Attending to the Full Moral Landscape

Abstract

This article explores the potential of recognizing ethical obligations to the other-than-human world. In particular, I emphasize how emotional responses to other-than-human beings reflect a proper apprehension of the moral landscape, which then allows ethical insights into our obligations towards others. Although this article overlaps with other work in environmental ethics, I specifically relate Margaret O. Little’s moral epistemology to our emotional experiences with the other-than-human to illustrate how a gestalt shift from “humans as apart from” to “humans as embedded within” complicates the moral picture of how we live with and in this world. I argue that when humans attend to our experiences with nature in an open and caring way, we can more easily and accurately ascertain the moral significance of the other-than-human parts of nature. Affective responses reveal important details of the moral landscape. Recognizing a reality of deep interrelatedness with the other-than-human world, our emotional responses to other-than-human beings enable us to appreciate moral obligations to care for the rest of nature and consider our relationality with the other-than-human world as a moral issue.