英文摘要
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The Development of human civilization and technology has caused serious impact on natural environment, and made environmental ethics one of the most important and exigent problems of the 21st century. Taoism tends to be critical towards human society and values Nature and natural processes. Hence, when we come to problems related to Chinese environmental ethics, Taoism is naturally one of the prominent theories. This paper will first examine the characteristic and limitations of recent discussion and explains why Chinese show much concern with Nature, however, without sufficient objective knowledge base. Where environmental ethics encompasses metaphysics, ideas of Nature and value, Taoism contains significant insights, though it lacks support from objective knowledge again. Consequently, our reconstruction of Taoistic environmental ethics remains in the stage of idea exploration rather than methods of practice and substantial directives. This is in fact the most urgent task for the development of Taoism, that is, exploring further the direction and concretization of Taoistic metaphysics and theory of value in terms of environmental sciences.
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