Fittingness and Environmental Ethics: Philosophical, Theological and Applied Perspectives

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. Individuals and communities make numerous decisions about courses of action which are informed by judgements of ‘fit’. ‘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. Fittingness interacts powerfully with a whole cluster of relational and moral terms - such as appropriateness, prudence, temperance, mutuality - that the book suggests can be of great benefit in reframing human relationships to the non-human.