chapter 2 vocab
Terms
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- environmental justice
- recognition that access to a clean, healthy environment is a fundamental right of all human beings
- environmental racism
- decisions that restrict certain people or groups of people to polluted or degraded environments on the basis of race
- inherent value
- value or worth of objects that satisfy the needs and wants of moral agents; Objects that can be used as a means to some desirable end
- inductive reasoning
- inferring general principles from specific examples
- biocentrism
- the belief that all creatures have rights and values; being centered on nature rather than humans
- ecofeminism
- a pluralistic, nonhierarchical, relationship-oriented philosophy that suggests how humans could reconceive themselves and their relationships to nature in nondominating ways as an alternative to patriarchal systems of domination
- universalists
- those who believe that some fundamental ethical principles are universal and unchanging. In this vision these principles are valid regardless of the context or situation
- anthropocenbtrism
- the belief that humans hold a special place in nature; being centered primarily on humans and human affairs
- science
- derived from "knowing" in Latin. Is a process for producing knowledge
- deductive reasoning
- deriving testable predictions about specific cases from general principles
- relativists
- those who believe moral principles are always dependent on the particular situation
- stewardship
- a philosophy that holds that humans have a unique responsibility to manage care for and improve nature
- environmental ethics
- a search for moral values and ethical principles in human relations with the natural world
- blind experiments
- those in which those carrying out the experiment don't know until after data has been gathered and analyzed which was the experimental treatment and which was the control
- moral extensionism
- expansion of our understanding of inherit value or rights to persons organisms or things that might not be considered worthy of value or rights under some ethical philosophies
- hypothesis
- provisional explanation that can be tested scientifically
- toxic colonialism
- shipping toxic wastes to a weaker or poorer nation
- significant numbers
- meaningful numbers who accuracy can be verified
- moral subjects
- beings that are no capable of distinguishing between right or wrong or that are not able to act on moral principles and yet are capable of being wronged by others
- nihilists
- those who believe the world has no meaning or purpose other than dark cruel unceasing struggle for power and existence
- moral agents
- expansion of our understanding of inherit value or rights to persons organisms or things that might not be considered worthy of value or rights under some ethical philosophies
- reproducibility
- making an observation or obtaining a particular result more than once
- parsimony
- if two explanations appear equally plausible choose the simpler one
- LULU's
- Locally Unwanted Land Uses such as toxic waste dumps incinerators smelters airports freeways and other sources of environmental economic or social degradation
- controlled studies
- those in which comparisons are made between experimental and control populations that are identical (as far as possible) in every factor except the one variable being studied
- utilitarians
- those who hold that an action is right that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people
- double blind design
- one in which neither the experimenter or the subjects know until after data has been gathered and analyzed which was the experimental treatment and which was closed
- morals
- the distinction between right and wrong
- values
- the ultimate worth of actions or things
- peredigms
- a model that provides a framework for interpreting observations
- scientific theory
- an explanation supported by many tests and accepted by general consensus of scientists