![]() While this obviously includes the geophysical environment, geoethics can also be applied to other spatial phenomena on earth: the living conditions of populations, the location of human settlements (activities and housing), and the mobility of people, as well as the spatial dimensions of political power, cultures, and social organisations. There has been ethical discussion for several decades now in the social sciences that suggests that the purview of geoethics might be extended to all geographical questions. Calls for geoethics can be seen as an academic endeavour involving two relationships to ethics: a professional ethic, which considers the proper use of geosciences, and a prescriptive (or normative) ethic, in which researchers participate in societal debates about the appropriate use of geophysical resources.ĢSuch a definition of geoethics might, however, seem artificially limited. ![]() In this context, geoethics seems to be a branch of the environmental ethics that has been developing for several decades at the intersection of moral philosophy and environmental studies. The aim of all these initiatives is to involve the scientific community in societal debate focusing on topics relating to the geosciences: for example, managing and preserving resources or preventing environmental risks. ![]() Edited volumes and textbooks have been published in recent years (Lollino, 2014 Wyss, 2015, Bohle, 2019), in 2016 a special volume of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health was devoted to the question of ‘Gender and Geoethics in the Geosciences’, and in 2017 wo special issues were published in 2017 in the journals Geosciences and Annals of Geophysics. Various organisations have seen the light of day (The International Association for Promoting Geoethics and The International Association for Geoethics) and events have regularly focused on discussing the moral issues raised by the development of geoscientific culture. Introduction: Geoethics, geosciences, and geographyġConceived along the same lines as ‘bioethics’, the term ‘geoethics’ has been used for the past fifteen years or so by specialists in Earth Sciences to make clear their desire to reflect on what might constitute good professional practice in the context of prescriptive approaches to the social uses to which scientific knowledge is put (Abel, 2006 Varet, 2008 Martínez-Frías, 2011 Matteuci, 2012 Peppoloni, 2012 Bobrowsky, 2017 Peppoloni, 2017). Keywords: constructivism, geoethics, norms, moral values, territorial governance Haut de page The article closes with the proposal of a classification aimed at highlighting the role of geoethical norms in the construction of some major currents of thought constitutive of political modernity. In a last part, the conditions for the conceptual and methodological implementation of a constructivist analysis of geoethical norms, regimes and controversies are introduced. In doing so, the heuristic interest of a constructivist and multifactorial approach to geoethical norms in the regulation of the spatiality of societies will be underlined. After recalling the existence of three possible uses of the term ‘geoethics’ within the academic sphere (professional, prescriptive and analytical), a second part presents five possible epistemological approaches of geoethical analysis (the naturalistic, idealistic, rational choice, holistic and constructivist approaches). This article proposes a research framework for analyzing the role of ideas and ethical norms in the construction of the spatiality of societies.
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