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Duties Of Preservation, Donald H. Regan

Book Chapters

The central philosophical problem concerning our duties with regard to nature is this: We are strongly inclined to think we have certain duties which are not fully accounted for by instrumental arguments. We are also strongly inclined to hold a view about value that seems to make it impossible to account for these duties by any noninstrumental arguments. Hence our perplexity. It seems that we have duties to respect living creatures; to avoid causing the extinction of species; even to preserve complex parts of the environment s uch as a tropical rain forest or the Grand Canyon. If we ask …