ABSTRACT
A tendency of which people have to be wary is the attempt to adopt just one framework or scheme, and then try to claim that in terms of it they have all the materials for understanding and solving their problems. This chapter describes that the liberal conception of morality - the conception associated with social contract theory. By this account of morality, people have to think about the basic rules for social living in terms of a fiction. The fiction is the supposition that at some imaginary time people chose freely to group themselves into a society. The chapter recognises that there is not just one moral framework within which to articulate people thinking about the rights and wrongs of their dealings with nature. In the philosophically interesting cases where their deliberations arrive at different results, it may prove impossible for people, as human beings, to take seriously the judgement of the non-anthropocentric perspective.
