Warwick Fox (born 1 March 1954) is an Australian-UK philosopher. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Lancashire, and his books include Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism;Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism. Boston and London: Shambhala Publications, 1990; US reprint edition: New York: The State University of New York Press, 1995; UK and European reprint edition: Totnes, Devon: Green Books, 1995; Japanese language edition: Toransupasonaru Ekoroji'i, Tokyo: Heibon-sha, 1994. Ethics and the Built Environment (ed.);Warwick Fox, ed., Ethics and the Built Environment. London: Routledge, 2000. (This publication followed on from Fox's organizing of "The Ethics of Building" conference,10-12 April 1999, Penrith, Lake District, England, which is thought to have been the first international conference devoted to that subject.) A Theory of General Ethics: Human Relationships, Nature, and the Built Environment;Warwick Fox, A Theory of General Ethics: Human Relationships, Nature, and the Built Environment. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. and On Beautiful Days Such as This: A Philosopher's Search for Love, Work, Place, Meaning, and Suchlike.Warwick Fox, On Beautiful Days Such as This: A philosopher's search for love, work, place, meaning and suchlike, Amazon: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (ppb) and Kindle Direct Publishing (eBook), 2014. His main areas of philosophical interest are environmental philosophy, General Ethics (a term coined and defined by Fox), and the nature of the interior lives of humans and other animals.
Philosophical work
Deep Ecology Fox's earlier work (1984 to mid-1990s) focused on analysing and developing the deep ecology approach to environmental philosophy. His central publication in this area was Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism in which he argued that deep ecology is associated with three basic ideas: (i) the general idea of developing a non-anthropocentric or, more positively, an ecocentric approach to the world around us (summarized in one form by a widely referred to eight-point "Deep Ecology Platform"; (ii) the idea of "asking deeper questions" about our relationship with the nonhuman world (which it was claimed, primarily by Arne Naess, would inevitably lead us to first principles or "fundamentals" from which a broadly ecocentric perspective would follow);Arne Naess, "The deep ecological movement: some philosophical aspects", Philosophical Inquiry 8 (1986): 10-31. and (iii) the idea of "cultivating wider and deeper identification" with the world around us.Fox had previously argued, contra Richard Sylvan, that, unlike most mainstream environmental ethicists, the writings of the main philosophically-oriented writers on deep ecology were not centrally focused on presenting ethically-framed arguments for the "intrinsic value" of the non-human world (even though they would sometimes employ the term "intrinsic value"), but rather on motivating the more psychological process of cultivating wider and deeper identification with the world around us. See: Warwick Fox, Approaching Deep Ecology: A Response to Richard Sylvan's Critique of Deep Ecology (Environmental Studies Occasional Paper no. 20), Centre for Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania, 1986 (ISSN: 0810 4395). See also: Richard Sylvan, "A Critique of Deep Ecology", Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, No. 12, Philosophy Dept, Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1985; also reprinted in two parts in the Summer and Autumn 1985 issues of Radical Philosophy (issues 40 and 41).
Fox argued that the first idea, of advancing a less anthropocentric/more ecocentric approach to the world around us, was eminently defensible but hardly distinctive of the deep ecology approach since other environmental philosophical approaches (e.g., Leopold's influential "Land Ethic" and other forms of ecophere or Gaia-oriented ethics)Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 (Leopold's influential "Land Ethic" is outlined in the concluding chapter); J. Baird Callicott, ed., Companion to 'A Sand County Almanac': Interpretive and Critical Essays (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989); J. Baird Callicott, Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999); J. Baird Callicott, Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and the Earth Ethic (NY: Oxford University Press, 2013); James Heffernan, "The Land Ethic: A Critical Reappraisal," Environmental Ethics 4 (1982): 235‑247; Kenneth Goodpaster, "On Being Morally Considerable", Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978): 308-325. along with some broader socio-political movements (e.g., some wings of the wider Green movement as well as more radical wings of Green political parties) were also trying to do this. Conversely, he argued that the second idea, of "asking deeper questions" about our relationship with the world around us, was relatively distinctive of the deep ecological approach but wasn't defensible as a way of ensuring less anthropocentric/more ecocentric approaches to the world around us. Fox demonstrated this by showing that the process of asking deeper questions could easily lead one to endorse first principles (or "fundamentals") from which one could straightforwardly derive even outrageously anthropocentric conclusions, depending upon the other hypotheses that one made use of in employing Naess's approach to developing a normative system.Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology, pp. 131-141; Arne Naess, "Notes on the Methodology of Normative Systems", Methodology and Science, 10 (1977): 64–79. Finally, Fox argued that the third idea, of "cultivating wider and deeper identification" with the world around us, was both defensible and distinctive of the deep ecology approach to environmental philosophy. Fox referred to this defensible and distinctive aspect of deep ecology as "transpersonal ecology", since it sought to encourage us to identify with the wider world in a way that went well beyond our normal range of personally-based identifications.
Pursuing this line of thinking, Fox distinguished between three basic forms of identification, which he referred to as "personally-based identification", "ontologically based-identification", and "cosmologically-based identification". These forms of identification refer, respectively, to forms of felt commonality with other entities that are brought about through personal involvement with them; through a deep-seated realization of the "utterly astonishing fact"Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology, p. 251. that, like oneself, they too exist (which takes us into the realm of what Wittgenstein himself referred to as the "mystical");Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 6.44: "Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is" (Ogden translation); or "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists" (Pears and McGuinness translation). and through a deep-seated realization of the fact that we and all other entities are aspects of a single unfolding reality. Fox argued particularly for the importance of this last, cosmologically-based, form of identification in counteracting our tendency to rely too much in our lives on personally-based forms of identification.
Ethics and the Built Environment In the late 1990s Fox moved on from writing on deep ecology (including its connections to and differences from other approaches to environmental ethics), and began to consider the field of environmental ethics as a whole. In his edited book Ethics and the Built Environment, he argued that, whereas the world around us – our "environment" – consists of both natural, spontaneously-occurring environments and human-constructed – or built – environments (and, increasingly, their various admixtures), environmental ethics as it had developed to that point had essentially been concerned only with the ethics of the natural environment. In his view, this meant that just as traditional, human-centred forms of ethics had exhibited what he referred to as a "blind spot" in regard to affording any significant consideration (or any consideration at all) to the nonhuman world, so the development of environmental ethics to that point had exhibited a major blind spot of its own in regard to the human-constructed (or built) environment.Fox, Ethics and the Built Environment, p. 2. What we needed, Fox argued, was a more general kind of ethics that could embrace not only traditional, human-focused ethical concerns but also ethical concerns raised by our relationships with both the nonhuman natural environment and the human-constructed, or built, environment.
General Ethics and the Theory of Responsive Cohesion In A Theory of General Ethics Fox refers to the kind of ethics he believes we need to develop as "General Ethics" (always spelt with a capital "G" and a capital "E" to "distinguish it from coincidental or haphazard references to 'general ethics' or 'ethics in general,' by which an author may well mean something much more limited").Fox, A Theory of General Ethics, p. 3. He defines General Ethics as referring to the development of a single, integrated approach to ethics that encompasses the realms of interhuman ethics, the ethics of the nonhuman natural environment, and the ethics of the human-constructed (or built) environment.
David Keller showed "General Ethics" as the most inclusive sphere in his diagram of "Spheres of Moral Responsibility" in his Environmental EthicsDavid R. Keller, ed., Environmental Ethics: The Big Questions (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). teaching anthology for the Wiley-Blackwell Philosophy: The Big Questions series. Keller also included the category of "General Ethics" as the third and final section (after the sections on "Individualism" and "Holism (Ecocentrism)") of the "What is the Scope of Moral Responsibility" section in that collection.
Fox refers to his own approach to General Ethics as "the theory of responsive cohesion". (He accepts that other approaches might also be developed to General Ethics and offers suggestions as to the general structural features that they, too, would likely need to possess.)See the final section of A Theory of General Ethics (pp. 357-360), entitled "Concluding Notes on the Structure of Any Future Version of General Ethics". Fox's theory of responsive cohesion approach proceeds from the idea that the ultimate basis of value is to be found not at the relatively high level of certain kinds of value-conferring powers or capacities that certain entities possess (such as rationality, sentience, or even being alive), which is where most ethicists have tended to look for it, but rather at the far more basic level of structure, form, or organization.