The semiotic foundation of an ecological ethic

TL;DRAbstract

This dissertation explores approaches to inherent value in the natural environment. Contemporary theories of inherent moral value that ground environmental ethics are inadequate for at least one of two reasons: either they fail to offer a sufficient scope, or they fail to offer justification sufficient for application in policy and practice. I respond to a gap between the broad holistic but counterintuitive proposals of environmental ethics and the intuitive individualistic but narrow proposals of animal ethics with a novel relational theory of inherent moral worth based in semiotics, the study of signification. Native American, Judeo-Christian, and contemporary spiritual perspectives on inherent value like that of Holmes Rolston III are based on spiritual and transcendent cosmologies that are difficult if not impossible to justify. Other approaches are grounded in moral intuitions developed out of growing scientific knowledge of the natural world, including those of Arne Naess, James

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