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Abstract
Modern Western society faces a number of challenges and risks to both itself and the natural environment. An ongoing debate addresses what aspects of the natural environment should be granted moral considerability and which ethical system or systems should be used to justify this considerability.
In this thesis, I critique the major centric positions within contemporary environmental ethics anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism and lay out an alternative approach developed from Merleau-Ponty s phenomenological ontology. Dualist approaches to environmental ethics are anthropocentric and favour human dominion. Holist approaches, such as deep ecology (e.g., Naess), are ecocentric and erase the difference within and between the human and nonhuman.
I make use of the ecofeminist critique (e.g., Plumwood) of both dualist shallow and monist deep ecology to argue for a relational identity of the human nonhuman (inter)world. An account of value in the nonhuman natural world that is anthropogenic but not anthropocentric is needed. Value in the human nonhuman interrelationship should be accounted for by an ethics using the metaphysics of divergent intertwining.
In considering my alternative ecophenomenological approach, I use the concept of Merleau-Ponty s ontology of the intertwining; however, Merleau-Ponty never completed the task of developing his ethics. I do so by using his intertwined and interworldly structure to help re-embed human existence in the natural environment without erasing the difference that also characterises this interrelationship. I take my ecophenomenology further by positing a provisional environmental virtue ethics.