Field philosophy is interdisciplinary experiential environmental humanities learning. It grows from a community-focused conception of environmental ethics and place-based environmental education, and it aims to help students develop an awareness of the role of environmental ethics in environmental issues, as well as cultivate an empathetic environmental ethic that might enable them to participate in environmental problem solving. The emotional, cognitive, and physical relationships with people, place, and ideas at the core of field philosophy necessitate a pedagogy that attends to affective learning objectives and relationship building. A shared focus connects literature in experiential education, educational psychology research on emotional engagement, and the ethic of care. A synthesis of this literature grounds an environmental pedagogy of care with meaningful potential for field philosophy.

An early ethics assessment method was used to evaluate sustainability goals and early findings from an automated body scanning technology for swine production. The project had twin goals of discovering potential pitfalls in the technology and exploring the applicability of the method, derived from the Ethical Matrix, as a tool to aid researchers in product design at very early stages in the research and development (R&D) process. This paper reports results on the second objective. Results of the evaluation workshop were coded and qualitatively analyzed. These results are reported and compared; the exercise is compared to the findings of other researchers using more traditional methods for ethical assessment on similar technologies, as well as standard social science methods for ascertaining economic sustainability and social acceptability of technological innovations. We conclude that the method has promise, especially for its applicability at very early stages in R&D, but that it does not substitute for analyses that occur at a much later stage in product or procedural development.