APES Chapter Two Vocab
Terms
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- LULUs
- Locally Unwanted Land uses such as toxic waste dumps, incinerators, smelters, airports, freeways, and other sources of environmental, economic, or social degradation
- utilitarians
- those who hold that an action is right that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people
- controlled studies
- those in which comparisons are made between experimental and control populations that are identical in every factor except the one variable being studied
- moral subjects
- beings that are not capable of distinguishing between right and wrong or that are not able to act on moral principles and yet are capable of being wronged by others
- values
- an estimation of the worth of things; a set of ethical beliefs and preferences that determine our sense of right and wrong
- double-blind design
- one in which neither the experimenter or the subjects know until after the data has been gathered and analyzed which was the experimental treatment and which was the control
- morals
- a set of ethical principles that guide our actions and relationships
- hypothesis
- a provisional explanation that can be tested scientifically
- 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
- biocentrism
- the belief that all creatures have rights and values
- scientific theory
- an explanation supported by many test and accepted by a general consensus of scientists
- 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
- relativists
- those who believe moral principles are always dependent on a particular situation
- reproducibility
- making an observation or obtaining a particular result more than once
- inductive reasoning
- inferring general principles from specific examples
- science
- a process for producing knowledge that rests on assumptions that the world is knowable and can be so through empirical study and logical analysis
- environmental racism
- decisions that restrict certain people or groups of people to polluted or degraded environments on basis of race
- nihilists
- those who believe the world has no meaning or purpose other than a dark, cruel, unceasing struggle for power and existence
- inherent value
- ethical values or rights that exist as an intrinsic or essential characteristic of a particular thing or class of things simply by the fact of their existence
- parsimony
- if two explanations appear equally plausible, choose a simpler one
- moral extensionism
- expansion of our understanding of inherent value or rights to persons, organisms, or things that might not be considered worthy of value or rights under some ethical philosophies
- deductive reasoning
- deriving testable predictions about specific cases from general principles
- stewardship
- a philosophy that holds that humans have a unique responsibility to mange, care for, and improve nature
- paradigms
- a model that provides a framework for interpreting observations
- environmental ethics
- a search for moral values and ethical principles in human relations with the natural world
- toxic colonialism
- shipping toxic wastes to a weaker or poorer nation
- significant numbers
- meaningful numbers whose accuracy can be verified
- environmental justice
- a recognition that access to a clean, healthy environment is a fundamental right of all human beings
- ecofeminism
- a pluralistic, nonhierarchical, relationship-oriented philosophy that suggests how humans could reconceive themselves and their relationships to nature in nondominating ways
- anthropocentrism
- a belief in humans as masters of the world with a unique set of rights and values
- moral agents
- beings capable of making distinctions between right and wrong and acting accordingly. Those whom we hold responsible for their actions
- instrumental 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