[SydPhil] University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar Series, Christopher Lean, (Macquarie University)

[Ryan Cox]

Hi everyone,

This week's speaker in the University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar Series is Christopher Lean, (Macquarie University)

The title of the talk is "Maintaining an ethical asymmetry between conserving and creating biodiversity". Here is an abstract for the talk:

Environmental conservation as a practice and philosophy has been implicitly and explicitly backward-looking. It is the act of preserving, conserving, restoring, and maintaining the features of the biotic world we inherit. Increasingly, this bias has been confronted by anthropogenic environmental change and increasing capacity to address existential environmental risk with technology. There has been a call to re-evaluate and support the practice of creating novel ecological arrangements (novel ecosystems) and to incorporate the value of engineered biotic novelty (novel biodiversity). This paper confronts the question of what, in principle, could justify a bias in value towards preserving biodiversity over creating biodiversity. I present two related, but ultimately independent, arguments for this position. First, I will consider methodological reasons towards preserving environmental value from axiology. There are a range of reasons that value conserved has been considered preferable to value created, beyond an unguided dispositional status quo bias (Cohen 2011; Brennan & Hamlin 2016). I argue the processes and products of deep history instantiate features that warrant asymmetrical valuation. Second, I present a reconsidered version of ‘authenticity’ as a justification for preserving biodiversity (Katz 2022). Under my presentation, authenticity refers to the evolved entanglement and interdependency of lineages and gene lineages. These interdependencies should be valued epistemologically and aesthetically.

The seminar will take place at 3:30pm on Wednesday Sep 3 in the Philosophy Seminar Room (N494).

Enquiries about the seminar series can be directed to ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au<mailto:ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au>

Ryan Cox
Lecturer in Philosophy
Discipline of Philosophy
School of Humanities
University of Sydney
ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au
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