Morality and the Environmental Crisis

The environmental crisis creates painful emotions and difficult moral dilemmas. This engaging, compassionate, and intellectually rigorous book helps readers think through the value of nature and our treatment of animals, individual responsibility and collective political change, newfound dilemmas of reason, and how to face environmental despair.

The environmental crisis creates an unprecedented moral predicament: how to be a good person when our collective and individual actions contribute to immeasurable devastation and suffering. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources from philosophy, political theory, global religion, ecology, and contemporary spirituality, Roger S. Gottlieb explores the ethical ambiguities, challenges, and opportunities we face. Engagingly written, intellectually rigorous, and forcefully argued, this volume investigates the moral value of nature; the possibility of an ''ecological'' democracy; how we treat animals; the demands and limits of individual responsibility and collective political change; contemporary ambiguities of rationality; and how to face environmental despair. In Morality and the Environmental Crisis, Gottlieb combines compassion for the difficulties of contemporary moral life with an unflinching ethical commitment to awareness and action.