From the concept of Environmental Reason to a Global Ethics project

Abstract

The contribution of the environmental philosophy to the XX and XXI centuries philosophy renovation and their capacity to be applied to all aspects of social life is the core of this essay. The history of philosophy on the West is focused on the human condition, the environmental philosophy drive its thought to a global view of biodiversity and geodiversity, enlarged by the concept of biosphere. The dominant perspective of the modern philosophy set the morale in the order of the rules and social conventions and leave the ethics on the field of personal experience. Analyzing the concept of Kantian reason, and its ethic’s corollaries, this essay propose develop them to a new concept, “Environmental Reason”. Conceptualized as a new categorical imperative to the men’s action, beyond the principle that prescribe that we must conform individual acts with a universal law, configuring the human conduct within the limits that safeguard the continuity of life, but also the intrinsic values of earth and its biodiversity and geodiversity. A new perspective ethics founded in the principles of the critique of anthropocentrism and the critique of ethnocentrism represent a new ontology, and a new epistemology, that could lead to a new ethics universal theory.

Keywords

• environmental reason; moral; ethics; anthropocentrism; ethnocentrism