Why should any society take the decision to devote scarce resources, as a matter of public policy, to preserving natural objects? This is one of the questions considered in the field of environmental ethics, and the thinking that has taken place in this discipline has been dominated by the 'ecocentric-anthropocentric' distinction. Answers focus on either 'intrinsic values in nature', or on the human welfare benefits that will accrue from preservationist policies. These two answers are generally taken to be both mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. Ecocentric writers believe that...

This volume examines the reasons why some despair at the prospects for an ecological form of democracy, and challenges the recent 'deliberative turn' in environmental political thought.

Deliberative democracy has become popular for those seeking a reconciliation of these two forms of politics. Demand for equal access to a public forum in which the best argument will prevail appears to offer a way of incorporating environmental interests into the democratic process. This book argues that deliberative theory, far from being friendly to the environmental movement, shackles the ability...

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of the 'end of ideology' thesis, not as a theoretical stance but as a reaction to what appears to have been the decline of major ideological families, such as socialism, in a changing world order. Globalization, as well as internal national fragmentation of belief systems, have made it difficult to identify ideology in its conventional formats.

Previously published as a special issue of The Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, this volume challenges the notion that we are living in a post-ideological age....

The beginning of the new century is a crucial time for environmental political theory. Since the first wave of environmental texts appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, environmentalism has come under a series of challenges, and has begun a process of redeveloping itself in order to meet these challenges. Environmental writers have shown that they can take on questions of distributive justice, democracy, economic efficiency, and other concerns of conventional political theory from an environmentalist perspective. This book offers a set of important contributions to the property theory,...