Nature and Culture in Environmental Ethics
— 20th World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, 1998

"Nature and Culture in Environmental Ethics." Pages 151-158 in Klaus Brinkmann, ed., Ethics: The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999). Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/37447

Invited paper at the Session on Philosophy and the Natural Environment, Robin Attfield, Chair, World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, August 1998. Humans in their cultures are out of sustainable relationships to the natural environments on which these cultures are superimposed. Bringing such culture into more intelligent relationships with the natural world requires not so much "naturalizing culture" as discriminating recognition of the radical differences between nature and culture, on the basis of which an ethic of complementarity may be possible. How far nature can and ought be transformed into humanized nature is a provocative question. Environmental ethics ought also to seek nature as an end in itself.