Abstract
Ethics is often the distillation of cultural and social tradition, including religious beliefs. Prominent cultural differences are frequently due to geographic and environmental influences which in turn may be reflected in ethical norms. Materialities interplay with understandings and beliefs, since human adaptive strategies are conditioned by the first and addressed by the second, these being guided by foresight and its uncertain drivers, these, in turn, raising the need for ethical considerations. In the West since Biblical times and Greek antiquity the notion that natural resources were a gift to be consumed, used and enjoyed, has been determinative. The emergence of such an understanding may be traced back to water management strategies in given areas of very productive narrow riverine land amid a dominant low natural productivity in most of the territory. Generally, because of the belief that nature was self-renewing and her resources essentially inexhaustible, discussions of the human exploitation of the natural environment have been framed with little acknowledgment of any ethical duties toward nature. This lacuna is challenged in the twentieth century by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Han Jonas, and it has subsequently become a prominent discussion among environmentalist philosophers, in an age when the impact of human activity upon the earth has made the need for a global ethics compatible with the geosciences a matter of urgency. This chapter will consider the imperative of responsibility that the new found powers inherent in techno-science have put before humanity and how this duty can be honored.
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Acknowledgements
Luiz Oosterbeek would like to thank the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology for its support to research leading to this chapter, through the Geosciences Centre (R&D unit 00073) and the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar.
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Sjursen, H.P., Oosterbeek, L. (2023). Materialities, Perceptions and Ethics. In: Di Capua, G., Oosterbeek, L. (eds) Bridges to Global Ethics. SpringerBriefs in Geoethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22223-8_6
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