About this episode
How should we treat our one and only home, Earth? What obligations do we have to other living or non-living things? How should we think about climate change and its denial? How does biodiversity and species extinction impact human beings? And how should we think about environmental justice, the rights of animals, and the ways we consume the natural world?In this episode, Ryan McAnnally-Linz welcomes Ryan Darr (Assistant Professor, Yale Divinity School) to reflect on some of the most pressing issues in environmental ethics and consider them through philosophical, ecological, and theological frameworks.Together they discuss:What and who matters in environmental ethics: Only humans? Only sentient animals? Every life form? The inorganic natural world?The significance and difference between global and individual scale of climate issuesThe ethics of climate change denialEnvironmental justice and moral obligations to the environment—the question of what we owe to animals and the rest of the natural worldThe importance of biodiversity and the impact of species loss and extinctionThe ethics of eating animalsThe problems with human consumption of the natural worldAnd the impact of cultivating a wider moral imagination of our ecological futureAbout Ryan DarrRyan Darr Ryan Darr is Assistant Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Environment at Yale Divinity School. His research interests include environmental ethics, multispecies justice, structural injustice, ethical theory, and the history of religious and philosophical ethics. He is currently writing a book that defends an account of environmental and multispecies justice as a framework for thinking ethically about the crisis of biodiversity loss and mass extinction. He is also developing an ongoing research project exploring the relationship between individual agency and responsibility and structural justice and injustice with a particular focus on environmental and climate issues.His first book, The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023. The book offers a new, robustly theological story of the origin of consequentialism, one of the most influential views in modern moral theory. It uses the new historical account to intervene in contemporary ethical debates about consequentialism and about how ethicists conceive of goods, ends, agency, and causality.Prior to joining the YDS faculty, Ryan held postdoctoral fellowships at the Princeton University Center for Human Values (2019-22) and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music (2022-24).Show NotesGet your copy of Ryan Darr’s The Best Effect: Theolo
