THE ATROCITY PARADIGM APPLIED TO ENVIRONMENTAL EVILS

摘要

Environmental ethicists have been remarkably reticent to use the word "evil" in describing ecological ills. This is not to say that we are somehow behind the curve in the wider world of philosophy. Claudia Card has rightly noted (2000, 9), "Until the past two decades, surprisingly few secular moral philosophers have attended specifically to the concept of evil." Shortly thereafter she notes that her own list of atrocities "includes evils done to animals who are raised on factory farms and butchered in mass-production slaughterhouses," and elsewhere she mentions that some might consider the widespread use of pesticides and nuclear power as evils (8,14). I take it as uncontroversial that we can identify ecological evils, at least on an intuitive level. I remember my shock at learning of the near-decimation of the buffalo of the American West, my creeping horror at being told every person on the earth stores trace amounts of DDT in their bodies, and the depression from reading a quote by someone who said merrily, in the nineteenth century, that hundreds of years of logging could not begin to deforest south central Wisconsin.