ABSTRACT
Eco-phenomenology must be critical of views that adopt a hard-line ethical view in which duties and obligations are based on agentindependent or agent-neutral precepts and principles. Since “everyday experience resists being forced into monistic models,” and indeed when considering phenomenology’s pre-theoretical realm of “lived experience,” an understanding of eco-ethics begins with the “initial acceptance of the idea that the prospect of reducing all moral phenomena to a single criterion is hopelessly flawed.” To introduce the reader to one instance of the eco-philosophical challenge to the fact/value distinction as related to those embracing naturalistic ethical realism which offers an interesting version of environmental ethics as a form of ethical perfectionism. The chapter provides compelling argumentation buttressing claims for a reconceived intuitionist view of eco-ethics, and describes the notion in Lingis of “imperatives” in the things themselves, as is concern, in Nature.
