Former Summer Fellow Joshua Duclos Authors Paper on the Idea of Wilderness in Environmental Ethics Debates

Joshua Duclos, a 2016 Graduate Summer Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, recently published a paper titled “Uncomplicating the Idea of Wilderness”  in the journal Environmental Values.

In the paper, Duclos responds to common empirical, cultural, philosophical, and environmental objections to the idea of “wilderness” in environmental ethics debates. In attempting to uncomplicate this idea, Duclos hopes to make it easier for philosophers and environmentalists to work together on problems related to the value and morality of wild places.

Duclos holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston University, where his dissertation focused on the meaning and value of wilderness in environmental ethics. As a Pardee Center Graduate Summer Fellow, he wrote a paper on the ethics of wilderness preservation and the welfare of wildlife.

In 2017, Duclos authored an article for The Conversation on the morality of hunting, in which he identifies three rationales for hunting – therapeutic, subsistence, and sport – and explores various ethical objections to these rationales, such as the infliction of unnecessary harm, questions surrounding a hunter’s character, and the concept that hunting is “unnatural”.