Published Paper Details:

The claims made by some environmental ethicists to place nature and restored-natural entities in two domains of moral evaluation has raised many questions by environmental ethicists. Such claim asserts that the dichotomy between nature and artifact leads to some sort of moral dualism where restored-natural entities are not to be evaluated morally at par with natural entities. Eric Katz goes to the extent of considering restored-natural entities as artifacts because of being contaminated and polluted with human intention, design and purposes etc. Due to this restored-natural entities lacks naturalness and their intrinsic values affected. Therefore such entities will have less moral standing or no sufficient moral standing for any moral consideration. But involvement of human design, human intention and purposes do not necessarily create artifact which might lack moral standing because such entities are different from a paradigmatic case of artifact. Following Aristotle's characterization of artifact and natural entities, this paper makes an attempt to show that restored-natural entities are not paradigm case of artifact but natural entities with moral standing. Further, the whole idea of nature-artifact dichotomy is not based on a solid ground as there is no clear demarcation line between nature and artifact. If this paper succeeds in establishing that restored-natural entities continues to be natural, they can possess moral standing and therefore we are obligated to respect them. In this essay an attempt is also made to examine the validity of moral dualism which is rooted in the very nature and validity of such distinction, although it is not the intention of this essay to undermine or reject such dichotomy. This issue is significant from the point of view of environmental ethics which is concern about human relationship with nature or the environment.