Minimal ethics for the Anthropocene

dc.contributor.authorZylinska, Joanna
dc.date.accessioned2018-03-20T15:46:22Z
dc.date.available2018-03-20T15:46:22Z
dc.date.issued2014
dc.description.abstractLife typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life—understood as both a biological and social phenomenon—it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. “Anthropocene” names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe.Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink “life” and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist’s method; it also includes a photographic project by the author.en
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden
dc.description.versionPublished Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationZylinksa, J. (2014) Minimal ethics for the anthropocene. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. DOI: 10.3998/ohp.12917741.0001.001en
dc.identifier.doi10.3998/ohp.12917741.0001.001
dc.identifier.endpage152
dc.identifier.isbn978-1-60785-329-9
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/5636
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherOpen Humanities Pressen
dc.relation.ispartofseriesCritical climate change
dc.relation.urihttps://openhumanitiespress.org/
dc.rights© 2014, Joanna Zylinska. This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4,.0 Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book are copyright © 2014, Joanna Zylinska and licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license.en
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
dc.subjectEthicsen
dc.subjectHuman ecologyen
dc.subject.lcshNature--Effect of human beings onen
dc.titleMinimal ethics for the Anthropoceneen
dc.typeBooken
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