Chapter 2 Key Terms
Terms
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- Morals
- Ethical principles that guide our actions and relationships
- Values
- Your ethical beliefs or morals that determine our sense from right or wrong
- Paradigms
- A model that provides a framework for interpreting observations
- Controlled Studies
- When comparisons are made between experimental and control groups that are identical in every way except the one variable being studied
- LULUs
- Locally Unwanted Land Uses such as airports, dumps, freeways, or other sources of degradation
- Utilitarians
- Those who believe that you should live to produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people, for the greatest time
- Moral Subjects
- Beings that have moral interests of their own and can be treated rightly or wrongly by others
- Deductive Reasoning
- Deriving testable predictions about specific cases from general principles
- Significant Numbers
- Meaningful numbers that can be verified
- Nihilists
- Those who believe that the world has no meaning or purpose other then a unceasing struggle for power and existence
- Universalists
- Believe that major principles of ethics are universal and unchanging
- Scientific Theory
- Explanation supported by tests and accepted as true
- Relativists
- Those who believe that moral principles are always important in any situation
- Parsimony
- Choosing the simpler explanation if two appear
- Anthropocentricism
- The belief that humans are the "masters" of the world with a unique set of rights and values
- Environmental ethics
- A search for moral values and ethics in human relations with the natural world
- Double-Blind Design
- When neither the one performing the experiment nor the subjects know which is the test variable and which is the control
- Biocentricism
- The belief that all creatures have their own rights and values
- Stewardship
- Responsibility to care for or manage a particular place
- Blind Experiments
- When those carrying out the experiment don't know which was the control and which was the experimental group until after carrying out the experiment
- Reproducibility
- Making the same observations or getting the same results more then once
- Science
- Process for producing knowledge that depends on observations and theories
- Inductive Reasoning
- Inferring general principles from collected observations
- Moral Agents
- Being capable of acting morally or immorally and can accept their responsibilities
- Instrumental Value
- When something is valued because it is valued by someone or something that is valued.
- Ecofeminism
- A relationship-oriented philosophy that suggests that humans can reconcieve themselves and their relationships to nature in nondominating ways
- Moral Extensionism
- Whom humans consider ethically significant
- Environmental Racism
- Decisions that restrict certain groups of people from polluted or degraded environments
- Inherent Value
- Belief that we deserve moral consideration no matter what we do because we are human
- Toxic Colonialism
- Sending toxic waste to poorer countries
- Hypothesis
- A provisional explanation that can be tested experimentally.