The Centre for Environmental and Animal Ethics (LEA) was established with two main general purposes. First, to disseminate the debate on applied ethics through a bibliographic rescue of great authors who contributed to the raising of an ethical perspective focused on environmental and animal issues. Such rescue is a theoretical commitment and also a practical one particularly taking into account the massive ecological challenge that befalls the contemporary world. Because of this LEA undertakes to pursue a sense of applied ethics that emphasize the expansion of the moral community to which we address our moral judgments and commitments. Secondly, to fill a gap in the national academic scenario by introducing to it some animal and environmental ethics debates carried out in the light of an ecofeminist, animalist and critical perspective of social justice. To this end, the aim is to dialogue with different ecofeminists standpoints, based on the stance that fragmenting and dissociating different expressions of inequality and violence is a way to support the maintenance of a dominant and oppressive system in different levels
Thus, LEA has three main researches axes: (i) systematic bibliographic survey of the environmental and animal ethics (ii) analysis of the relation amongst gender oppressions, sexualities, nature and species; and (iii) identification of the frontiers of applied ethics as continuation of hierarchical relationships, victims of moral codes aligned with ideological purposes in respect of what is assumed to be “natural”. This is a perspective of an environmental ethics that encourage a critical addressing of the binomial angles that historically forged an anthropocentric and androcentric view. Such a mapping enables a qualified analysis on how the disconnections between gender violence, sexualities, nature and species relates one to another within the western culture, necessarily affecting not only how our routine relationships are but also how we maintain a speciesist and ecocidal cultur.