Читать книгу Environmental Ethics онлайн

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Deontology (since Kant) has been very keen to think of duties in terms of thought experiments that create models that are universal in scope. In the current example, the operative question might be: “What if every county in America were to build a conventional coal-powered energy plant?” Could we do so without logical contradiction? Here we tread in uncharted territory. According to most scientists, if every county in the United States built such a power plant the amount of pollution (both air and heavy metals) would be so great that people would begin dying in high numbers, causing high social and political unrest. High social and political unrest is called anarchy. Anarchy is the breakdown of government. There would be no cohesive society under this description. Therefore, the model is inconsistent. Inconsistent models are illogical. All illogical models are to be rejected. Therefore, deontology would create a prohibition against building the power plant.