Open Conference Systems, RUC Sunrise Triple C Conference: Climate – Change – Communication

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Values and Nature
Erik Bendtsen

Last modified: 2010-04-27

Abstract


Human relationships matter, and our relationships reflect our attitudes. Whether we are aware or not our attitudes and actions matter to our surroundings - and to ourselves. This is obvious from our attitudes towards other human beings. We may be kind and understanding and be recognizing likenesses with ourselves or what we cherish, or we may be hostile and without an ability to recognize any likenesses with ourselves.  As such our attitudes are expressions of emotional dispositions for experiencing things in a specific value-laden way, and values come into existence from the awareness of our attitudes to various things and reflections on their goodness and badness, rightness or wrongness - i.e. whether our attitudes reflect our right values. Values therefore seem to be pondered  attitudes, but his is by far normally the case. Most often values are traditionally accepted ways of viewing what is good and bad and right and wrong to do on this background of values and the actions therefore are not necessarily reflected and in accordance with what might be the right or true values. An examination of the possibly right values involves a deep reflection on human life and the nature of values and that includes all the aspects of human life - i.e. our relationship to nature:  to surrounding nature and to ourselves. We might discover the problematic relationship of human beings to nature on the background of destruction and perhaps hence exploitation and climate-change, but we might also start the other way round and ask which values - and that means which human and cultural conditions made it possible to develop values and attitudes that have over-exploitive and destructive consequences for nature - and ourselves.


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