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How can concern for individual animals meet responsibility for the ecological relationships that sustain them? An inquiry into continuity between human and non-human life, in dialogue with Mary Midgley, enactivism and pragmatism.
Protecting an individual animal and protecting the ecosystem it inhabits can call for different decisions. This is one of environmental ethics’ most concrete difficulties: recognising the value of individuals, species and environments while keeping each in view. Continuità approaches this tension through our place within the living world and the concepts with which we describe other beings.
The book moves through the competing claims of green ethics: the moral importance of suffering and individual experience; the value of ecological communities; and the search for principles that can guide decisions in particular circumstances. Evolution, ecology and animal cognition inform the argument by constraining assumptions and prompting revision. Biological knowledge alone, however, cannot settle what ought to be done. The reasons supporting moral judgements still require articulation and scrutiny.
Continuity provides a way of navigating these questions. It concerns our shared evolutionary history, the ecological dependencies that constitute our lives, and the relationships through which experience and action take shape. A sustained dialogue with Mary Midgley questions rigid divisions between nature and culture, reason and emotion, humanity and animal life. Enactivism and pragmatism help develop the embodied and relational dimensions of this account, while leaving open the further question of how they should inform moral deliberation.
The resulting proposal is a critical pluralism in which different perspectives must be tested against conflicts and assessed for their reach and limitations. Continuity preserves differences between beings and supplies no advance guarantee that all values will agree. It asks us to consider individuals together with the relationships and systems in which they live. The book is intended both for readers working in animal and environmental ethics and for those seeking philosophical resources to examine everyday and collective responsibilities towards non-human life. Its guiding concern is how far our ways of deliberating must change when we take our membership of the natural world seriously.
In 2026, Continuità took joint second place in the essay section of the twenty-ninth Premio Parco Majella. A report on the award is included among the links; reviews appear in their own section.
Begin with the conflict between different scales of moral concern: how should the life of an individual animal be considered alongside its ecological relationships? The task is to make the costs of competing choices visible.
Shared evolutionary history, present ecological relationships and the situated experience of acting provide three approaches to the problem. Bringing them together connects scientific understanding with deliberation while preserving the distinct task of justifying values.
Midgley helps question the image of human beings as separate from the rest of life. The discussion continues through enactivism and pragmatism, examining how a relational understanding of living beings can inform ethics.
The JoLMA article brings one of the book’s questions into focus: what changes in moral considerability when an organism is understood through its interactions with its environment? Reading the two texts together invites a distinction between describing relationships and assessing the responsibilities we assume within them. The journal link provides public access to this stage of the research.
When considering a concrete conflict, try listing the individuals involved, the relationships on which they depend and the consequences of the available alternatives. What becomes visible when the scale changes? Which reasons remain in tension? This offers a way to approach the book’s pluralism through the work of deliberation, before moving to the broader survey in Filosofia analitica e cervi.
From Mary Midgley to conflicts in animal and environmental ethics: five stops across books, research and public discussion.
Explore this path →Walking through a city, encountering a wolf, reconsidering non-human life: a route through shared spaces.
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