2025.05.12 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Dale Jamieson, Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2024, 290pp., $39.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781108994392.
Reviewed by Nicolas Delon, College of Charleston
Every version of Environmental Ethics I teach has featured Dale Jamieson’s Ethics and the Environment (first edition, 2008), so I was particularly excited to use the revised second edition last spring. It defies textbook conventions—no study questions, refreshingly concise, surprisingly affordable. Yet this “introduction” delivers far more than its modest title suggests.
The first part lays the foundations for the rest of the inquiry. The first chapter introduces the field: What are nature and the environment? What are its different scales (global, regional, local, human and nonhuman) and aspects (economic, technological, religious, aesthetic, ethical)? Chapter 2 outlines an account of human morality and chapters 3 and 4 deliver a very effective introduction to moral philosophy (metaethics and normative ethics).
The second part of the book deals…
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