The Ethics Forum – Call for contributions

[External Announcement]

Special Issue: Between Facts and Values: The Concept of Ecosystem Health

Guest Editors: Laurent Jodoin and Antoine C. Dussault

Call for contributions. Deadline for submission: 1 September 2023

From threat to dominated object, from sacred place to resource pool, our conception of nature and ecosystems has undergone mutations whose magnitude we hardly measure and which are worth re-examining. In fact, the environmental crisis that we are both creating and undergoing reveals the vulnerability of our environment but also our own. This raises two central questions in environmental ethics: what value should be placed on the environment? and what does it mean to protect an environment? The answers to these questions are sometimes articulated around a concept that is meant to be operational, that of « ecosystem health »: the health of an ecosystem should be preserved and to undermine the health of an ecosystem would therefore be morally reprehensible. However, this concept has both descriptive and normative content, thus calling on the resources of ethics and philosophy of science. It also has an ontological dimension insofar as the question of the very existence and nature of ecosystems, and consequently that of the possibility of valuing them and of attaching the notion of health to them, are still debated.

In 1995, the journal Environmental Value devoted a special issue to the concept of ecosystem health, which became a landmark publication. Philosophers such as J. Baird Callicott, Dale Jamieson, James L. Nelson, and Bryan Norton, and a scientist, David J. Rapport, contributed to the issue. Nearly thirty years later, the themes and arguments have not lost much of their relevance. This is why Les Ateliers de l’éthique/The Ethics Forum proposes to introduce them to a French-speaking public and to analyze them in a fresh way by soliciting the philosophical community. The articles that will be translated are the following:

• Callicott, J. Baird (1995), “The value of ecosystem health,” Environmental Values 4(4): 345-61.
• Nelson, James Lindemann (1995), “Health and Disease as ‘Thick’ Concepts in Ecosystemic Contexts,” Environmental Values 4(4): 311-22.
• Norton, Bryan (1995), “Objectivity, Intrinsicality, and Sustainability- Comment on Nelson’s ‘Health and Disease as “Thick” Concepts in Ecosystemic Contexts,’” Environmental Values 4(4): 323-32.

Les Ateliers de l’éthique/The Ethics Forum thus invites contributions in the form of critical commentary or research papers that discuss the themes addressed by Callicott, Nelson and Norton. These themes include, but are not limited to:

• Objectivity and/or social construction of ecosystemic health.
• Ecosystem health and the fact/value distinction.
• Ecosystem health and the organicist view of ecosystems.
• Ecosystem health and the roles of metaphors and analogies in science.
• Relation between ecosystem health and the concepts of having a good of one’s own, biological interests and/or ecological functions.
• Ecosystem health’s contributions to environmental policy.

Format of contributions

Submissions may be in English or French. Critical commentaries should be approximately 3,000 to 6,000 words and research articles should be approximately 6,000 to 12,000 words. The text must be anonymized and made suitable for anonymous review. Detailed submission guidelines can be found at: https://www.lecre.umontreal.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/consignes-aux-auteurs-2014_mise-en-page-1.pdf

Manuscripts should be sent by 1 September 2023 to: eliot.litalien@umontreal.ca