General Ethics and the Theory of Responsive Cohesion

Warwick Fox (University of Central Lancashire)

In this talk I will outline the nature of ethics and discuss its expansion from interhuman ethics to environmental ethics to what I have referred to as General Ethics. By General Ethics I mean the development of a single, integrated approach to ethics that encompasses the realms of interhuman ethics, the ethics of the natural environment, and the ethics of the human-constructed, or built, environment. I will outline my own approach to General Ethics, which I refer to as the theory of responsive cohesion. This approach is both different from and more expansive than others on offer because it sees the basis of value as lying in a particular form of organization or structure that things can assume as opposed to particular kinds of higher-order powers or capacities that some things have, such as autobiographical self-awareness, rationality, sentience, being alive, or the capacity to maintain some kind of holistic integrity (all of which themselves represent a subset of the total class of responsively cohesive structures). A range of significant ethical implications follows from this approach.

Warwick Fox is Emeritus Professor at the University of Central Lancashire. He has published widely in environmental philosophy in particular and, more recently, on the extension of this work into what he has referred to as General Ethics. He is represented in leading anthologies and encyclopedias in the area, has served on the editorial advisory boards of some of the leading journals in the area (including Environmental Ethics, Organization and Environment, and Environmental Values), and his books include Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism (State University of New York Press, 1995, and Green Books, UK, 1995), Ethics and the Built Environment (ed., Routledge, 2000), and A Theory of General Ethics: Human Relationships, Nature, and the Built Environment (The MIT Press, 2006).