rel="nofollow" href="#ub3081064-298c-5883-bd27-ce6a05e13d90">Chapter 3). This education process should be ongoing. The point is to allocate space in one’s consciousness and in the consciousness of those in your micro community to the existence and lives of others remote from you. Because this is an ethical imperative, obedience is not optional.
The second feature has to do with the way you incorporate others into your worldview (ei esti). Fulfilling this has to do with the operation of one’s imagination. The imagination is the power of the mind that makes real and integrates what is abstract into lived experience and vice versa. When one educates oneself about the lives of others, the imagination steps in and makes possible rational and emotional applications of the good will. Thus, one might possess enough (particularity via education and the imagination) that one could be able rationally to assess one’s duties in response to others’ valid rights claims. Also, one will be able to create fictive reconstructions of the people in these countries based upon intersubjective facts that one can create an extended style of sympathy. Normally sympathy requires two people in direct contact. In the extended variety, all that is needed is enough facts to generate an image of some typical person living in the country such that the vividness of their particularity will generate a constructed variety of the actual person-to-person contact of proximate sympathy. In this way, the rational and affective good will act together to exhort one to action on behalf of another.
The third feature refers to an action response (dioti). Those in other countries who have legitimate rights claims are entitled to our responding via our correlative duties. Ignorance of their plight does not absolve us from our responsibility. What often gets in the way is that we view those in the extended community as having their own society (that is viewed as the proximate provider of goods and services). Because our world is set up on the model of individual, sovereign states, it seems to many that each country should take care of its own. The community model offers some support to this analysis. However, in the end this sort of parochialism fails because the boundaries of states are not Natural facts but socially constructed conventions. Where one country ends and another begins is an artifact of history and military conquest. Since few of us (except the kraterists)22 believe that might confers normative goodness, this position should be rejected. The boundaries of states are artificial and do not indicate Natural divisions (even when the boundary between states is a mountain range or a river).
Thinking in this way is important because it shows that the way we parse ourselves (via geography, language, or culture) is rather arbitrary. There is a much stronger sense (based upon human biology) that our existence as Homo sapiens is the only real robust boundary that counts among our species.23 However, there is much truth in the old adage “out of sight, out of mind.” When we are ignorant of the plight of others and when we haven’t undergone the imaginative connection of the other to ourselves, then it is certainly the case that we will be less likely to be moved to action.
The extended community worldview imperative exhorts us all to educate ourselves about the plight of others in the world and then to respond with individual and corporate action according to our abilities to act effectively. It must become a top priority issue to us all.
Third, when we add the other components of the Natural community, we come up with two more community worldview imperatives: the eco-community worldview imperative and the extended eco-community worldview imperative. Let us begin with the eco-community worldview imperative (the eco-community close at hand, hoti):
Each agent must educate themself about the proximate Natural world in which they live relating to their agency within this ecosystem: (a) what their natural place in this order is vis-à-vis their personal agency; (b) how their natural place (vis-à-vis their personal agency) may have changed in recent history; (c) how their social community’s activities have altered the constitution of the Natural order and how this has effected community agency; (d) the short-term and long-term effects of those changes vis-à-vis agency; and (e) what needs to be done to maintain the natural order in the short and long term so that the ecosystem might remain vibrant.24
First, there is the requirement that people educate themselves as much as is practically possible about the proximate environment in which they live. This will require particular attention to the land, water, air, animal life, plant life, and meteorological events. In the age of the Internet, it should be possible for a large number of people on earth to obtain easy access to these facts.25 What is important, of course, is that they connect to reputable scientific sources.
Second, is the personal recognition that individual humans live in interaction with their Natural surroundings and that they should contextualize such interactions personally.
Third, requires a sense of recent history of their local environment. This creates a personal baseline by which an individual might assess how they have been affected by climate change.
Fourth, and last is for the agent who has just assessed how they have been affected to examine various sustainability policy proposals and gather enough information so that they can decide which course they will endorse and then work vigorously for enactment of those policy proposals.
Just as when we focused upon the human community it was necessary to go beyond to the extended human community, so also it is the case with the eco-community. The extended eco-community worldview imperative is:
Each agent must educate themself about the world’s biomes: freshwater, saltwater, arid regions, forests, prairies and grasslands, tundra, and artic regions. This education should be ongoing and should include how the relative stability and Natural sustainability is faring at various points in time. This knowledge will entail a factual valuing that also leads to an aesthetic valuing. Since all people seek to protect what they value,26 this extended community membership will ground a duty to protect the global biomes according to what is aspirationally possible.
This imperative prescribes first educating oneself about the scientific facts of the world. This doxastic responsibility is primary. Far too often people create beliefs that are unsupported by hard data.27 This is irresponsible and immoral.28 As the late US New York Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is reputed to have said, “We are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts.”29 What this means is that people must do their best to seek out reputable sources of scientific information on key extended environmental questions such as the CO2 in the troposphere over discrete meteorological air spaces and the trends that follow from this.
Now it is probably the case that large numbers of individuals are deficient in science education so that they would not be able to engage at this level except for broad generalizations that might be skewed by news outlets (on traditional media or on social media). For these individuals I would suggest that they go to local libraries (in countries that have these public resources) and engage with the librarians on how they can educate themselves objectively on issues facing the scientific community’s assessment of how various perturbations are altering Nature.30
A second normative duty is to transition from factual understanding to aesthetic valuing. It is my contention that this is a seamless process and the foundational grounding for an anthropocentric approach to environmental ethics.31 Understanding the operation of a complex biological system will result in an intellectual valuing of that system. To value a system is to undertake a duty to protect said system. Thus, the second part of the extended eco-community worldview imperative is to undergo this process. It all begins with education and it ends with an intellectual-cum-aesthetic appreciation that translates into a duty to protect.
In the end, the extended eco-community worldview imperative entails a duty to protect all of the world’s Natural biological and non-biological material systems (such as earth, air, and water) according to our resources. Since this duty extends only to humans, this account is anthropocentric. And though the shared community worldview imperatives (in their various forms) emphasize the communal duties incurred, still because human communities are comprised of many individual humans, these duties apply to each individual within the community via my personhood account, the personal worldview