Excerpt
AMERICANS have come perilously close to accepting the idea that rationality consists almost exclusively of money-type thinking. Put another way, rationality consists of obtaining the highest money return in transactions involving commodities of any type. To challenge the rationality of money-thinking is to open oneself to the charge of irrationality or to only slightly less invidious charges of being idealistic or of employing heroic assumptions about human behavior and social efficacy.
Although ethics have a historical role that goes far beyond this, ethical thinking has become an alternative position for those who are persuaded that rational thinking goes beyond moneythinking; that human behavior is ruled more than by narrow self-interest; that not everything of value can be treated as a piece of property with fungible (that is, every commodity is pretty much like another) characteristics; that future generations have a rightful claim to have preserved for them some parts of nature; and that humans can appreciate intrinsic or existence value that ethically constains the exercise of power over land use and development. Land use and environmental ethicists today suggest that what was once ethical may …
Footnotes
Richard C. Collins is director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation and a professor of urban and environmental planning, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 22903.
- Copyright 1991 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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