Study On Fact-Value Question In Environmental Ethics

Fact-Value question that Hume pointed out is rather important in the study of ethics."How to infer value from fact",is a basic question that both meta-ethics and normative ethics have to answer.Ecological crises are intensifying seriously in current society.As good ecological environment is the basic guarantee for a better life,resolving ecological delimma has become a task facing all human.Environmental ethics take the moral relationship between human and environment as research object and actively provide theoretical guidance for solving environmental problems,which have produced some meaningful theories.Throughout the history of environmental ethics,the factual cognition of ecological environment and the ethical norms of protecting ecological environment are closely linked and promoted each other.In this development process,"how to infer value from fact" has become a question that environment ethics must deal with.This thesis explores Fact-Value question in environmental ethics.Introduction briefly describes the background of the selected issue,makes a definition about three basic concepts——"fact","value",and "environmental ethics",and provides the international and domestic research status of this issue.Chapter 1 discusses the research of modern western meta-ethics on this issue,and specifically introduces the controversy between moral realism,anti-realism and constructivism.Moral constructivism puts forward the existence of human-constructed moral facts that can bridge the gap between facts and values,which is based on the integration of moral realism and anti-realism critically.And to some extent,it can defend the argument of environmental ethics.Chapters 2-5 systematically introduce the contents of different theories of environmental ethics——Modern Anthropocentrism,Animal Liberation and Animal Rights Theory,Biocentrism,and Ecocentrism.These chapters mainly describe how different theories derive valuative judgments from relevant factual judgments,and make a brief evaluation of these theories.Chapter 6 summarizes the inference logic of different theories of environmental ethics,and proposes an inference model of "valuative judgment+factual judgment?valuative judgment"which can be used to solve Fact-Value question.The valuative judgment as a premise people can obtain is subjectively constructed on the basis of factual cognition,and that is an account for its source in the perspective of moral constructivism.After proposing an attempt to solve Fact-Value question,this thesis explores a more realistic question about how to achieve the transition from the judgment of environment value to the practice of ecological morality,and finally provides some constructive advices to resolve environmental problems and ecological crises.