Fittingness and Environmental Ethics by Michael S Northcott

Fittingness and Environmental Ethics by Michael S Northcott

This volume focuses on ‘fittingness’ as an ethical-aesthetical idea, and in particular examines how the concept is beneficial for environmental ethics. It brings together an innovative set of contributions to argue that fittingness is a significant but under-investigated facet of human ethical deliberation with both ethical and aesthetic dimensions. In widely diverse matters – from architecture to table manners – individuals and communities make decisions based on ‘fittingness’, also expressed in related terms, such as appropriateness, prudence, temperance, and mutuality. In the realm of environmental ethics, fittingness denotes a relation between conscious embodied persons and their habitats and is of relevance to judgements about how humans shape, and take up with, the non-human environment, and hence to ethical decisions about the development and use of the environment and non-human creatures. As such, fittingness can be of great benefit in reframing human relationships to the non-human, stimulating a way of living in the world that is fitting to the preservation of its fruitfulness, goodness, beauty, and truth.

Michael S. Northcott is Professor Emeritus of Ethics at the University of Edinburgh and Guest Professor at the Indonesian Consortium of Religious Studies at Universitas Gadjah Mada Graduate School in Yogyakarta (Indonesia). He is also Guest Professor of Systematic Theology at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven (Belgium).

Steven C. van den Heuvel is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven (Belgium).