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Browsing by Author "Greenwood Press, publisher"

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    Endangered species and ethical perspectives
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Greenwood Press, publisher
    Few doubt that humans have obligations concerning endangered species. Whether humans have duties directly to endangered species is a deeper question, part of the larger issue of biodiversity conservation. Many endangered species have no resource value, nor are they particularly important for the usual humanistic reasons: medical, industrial, agricultural resources, scientific study, recreation, ecosystem stability,. Many environmental ethicists believe that species are good in their own right, whether or not they are good for anything. The duties-to-persons-only line of argument leaves deeper reasons untouched. What may be required is not just prudence saving resources but principled responsibility to the Earth.
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    Wild animals and ethical perspectives
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Greenwood Press, publisher
    Few ethicists doubt that humans have duties toward domestic animals, but the question of duties to wild animals is more vexed. Leading issues surround hunting and trapping, animal suffering, appropriate levels of management intervention, poisoning, habitat degradation, feral animals, restoration, and endangered species. Duties to wild animals, if they involve care, also involve non-interference, sometimes called hands-off management. Compassion is not the only consideration; and in environmental ethics it plays a different role than in a humanist ethics. Animals live in the wild, subject to natural selection, and the integrity of the species is a result of these selective pressures. To intervene artificially is not to produce any benefit for the good of the kind, although it would benefit an individual bison or whale. Human beings, by contrast, live in culture, where the forces of natural selection are relaxed, and a different ethic is appropriate.