today we are aware that our existence is not developed solely through links between people, but that these are preceded by a biological and ecological construct, without which humans and the world would exist. Faced with this recognition, environmental ethics emerged a few decades ago, a branch of philosophy that reflects on our duties and how we should relate or behave with the natural world and the multitude of beings that make it up (biotic and abiotic), proposing the modification of our incorrect and unjust behaviors. Its creation was not the work of chance, but rather the need to face the fact that the human species is primarily responsible for environmental collapse and severe negative effects on the natural world, generally in an unbridled, irrational, and immoral manner.
According to the above, the last decades of the 20th century and the first of the current one have been the scene of important changes in the relationship that human beings have with non-human animals and Nature in general, since the reduced scope has been severely questioned. from the consideration of traditional ethics, because for centuries human behavior was judged only insofar as our actions benefited or affected members of our species.
For a long time, the harms against other species and the planet have been completely ignored. Thus, for example, social, industrial, and commercial development have had negative consequences for Nature and the beings that inhabit it. These impacts are now a central part of practically all social, scientific, technological, economic, political, sociological, pedagogical, and philosophical discourses. Today, a change in attitudes towards and relationships with the environment is unanimously requested as a basic principle.
This new sensitivity also entails recognizing greater responsibility in the production, consumption, and waste that is generated, as well as in the birth rate of our species, which requires an increasing amount of space, whether to live or to produce resources, reason (or excuse) by which the territories in which they have lived for an indefinite time and on which they necessarily depend to survive are invaded, transformed and taken from other species.
The present environmental crisis is presented to us, in this way, as a requirement to renew our traditional ethical theories, since they have clearly shown their insufficiency to respond and propose solutions to the main environmental problems and crises. It is precisely from this insufficiency that the need arises to extend and include in the ethical sphere all the beings with whom we cohabit on this planet and who historically had received little or no attention from us. This, even though many of them, like us, are beings that feel and suffer, in a very similar way to how we do, or rather: humans experience pain and suffering just as they do. have felt, as a result of a long process of biological evolution that led them to develop these capacities that we simply inherit (as Mosterín shows in his book The Kingdom of Animals, 2013).
The recognition of the above seems to be more than enough reason to integrate all living beings into our ethical considerations, but also the ecosystems in which they develop and on which they depend for their survival. By the way, although there is a risk of falling into an anthropocentric vision, it is true that our species requires them too since we are part of the symbiotic relationship that unites us to everything like a rhizome and of which we should not feel alien, but integrated.
Some proposed topics, without the call being limited to them, are:
- Relevance and timeliness of environmental ethics.
- Scientific and philosophical criteria that clarify, justify, and endorse the creation of animal ethics and even jurisprudence that defends animal rights.
- Analysis and evaluation of the debate between environmentalists and animal rights defenders.
- Evaluation of veganism as a practical option for environmental and animal ethics.
- Environmental ethics in the face of climate change.
- Ethical environmental positions regarding the use of insecticides, herbicides, and GMOs.
- Epistemological evaluation of the use of animals in research.
- Environmental conflicts, eco-pacifism and eco-violence.
- Environmental ethics and environmental education.
