L’eredità dell’etica ambientale. Proposte per l’avvio di un dibattito

The main aim of this paper is to show that, without abandoning the Western philosophical tradition, there are various options to accept both the possibility and the duty of respecting various types of natural entities. I claim that although environmental are often linked to a paradigmatic revolution of moral thought or a total overturning of Western paradigm of thought, we need to reconsider these beliefs. Only by abandoning similar prejudices it is possible to push environmental ethics to face a more important challenge. This is the need to reach a new paradigm of environmental ethics. This paper attempts to offer some theoretical coordinates of this hypothetical new paradigm and does so from both the conceptual and existential point of view, as well as the metaethical and normative one. Claiming that moral thought cannot escape the ethical obligation to give concrete answers to the problems of human beings, the paper provides useful elements to encourage a paradigm shift within the discipline – one that allows it to transform its theoretical abstractness into practical effectiveness.