United States population policies and environmental ethics: Addressing population growth from the biocentric perspective

When the environmental movement began to surge in the 1960s, concerns were raised over the prospects of the U.S. population growing to an unsustainable level and causing irreparable harm to the environment and our quality of life. Unfortunately, population growth has not been given the priority it deserves not because it is not an important issue, but because of our failure to view population growth, and all environmental issues, from a biocentric outlook. It is this paradigm shift towards biocentrism that we as moral agents should be making and which will subsequently cause us to view population growth in a new way. This argument is made by illuminating the inadequacies of the traditional anthropocentric ways of defining environmental issues, and then presenting and defending the biocentric ethics that we should use to supplement our traditional outlook on our place in the environment and how we treat it and its nonhuman inhabitants.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Ethics and Policy Studies

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Year

2000

Author dc:creator

• MacWilliams, Philip Davis

Contributors dc:contributor

• Barbara Brents

Statement dc:rights

• IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language

English

Identifier

https://oasis.library.unlv.edu/rtds/1169

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:oasis.library.unlv.edu:rtds-2168