The Moral Authority of Nature

About this book

For thousands of years people have used nature to justify their political moral and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify. The Moral Authority of Nature offers a wide-ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good beautiful just or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics including the connection of cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece medieval notions of sexual disorder early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as "against nature " race and the origin of humans ecological economics and radical feminism. The essays also range widely in time and place from archaic Greece to early twentieth-century China medieval Europe to contemporary America. Scholars from a wide variety of fields will welcome The Moral Authority of Nature which provides the first sustained historical survey of its topic. Contributors: Danielle Allen Joan Cadden Lorraine Daston Fa-ti Fan Eckhardt Fuchs Valentin Groebner Abigail J. Lustig Gregg Mitman Michelle Murphy Katharine Park Matt Price Robert N. Proctor Helmut Puff Robert J. Richards Londa Schiebinger Laura Slatkin Julia Adeney Thomas Fernando Vidal