PHI3640: Environmental Ethics

Course Description

PHI3640, Environmental Ethics, asks what, if anything, we owe to the non-human world — and on what grounds. It is applied ethics, but of an unusual kind, because the standard moral theories were built to govern relations among humans and have to be stretched, revised or replaced to say anything about rivers, forests, species and ecosystems.

The University of West Florida sets out the structure precisely: the course "introduces students to issues and problems in the field of environmental ethics," where "theories of value are investigated in the effort to clarify the interrelations between humanity and nature," and — importantly — "discussions concerning the moral status of the non-human community will not be restricted to debates over value theory alone, but will also encompass metaphysical issues that bear upon environmental problems."

That last clause distinguishes a serious course from a survey of environmental problems. The hard questions here are not empirical but conceptual. Is a species the kind of thing that can be wronged? An individual animal can suffer, which gives it a plausible claim; a species is an abstraction with no experiences at all, yet extinction seems worse than the death of the same number of individuals. What is "nature", if humans are themselves natural? Can an ecosystem have interests? These are metaphysical questions with practical consequences, and the course takes them seriously rather than assuming an answer.

The field's organising axis is the scope of moral considerability: anthropocentrism (only humans matter directly), sentientism (all beings that can suffer), biocentrism (all living things), and ecocentrism (wholes — species, ecosystems, the land community). Each is a defensible position with awkward consequences, and the course's discipline is following the arguments rather than the sympathies.

PHI3640 is offered at approximately 8 Florida institutions, all universities, and carries 3 credits with roughly 45 contact hours. It is a 3000-level course, usually an elective, and it draws students from philosophy, environmental science, biology, political science and pre-law in roughly equal measure.

UWF's version "meets College-Level Communication Skills Requirement" — meaning the written work is graded as writing as well as content. Philosophy courses generally are writing-intensive; this one is formally so at that institution.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Explain the principal normative ethical theories — consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics and contractarianism — and apply each to an environmental question.
• Distinguish intrinsic from instrumental value, and explain why the distinction is central to every substantive dispute in the field.
• Explain the concept of moral considerability and the criteria proposed for it: rationality, sentience, being alive, having interests, being part of a biotic community.
• Compare anthropocentric, sentientist, biocentric and ecocentric positions, and state the strongest objection to each.
• Explain and evaluate the case for animal moral status, including Singer's utilitarian argument from sentience and Regan's rights-based argument from being a subject-of-a-life.
• Explain and evaluate biocentric individualism, including Taylor's account of living things as teleological centres of life.
• Explain and evaluate ecocentric and holist positions, including Leopold's land ethic and deep ecology, and address the charge of "environmental fascism".
• Explain and evaluate ecofeminist critiques linking the domination of nature to the domination of women.
• Explain and evaluate social ecology and environmental justice critiques, including the distribution of environmental harm across class and race.
• Analyse obligations to future generations and the non-identity problem, and explain why it complicates the intuitive case for long-term environmental duties.
• Analyse discounting and cost-benefit analysis as applied to environmental policy, and evaluate the ethical assumptions embedded in them.
• Analyse the ethics of climate change: responsibility for historical emissions, intergenerational justice, international equity and individual obligation.
• Analyse the value of wilderness and biodiversity, and evaluate the critique of the wilderness concept as historically and culturally constructed.
• Analyse specific applied problems — species preservation, land use, pollution, agriculture and food, population, resource extraction, restoration — and identify the value commitments in competing positions.
• Reconstruct a philosophical argument accurately, identify its premises and inferential structure, and evaluate its validity and soundness.
• Construct and defend an original argument in writing, anticipate the strongest objection to it, and respond.
• Distinguish empirical disagreement from evaluative disagreement in an environmental dispute, and explain why conflating them makes the dispute intractable.

Optional Outcomes

• Analyse Indigenous environmental philosophies and traditional ecological knowledge.
• Analyse religious and theological approaches to environmental obligation — stewardship, dominion, and non-Western traditions.
• Analyse animal agriculture and the ethics of eating.
• Analyse the ethics of ecological restoration and rewilding, including the "faking nature" objection.
• Analyse geoengineering and the ethics of large-scale technological intervention.
• Analyse environmental virtue ethics and the character-based approach.
• Analyse environmental activism and civil disobedience.
• Analyse the concept of sustainability critically, distinguishing weak from strong versions.
• Apply the course's frameworks to a Florida environmental controversy in a research project.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Introduction: what makes an ethical question environmental; the emergence of the field in the 1970s
• Review of normative theory: consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, contractarianism, and their environmental applications
• Value theory: intrinsic and instrumental value, objective and subjective value, and the question of whether value requires a valuer
• Moral considerability and moral standing: the criteria, and the problem of drawing the line non-arbitrarily
• Anthropocentrism: strong and weak forms; the argument that human interests suffice to ground environmental protection
• Animal ethics: sentience as the criterion; Singer's utilitarianism and Regan's rights view; speciesism; the marginal cases argument
• Biocentric individualism: Schweitzer's reverence for life; Taylor's respect for nature and teleological centres of life; the problem of comparing claims
• Ecocentrism and holism: Leopold's land ethic, Callicott's development of it, deep ecology, the Gaia hypothesis; the environmental fascism objection
• The metaphysical questions: what "nature" and "natural" mean, whether humans are part of nature, whether wholes can have interests, and the ontological status of species
• Ecofeminism: the parallel between the domination of nature and of women; care ethics applied to the environment
• Social ecology and environmental justice: the distribution of environmental burdens, environmental racism, and the critique of mainstream environmentalism
• Future generations: obligations across time, the non-identity problem, discounting, intergenerational justice
• Climate ethics: causal and moral responsibility, historical emissions, differentiated obligations, individual versus collective action, adaptation and loss
• Wilderness and biodiversity: the value of wild nature; Cronon's critique of the wilderness idea; endangered species and the case for preservation
• Economics and the environment: cost-benefit analysis, contingent valuation, ecosystem services, and the ethical assumptions each embeds
• Applied problems: pollution and risk, land use and development, agriculture, population, resource extraction, ecological restoration
• Argument analysis and philosophical writing throughout

Optional Topics

• Indigenous environmental philosophy and traditional ecological knowledge
• Religious and theological environmental ethics
• Food ethics and animal agriculture
• Restoration, rewilding and the "faking nature" debate
• Geoengineering and technological intervention
• Environmental virtue ethics
• Activism, civil disobedience and political obligation
• Sustainability: weak and strong conceptions
• Urban and built-environment ethics
• Case study or research project on a specific controversy

Resources & Tools

• Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application (Louis Pojman, Paul Pojman & Katie McShane, Cengage) is the most widely adopted anthology and covers the theoretical positions with primary sources.
• Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works (Schmidtz & Willott) and The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book (Van DeVeer & Pierce) are the common alternatives; A Companion to Environmental Philosophy (Jamieson) is the standard reference.
• Primary texts frequently assigned in whole or extract: Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac — particularly "The Land Ethic," which is the field's founding document; Peter Singer's Animal Liberation; Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights; Paul Taylor's Respect for Nature; Rachel Carson's Silent Spring; Lynn White's "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis"; Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" — usually taught critically, since Hardin's later writing and the empirical failures of the model are both relevant; and William Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness."
• Free and authoritative: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on environmental ethics, animal ethics, intergenerational justice and climate justice are peer-reviewed, current and free — the single most useful free resource for this course. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good second.
• Journals: Environmental Ethics, Environmental Values and Ethics, Policy & Environment are the field's principal outlets and are worth knowing for a research paper.
• Citation: philosophy uses Chicago or MLA depending on the department; check the syllabus.
• ⚠ Florida makes this course unusually concrete, and instructors here use it. Live Florida controversies that map directly onto the theoretical positions: Everglades restoration — one of the largest ecological restoration projects in the world, and a direct case study in the "faking nature" and restoration-value debates; manatee protection versus boating and coastal development, and the 2021 mortality event driven by seagrass loss; Florida panther recovery versus land development in Southwest Florida; springs and aquifer depletion, where consumptive use permitting is a distributive justice question; sea level rise and managed retreat, which is intergenerational and distributive ethics in real time; invasive species control, including lethal management of Burmese pythons and lionfish, which raises animal-ethics questions directly; phosphate mining and the Piney Point discharge; and red tide and nutrient loading from agriculture.
• Florida sources for a research project: the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the five water management districts, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the South Florida Water Management District Everglades restoration reporting, and the Everglades Foundation and Florida Springs Council for advocacy perspectives.

Career Pathways

• The honest framing. This is a philosophy elective. It does not train anyone for a job, and a guide that pretended otherwise would be misleading. What it builds is the ability to identify what is actually being disputed in an environmental disagreement — and that turns out to be professionally useful in several fields, because a great many environmental conflicts are conducted as if they were factual disputes when the real disagreement is about value.
• Environmental Lawyer — SOC 23-1011. ⚠ Environmental law is substantially about competing claims to value and standing, and the standing question — who can sue on behalf of a river? — is a legal version of this course's central question. Philosophy is among the strongest undergraduate preparations for law school.
• Environmental Policy Analyst — SOC 19-3094 and 13-1111. Cost-benefit analysis, discounting and valuation are policy tools with embedded ethical commitments, and analysts who can see them make better arguments.
• Environmental Planner and Sustainability Manager — SOC 19-3051 and 11-9199. Corporate and municipal sustainability roles involve articulating and defending value positions, not only measuring emissions.
• Conservation Scientist and Land Manager — SOC 19-1031. ⚠ Practical conservation is full of ethical decisions presented as technical ones: whether to cull an invasive population, whether to relocate a species, whether restoration to a historical baseline is coherent when the climate has changed.
• Non-profit and NGO Programme Officer, Advocate — SOC 11-9151 and 21-1099.
• Environmental Journalist and Science Communicator — SOC 27-3023 and 27-3042.
• Teacher and Postsecondary Educator — SOC 25-2031 and 25-1126 (Philosophy and Religion Teachers, Postsecondary); the latter requires graduate study.
• Ethics and Compliance Roles — SOC 13-1041, including corporate environmental, social and governance functions, where the ability to distinguish substantive commitment from greenwashing is the job.
• Any environmental science or management career — SOC 19-2041, 19-1031 and 19-2042. ⚠ The realistic pitch to a science student: you will spend your career in disputes where the science is agreed and the disagreement is about value, and being able to name that difference makes you more effective, not less.
• Florida employment context: the Florida Department of Environmental Protection; the five water management districts; the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission; county environmental and growth-management departments; the environmental consulting sector, which is large here; conservation organisations including the Nature Conservancy, Audubon Florida, the Everglades Foundation and 1000 Friends of Florida; and the state's environmental law practices.

Special Information

Position in the curriculum

PHI3640 is a 3000-level elective. For philosophy majors it satisfies an applied ethics or value theory requirement; for environmental science, biology, sustainability and political science students it is a common and often recommended elective, and several Florida environmental programmes list it as an approved option. It typically follows an introductory philosophy or ethics course, though this is not universal.

Prerequisites narrative

UWF lists none. Some institutions require an introductory philosophy or ethics course, or sophomore standing; the University of Florida's practice for the adjacent PHI3700 — requiring a prior philosophy course or sophomore standing — is a common pattern. No environmental science background is assumed, and none is needed; the empirical material is supplied.

What is assumed is willingness to argue carefully. Students from science backgrounds sometimes arrive expecting the course to tell them what the right answer is, and are disconcerted to find that the discipline's method is to make the disagreement precise rather than to resolve it.

Course format and workload

Three credits, approximately 45 contact hours, no laboratory. Online and hybrid sections are common. Assessment is writing-driven: argumentative essays, article critiques, and often a research paper applying the frameworks to a specific problem. Some sections include structured debate or oral defence.

The reading is not voluminous but it is dense — a fifteen-page philosophy article can take longer than fifty pages of a textbook, because the argument has to be reconstructed rather than absorbed. Students who read philosophy the way they read a science text, for information rather than for structure, struggle. The technique that works is to read for the argument: what is the conclusion, what are the premises, where is the inference doing the work, and what would have to be true for it to fail.

Expect six to nine hours a week outside class, most of it reading and writing.

⚠ On the course's difficulty, which is not what students expect

Environmental ethics is intellectually demanding in a specific way: every position has consequences its holders find uncomfortable.

Strong animal-rights positions imply obligations most people are unwilling to accept about predation and pest control. Ecocentric holism, taken seriously, can subordinate individual welfare — including human welfare — to ecosystem integrity, which is the "environmental fascism" objection Callicott spent years answering. Anthropocentrism looks parochial until one notices how much environmental protection it actually justifies. Biocentric individualism struggles to say why a mosquito's claim is weaker than a manatee's.

A good course makes students sit with that rather than resolving it prematurely, and the mark of understanding is being able to state the strongest objection to the position you hold. Students hoping for confirmation of an existing view — in either direction — will find the course frustrating; students willing to have their reasons tested get a great deal out of it.

Transfer and articulation

PHI3640 is a 3000-level SCNS course: the number is recognised statewide, but upper-division credit is not covered by the A.A. transfer guarantee and applicability inside a major is the receiving department's decision. It is generally not available before transfer from a Florida College System A.A. — the lower-division philosophy path is PHI2010 (introduction to philosophy) and PHI2600/PHI2630 (ethics), which are common prerequisites and transfer cleanly, and which several environmental programmes accept in place of this course. Since PHI3640 is normally an elective, it transfers as elective credit with little friction; the more common issue is a student assuming it satisfies a specific requirement that it does not.

Course-code variations across Florida

The PHI prefix is philosophy. Relevant numbers: PHI2010 (introduction to philosophy) and PHI2600/PHI2630 (ethics and applied ethics) at the lower division; PHI3640 (environmental ethics); PHI3670 (ethics at the upper division, offered at UWF); PHI3700 (philosophy of religion); PHI3130-range logic; PHI4xxx for advanced topics. Adjacent prefixes: PHH for history of philosophy, PHM for social and political philosophy, PHP for individual philosophers, and IDS for interdisciplinary courses. ⚠ Note that environmental studies courses under EVR or ISC prefixes are not equivalent — they cover environmental problems empirically rather than analysing the value questions philosophically, and a philosophy department will not accept the substitution.

AI Integration

Philosophy has an unusual relationship with generative AI: the tools produce competent-sounding philosophical prose easily, and competent-sounding prose is exactly what the discipline is not assessing.

Where AI helps. Language models are genuinely useful for explaining a position a second way — the non-identity problem and the intrinsic/instrumental distinction are two that commonly need it — for summarising a difficult article before you read it properly, for generating objections to test an argument you are constructing, and for helping structure an essay. Using a model as an interlocutor — "what is the strongest objection to this?" — is a legitimate and productive use, and closer to how philosophy is actually done than solitary reading is.

Where AI fails. Models produce fluent summaries of positions rather than arguments for them, and the difference is the entire discipline. They flatten disagreement into balanced overviews when the philosophical work is in showing why one position is better supported. They fabricate citations and misattribute positions — assigning to Leopold or Taylor claims they did not make — which in a discipline where the argument is the evidence is fatal. And they are conspicuously bad at the thing the course rewards: identifying the precise point at which an argument fails, as opposed to noting that critics have objected.

The assessment reality. Philosophy is graded on the quality of reasoning, and instructors read a great deal of student writing. Generated prose is generally recognisable — it is fluent, balanced, unobjectionable and argues for nothing. A paper that surveys four positions and concludes that the issue is complex earns a poor grade whoever wrote it. A paper that takes a position, defends it against the strongest objection and concedes what it must, earns a good one and cannot currently be generated.

⚠ And there is a live topic here worth taking seriously. Environmental ethics is one of the fields where AI is itself an object of study, for two reasons. The environmental cost of computation — the energy and water demands of large-scale training and inference, and the associated emissions — is a straightforward applied problem of exactly the kind this course analyses, and the water question is locally salient in a state managing aquifer depletion. And the extension of moral considerability is the course's central question: the arguments used to include animals or ecosystems in the moral community are structurally similar to those now being made about artificial systems, and examining that parallel is a legitimate and demanding exercise in the course's own method.

Academic integrity. Policies vary and are often strict where the course carries a writing designation, since the writing is the assessed skill. Read the syllabus, and note the self-interested argument: the skill this course builds — constructing and defending an argument under objection — is the one that transfers to law, policy and advocacy, and it is not acquired by delegating it.