Environmental Ethics

Environmental Ethics

Society is not capable of interest satisfactions it enjoys no pleasure suffers no pain . Unlike a person , society has no skin or self , no continuous biological or psychological identity a society has a loose diffuse , changing membership , with some cooperation and much conflict-pulling and hauling-between individuals and interest groups

Sociologist 's debate whether there is any social whole above the individual person-parts who compose it . Society itself has no center of experience only individuals do . Society is not capable of interest satisfactions it enjoys no pleasure , suffers no

pain . Unlike a person society has no skin or self , no continuous biological or psychological identity a society has a loose , diffuse , changing membership , with some cooperation and much conflict-pulling and hauling-between individuals and interest groups

Society can err about what contributes to its well-being . Social choices too can be out of touch with reality . Further , given the prevailing pluralism in the United States , a negotiated consensus of values is likely not to be consistent . Separate individual values , itemized one by one , may be singly attractive but pernicious in combinations that nobody much foresees . Even if only individuals have a well-being (with society merely an aggregate Such considerations lead many to claim that values is some kind of fiction , a pragmatic operational concept (like a center of gravity ) that is only apparent . By that account all social values would be instrumental , directly or indirectly , to intrinsic individual values . Still , some social preferences seem to serve society at large beyond the fact that or regardless of whether they satisfy individual interests . Social preferences , unless oppressive , seem to command more importance than particular individual preferences . Perhaps this is only because they are massively aggregated individual preferences . But perhaps society has an importance of related individuals , society at least functions and dysfunctions . The vague , beguiling slogan "the greatest good for the greatest number " can mean " what most prefer on average . But usually means "what is on average functional in society Part of the worth of a practice is whether it keeps society functioning smoothly , regardless of whether this agrees with the corporate will

The Indian Peaks Wilderness "open space " serves as a pressure release valve for the Denver-Boulder metropolitan area , and it might be most functional for Colorado society to maintain it so , even though the legislature had voiced a preference , reflecting polls , that federal managers log the area to provide jobs and firewood . The Colorado Senate passed Bill 5 in 1985 changing state water law to give landowners the right to mine underground water for irrigation , industrial , and residential development

Shrug and graduate student Kurt House have instead proposed a permanent large-scale solution , one especially suited to coastal areas like the eastern United States , where there are few suitable land-based geological basins . Under high pressure and low temperature ' he says CO2 is denser than seawater ' It sinks . Their innovative idea is to inject the CO2 into deep-water sediments that have accumulated on the ocean floor . In these sediments - think of tiny shells...