Introduction

The author believes that the problems facing the modern world cannot be solved from within the conventional framework and that a radically different framework is needed. The book develops its proposed framework by appropriating key ideas from Spinoza’s Ethics, though in the end its ideas are significantly different from Spinoza’s. (The book does not presuppose any familiarity with the Ethics.) After defining key terms, the introduction explains the book’s organization: we are fully natural creatures; we can nevertheless be free; and a naturalist view of nature is compatible with and is completed by a religious view of nature. The book promises a worldview, and an ethics rooted in it, more apt for our times that results in an ethics radically different from Spinoza’s. It calls this new ethics an “ecological ethics.”