Chapter 2 Vocab
Terms
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- stewardship
- responsibility to care for or manage a particular place
- science
- a process for producing knowledge
- values
- the ultimate worth of actions or things
- toxic colonialism
- the practice of targeting poor communities of color in the Third or Forth World for waste disposal and/or experimentation with risky technologies
- controlled studies
- comparisons made between experimental and control populations that are identical in every factor except the one variable being studied
- parsimony
- if two explanations appear equally plausible, choose the simpler one
- hypothesis
- a conditional explanation that can be verified or falsified
- environmental racism
- inequitable distribution of environmental hazards based on race
- blind experiments
- experiments in which results are unknown until the data is gathered and analyzed
- inductive reasoning
- inferring general principles from specific examples
- utilitarians
- those who believe that an action is right that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people
- anthropocentrism
- a belief in humans as masters of the world with a unique set of rights and values
- moral subjects
- beings who are not moral agents themselves but who have moral interests of their own and can be treated rightly or wrongly by others
- environmental ethics
- a search for moral values and ethical principles in human relations with the natural world
- universalists
- those who believe that some fundamental ethical principles are universal and unchanging
- moral agents
- beings capable of acting morally or immorally and who can- and should -accept responsibility for their acts
- instrumental value
- value or worth of objects that satisfy the needs and wants of moral agents
- reproducibility
- making an observation or obtaining a particular result more than once
- environmental justice
- combines civil rights with environmental protection to demand a safe, healthy, life-giving environment for everyone
- inherent value
- an intrinsic or innate worth
- ecofeminism
- a pluralistic, nonhierarchial, relationship-oriented that suggests how humans could reconceive themselves and their relationships to nature in nondominating ways
- moral extensionism
- expansion of our understanding of inherent value or rights to persons, organisms, or things that might be considered worthy of value or rights under some ethical philosophies
- deductive reasoning
- deriving testable predictions about specific cases from general principles
- significant numbers
- meaningful numbers whose accuracy can be verified
- LULUs
- "Locally Unwanted Land Uses" such as toxic waste dumpes, incinerators, smelters, airports, freeways, and other sources of environmental, economic, or social degradation
- morals
- the distinction between right and wrong
- scientific theory
- an explanation that has been supported by a large number of tests and majority of experts in a given field have reached a general consensus
- nihilists
- those who believe that the world is irrational and has no meaning or purpose
- relativists
- those who believe moral principles are always dependent on the particular situation
- double-blind design
- an experiment in which neither the subject not those administering treatment and analyzing results now who is receiving the experimental or the control treatments until after the experiment is completed
- paradigms
- overarching models of the world that guide our interpretation of events
- biocentrism
- the belief that all creatures have rights and values