Relational Agency and Environmental Ethics - by Suvielise Nurmi (Hardcover)

About the Book

The book charts a new direction for environmental ethics-and ethics in general-by relationally revising the concept of moral agency in light of the current understanding of embodied mental processes and environmentally extended cognition. The book sketches the crucial implicat...

Book Synopsis

Why does ethics only weakly contribute to the most crucial problems of the current world? Relational Agency and Environmental Ethics: A Journey Beyond Humanism as We Know It explores how the concept of moral agency embedded in modern humanist ethics, in its reliance on environmentally harmful and scientifically implausible presuppositions, prevents ethics from efficiently supporting a sustainability transition. The modernist individualist notion of agency includes conceptual dichotomies between moral agency and human nature, mind and body, reason and emotion, and knowledge and will, yet it should be revised without dismissing responsibility, normativity, and a shared ground for critical assessment. Suvielise Nurmi proposes an agential shift resting on a relational concept of agency, combining ecofeminist and evolutionary criticisms of modernism together with various interdisciplinary discussions involving philosophy of mind, cognitive science, anthropology, social ontology, and developmental biology and psychology. This book argues that the relational shift can resolve the dilemma and bring environmental relationships to the core of ethical discourse: there is no ethics distinct from environmental ethics. Environmental responsibilities can be justified as responsibilities for one's relationally considered agency.

Review Quotes

"Nurmi uses findings in philosophical anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, sustainability science, and ecofeminism to outline and defend a highly complex paradigm shift in ethical theory. Ethics, in this view, rests on "an ecologically relational theory of moral agency" (p. 86). Nurmi finds many benefits in this relational concept of agency... Moral agency thus calls for genuine interactivity through cultivating love, friendship, trust, and reciprocity. What is important is to care for and sustain such mutual webs of interaction, so they function in ways that produce states of affairs that are good for all, including non-human animals and the environment. This is a welcome though challenging book. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. General readers." --Choice Reviews

"This book engages an important concern: how to create an environmental ethics that could support sustainability. [...] Instead of modernist, humanist, individualist ethics, even in the form of extended humanism or the alternative ontologies, the author proposes the relational agential strategy. Relationality (cooperative partnership) is placed at the center of agency. The agents are capable of self-correction, and the individual is responsible for developing one's agency toward inclusivity (i.e., ecological disposition). This is a promising advancement in thinking about the environmental ethics. While the intersections between agency, identity, and material relationships are hardly new questions, the ways to imagine moral agency matter. [...] It has been fascinating to read how the author carefully weaves together strands from several disciplines and schools of thought to establish her relational agency, which does not distance itself from epistemic sphere and calls to cultivate one's ecologically sensitive virtues." --Anne Kull, University of Tartu

"In this wide-ranging and well-researched book, Suvielise Nurmi explores a relational account of moral agency. The development of this account, particularly in relation to environmental ethics, makes an valuable contribution to the field." --Marion Hourdequin, Colorado College

About the Author

Suvielise Nurmi is postdoc researcher in ethics and environmental philosophy at the University of Helsinki.