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7 Pluralism, Contextualism, and Natural Resource Management Getting Empirical in Environmental Ethics Introduction: Environmental Ethics and Social Inquiry Given the public mission of environmental ethics—that is, to make compelling normative arguments justifying sound environmental policy and management decisions—it is surprising that the field has been so methodologically conservative over the years. One would think that this pragmatic charge would have spurred the development of a more interdisciplinary style of philosophical inquiry, especially studies that incorporate the analytical and experimental tools of the policy and management sciences.Yet, as I discuss in Chapter 3, the field has remained mostly insulated from the core discourses and methods that inform environmental public policy and management. It has emphasized instead the search for philosophical“first principles,”often at the expense (as I argue) of informing intelligent and democratically accountable environmental practice and decision making. Another way to put this is that, instead of breaking new methodological and institutional ground, and perhaps contrary to its own origins as a direct response to the “ecological crisis,” environmental ethics has for the most part reflected the traditional style of mainstream academic philosophy. It has generally eschewed interdisciplinary approaches in favor of a “purer” form of intellectual inquiry, one conducted by scholars working in relative isolation from the “real world” of social problems and practices. Although some encouraging developments indicate that this may be slowly changing in academic philosophy, at least in a few inherently interdisciplinary domains, such as moral psychology (e.g.,Appiah 2008), it is nevertheless still true that experimental work, even in an applied field, such as environmental ethics, remains Pluralism, Contextualism, and Natural Resource Management / 115 at best a minority tradition. And even within the domain of applied ethics, moreover , other disciplines are well ahead of environmental ethics with respect to the incorporation of the empirical methods of the social sciences. For example, biomedical ethics, a close academic cousin of environmental ethics, has in recent years displayed much more openness to such methods, especially ethnographic research (see, e.g., Borry, Schotsmans, and Dierickx 2005; De Vries et al. 2007; Fox and Swazey 2008). If environmental ethics is to have more of an impact in policy and management discussions, I believe it needs to adopt a more interdisciplinary spirit regarding the study of environmental values with respect to their structure and content and their potential roles in the public realm.As part of this process, the field could benefit greatly by integrating the methods of the experimental social sciences, particularly studies of public environmental ethics and attitudes, into its more traditional methods of theoretical analysis and argument.A more naturalistic and empirical approach to the study of environmental ethics, by breaking down some of the epistemological and ontological walls dividing the “two cultures” of the humanities and the sciences (Snow 1959), has the potential to broaden the intellectual scope of the field. It can also demonstrate its relevance to the public arena as a practical philosophical endeavor able to deepen the understanding of environmental values and attitudes within the social sciences. Public beliefs and values are in turn crucial data for assessing our assumptions about the meaning and structure of environmental ethics, including the variability of ethical beliefs regarding nature and the relationship of these commitments to policy and management choices. In this chapter, I describe and discuss two experimental studies of public environmental ethics (performed by myself and collaborators at the University of Vermont) that I suggest can shed useful empirical light on a pair of key philosophical issues in the field as well as inform environmental ethicists and resource managers about the normative content of public environmentalism. The first study addresses a major philosophical and empirical debate in environmental ethics: the question of ethical pluralism and the degree to which the public embraces a wide array of ethical positions toward nature. The second study focuses on an important methodological question surrounding the significance of ethical principles in environmental decision making—namely, whether individuals conform to a more principle-centered or context-centered style of ethical judgment in environmental dilemmas. I believe this sort of experimental work can open up new possibilities for a pragmatic environmental ethics that is more conversant with the environmental social sciences while also helping natural-resource managers and policy makers understand the wide range of the public’s environmental ethical commitments. Additionally, it will begin to fill a hole in the empirical scholarship on public environmental ethics, a lacuna that exists not only within environmental ethics but...

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