Please join us when Suvielise Nurmi, MSCA Research Fellow, School of Culture and Society, Department of Theology, Aarhus University, will give this CEH Talk concerning Biodiversity ethics from a relational perspective.

Abstract

The planet is experiencing an accelerated loss of biodiversity. However, there is scarcity of ethical tools to address the issue, precisely because of its relational nature. The fact that biodiversity refers to relations rather than individuals or fixed collectives makes it ill-suited to most modern Western moral theories, which are formulated in terms of rules and principles for the treatment of existing, morally significant entities. Nurmi works on constructing a novel approach, relational biodiversity ethics (REBET).

A ‘relational shift’ in thinking is increasingly being called for by conservation scholars as the most promising approach to biodiversity conservation and the needed ‘deep leverage point transformation’ for sustainability. It is required to move the modern mindset away from dichotomous conceptualizations, supposing human-nature, nature-culture, mind-matter and subject-object dichotomies, and bring relationality, interactivity, and dynamism to the fore in understanding both moral ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of responsibility. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the European Environment Agency (EEA) all place emphasis on the human-nature relationality, relational values and relationally justified plurality of cultural, contextual and value perspectives to biodiversity conservation.

What then is the potential for a relational approach to provide ethical assistance for addressing biodiversity loss, and the ethical relevance of different relationalities? The research integrates two fields of discussion: On the one hand, there is a debate in philosophy regarding the capacity of relational ethics, exemplified in, for example, feminist and care ethics, to maintain the conditions of moral autonomy, responsibility and normativity. On the other hand, there is an underexamined question in conservation science research concerning how the relational framing of biodiversity should be considered and how it can be translated into normative guidelines for conservation. In this CEH talk, Nurmi introduces her research and its initial findings.