Marshall, Alan (Libertarian Extension)

Alan Marshall is a significant scholar in the field of environmental ethics and its history. He has identified three broad approaches to environmental ethics over the last 40 years: the Libertarian Extension, the Ecologic Extension, and Conservation Ethics.

The Libertarian Extension includes the work of philosophers Arne Naess (who used the term deep ecology) and Peter Singer; it is characterized by its similarity to libertarianism in their shared emphasis on equal rights and civil liberties. But while libertarianism is politically concerned only with humans or the local community, the Libertarian Extension extends civil liberties to nonhumans as well. Not to do so would be to be guilty of speciesism, a term coined by British psychologist Richard D. Ryder in his work in the early 1970s to ...