Final Project Case Analysis and a Positive Step Choose an environmental issue or specific case that you want to learn more about and that you see raising important ethical challenges.
My suggestion is that you choose a topic discussed in the remaining chapters of our class text, for example Waste, Land Degradation, Water, Biodiversity and Species loss, Animals (including the environmental impact of industrial animal agriculture, which is not directly covered in our reader), Population, since these are ready-made research resources. This is not mandatory: if there is a specific environmental issue or case you are interested but is not covered in our textbook or class, then please discuss with me.
Within each topic, there are some brief cases in the book, or you can consider a specific problem in a part of the US or globe that you have a particular interest, or that you see as particularly urgent or relevant personally or professionally. The specific case can be far away or local.
You may also consider digging in deeper to an additional dimension of the one of the topics we considered in recent weeks — responding to climate change, or fast fashion. Build a strong QCC and conduct a philosophical/ethical analysis of the issue with the aim of discerning and justifying some sort of positive step to address the issue you focus on. This positive step can be at the level of theory, policy, or action. Your discussion of a positive step can build from a critical analysis of the strengths and limitations of others attempts. In the process of researching and analyzing the issue, and justifying the positive step you recommend, you need to show your understanding of key elements of at least three ethical frameworks. In the process, you will also show your critical understanding of your own value priorities and their assumptions, implications, and limitations. How specifically you structure the paper to address your QCC and articulate a positive step will depend on what your issue is: there is no single correct plan here. For example, after researching, a specific environmental problem in a specific location and thinking about all the ethical theories and worldviews you studied this fall, you may decide that a combination of a couple approaches is the most promising way to approach and solve the problem you discuss. So your project will be to explain the problem and explain your proposed solution, showing what alternatives you considered, how you evaluated the alternatives in relation to your solution, and why you decided on your proposed solution.
For example, your project might be to test two or three moral-theoretical approaches to the problem, and then argue that one is superior to the other.
For example, after researching and thinking, you may decide that there are unexamined assumptions that we need to recognize about the problem, or about the ways people have tried to approach the problem so far, and your paper is spent articulating these assumptions and arguing why they are important to notice. Getting clearer on a problem counts as a positive step.
You may focus on a conflict between approaches, or between parties involved, and your project is to explain how that conflict could be addressed or resolved.
If you want to focus on concrete actions, then your QCC might be something like, What is a specific doable intervention to educate and convince some specific others (for example, USJ students or the USJ Administration, ones church, workplace or professional organization, neighborhood group, Town Council) that X is a problem and that Y is a good solution that they should advocate or work toward? And your project is to explain how you decided Y is a solution (showing good critical evaluative skills), but then the bulk of your project is to come up with a specific measure that could be implemented by you or others.
Possible Formats: Paper: If you have not yet passed your Writing Portfolio, then a paper is mandatory.
o Length: 2000-2500 words. Pictures, graphs, and other visual elements are welcomed in addition to the required amount of text. i have already started the paper i just need someone to add 5 more pasges to it. see below for draft.Biodiversity and Species Loss
According to North American Breeding Bird Survey in 2014, 61% of bird species that existed 40 years back are no longer there in North America. One such kind is the night hawk that the research has profiled as one of the most endangered species whose number is dwindling in New Hampshire by the year (Angermeier & Karr, 2015). Extinction of these species and the general biodiversity loss has become devastating over time making conservationists and preservationists to formulate approaches towards mitigating these problems. However, in the process of natural management, conflicts and dilemmas have risen, bringing into conflicts various values enshrined in natural conservation management. For instance, there may arise a conflict existing between sustenance of particular livelihoods and preservation of certain species.
In a bid to address such potent conflicts and dilemmas, a unitary effort between conservationists and state department of environment have initiated positive steps toward mitigating this problem of the species loss (Angermeier & Karr, 2015). One such organization is National Wildlife Federation (NFW) engaging in concerted efforts to improve wildlife populations and species in the US. Its strategy has laid emphasis on protection, restoration and connecting critical wildlife habitats in North America. In facilitating their move, the federation has assessed various ethical perspectives before sticking to one ethical approach.
Since the contracarian ethical perspective maintains that morality should spring from human beings establishing contracts among themselves, this approach proves unsuitable for mitigating loss of species (Robinson, 2013). Further, the view of this approach presents an ethical constraint on wildlife management concealed in the subtle use of wildlife for the benefit of human beings. A look at a utilitarian perspective, the aim of conservation of biodiversity seeks to bring the best overall outcome, when considering everyone who the decision has a likelihood of affecting biodiversity.
For NFW, this ethical approach aims at minimizing total pain or even frustrations while maximizing total satisfaction and pleasure in an overall sense. Since biodiversity and loss of species are the considered in this case, the federation advocates for taking care of wildlifes welfare as they have the likelihood undergo suffering (Angermeier & Karr, 2015). The ethical approach has since gained favour in this mission making it easier for integration with the relational view or the contextual ethics. In the approach, there exists an acknowledgment of critical emphasis on the ethical vitality of fostering human-animal relationships. These relationships come with moral obligations to the wild animals instead of the domesticated ones and as such, utilitarian and relational ethical approaches facilitate positive steps towards addressing biodiversity and loss of species.
References
Angermeier, P. L., & Karr, J. R. (2015). Biological integrity versus biological diversity as policy directives: protecting biotic resources. In Ecosystem management (pp. 264-275). Springer, New York, NY.
Robinson, J. G. (2013). The limits to caring: sustainable living and the loss of biodiversity. Conservation Biology, 7(1), 20-28.
