Environmental Ethics

12 Key excerpts on "Environmental Ethics"

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  Values and Planning

  • Huw Thomas(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As Taylor (1986, p.3) notes, it is: ‘concerned with the moral relations that hold between humans and the natural world. The ethical principles governing those relations determine our duties, obligations, and responsibilities with regard to the Earth’s natural environment and all the animals and plants that inhabit it.’ Environmental Ethics, then, is clearly about choices and decisions, and it concerns questions of right and wrong, good and bad. It is important to recognise that the consideration of Environmental Ethics is not an optional question. Rather, the failure to consider Environmental Ethics directly is itself a form of ethical choice, albeit of a de facto sort. Even those who have little or no regard for environmental impacts on the natural environment have a set of Environmental Ethics – they simply treat the environment or environmental considerations as having little or no value. Before examining in detail any particular ethical positions or theories, it will be instructive to attempt to develop a broad framework for organising or categorising many of these different approaches. An initial important question in defining the scope of Environmental Ethics and in categorising different theories of Environmental Ethics is how we conceive of the relevant moral community involved – that is, to whom or to what do we have ethical duties or obligations? There are several different dimensions to this question, including a biological dimension, a temporal dimension and a spatial/geographical dimension. The first dimension, which I refer to as biological, involves the fundamental issue of whether moral obligations extend beyond the human species, and whether other forms of life, or the larger ecosystem itself, have intrinsic value. Within the Environmental Ethics literature there is a distinction frequently made between anthropocentric views and those which might be said to be non-anthropocentric

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  Environment, Development, Agriculture

  Integrated Policy Through Human Ecology

  • Bernhard Glaeser(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part TwoEthical-political dimensions Passage contains an image

  Chapter 3Environmental Ethics: possibilities and limits

  Environmental Ethics, it seems, cannot contribute all that much to a reduction in environmental pollution. If this is indeed the case, why is there such frequent and detailed discussion on what the basis for these ethics should be? Time and again in popular literature and Sunday speeches, ethics is cited as a means to influence the behaviour of individuals, and, on a larger scale, the moral will of societies, such that their political classes treat nature properly, that is with concern for preservation.

  Since it is fairly obvious that moral suasions and appeals have little consequence on the individual level, let alone on the national or global level, we are led to ask what exactly Environmental Ethics are and, further, what are they good for? What do they comprise and how do they function? Are our expectations regarding the effectiveness of ethics perhaps too high? This chapter attempts to provide an answer to the above questions, specifically investigating the role of Environmental Ethics in the conception and implementation of environmental policy. In order to do so, it is first necessary to delve into the concept of ethics itself and deal with some of the fundamental contradictions to be found there. Rather than attempt to encompass the wealth of literature already engendered by research on ecological ethics and its many facets, the discussion here will deal only with central elements and adhere as closely as possible to the human ecological tradition.

  3.1 Ethics between knowledge and action

  In addition to its theoretical and empirical tasks, human ecology also encompasses normative aspects. These proceed from the assumption that human ecology as a theory of social action should also contribute to solving environmental problems. Thus the orientation towards action in the theoretical analysis is supplemented by the orientation towards action in the normative approach: Environmental Ethics. Environmental norms play an important role quantitatively in setting standards or threshold levels, and qualitatively in providing criteria for environmental quality standards. However, when environmental standards of any kind are set, the impression is often given that these are derived directly from the findings of scientific research. This is an epistemological error, since norms are established ex definitione.

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  Environment, Development, Agriculture

  Integrated Policy through Human Ecology

  • Bernhard Glaeser(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART TWO Ethical-political dimensions

  CHAPTER 3

  Environmental Ethics: possibilities and limits

     

  Environmental Ethics, it seems, cannot contribute all that much to a reduction in environmental pollution. If this is indeed the case, why is there such frequent and detailed discussion on what the basis for these ethics should be? Time and again in popular literature and Sunday speeches, ethics is cited as a means to influence the behaviour of individuals, and, on a larger scale, the moral will of societies, such that their political classes treat nature properly, that is with concern for preservation.

  Since it is fairly obvious that moral suasions and appeals have little consequence on the individual level, let alone on the national or global level, we are led to ask what exactly Environmental Ethics are and, further, what are they good for? What do they comprise and how do they function? Are our expectations regarding the effectiveness of ethics perhaps too high? This chapter attempts to provide an answer to the above questions, specifically investigating the role of Environmental Ethics in the conception and implementation of environmental policy. In order to do so, it is first necessary to delve into the concept of ethics itself and deal with some of the fundamental contradictions to be found there. Rather than attempt to encompass the wealth of literature already engendered by research on ecological ethics and its many facets, the discussion here will deal only with central elements and adhere as closely as possible to the human ecological tradition.

  3.1 Ethics between knowledge and action

  In addition to its theoretical and empirical tasks, human ecology also encompasses normative aspects. These proceed from the assumption that human ecology as a theory of social action should also contribute to solving environmental problems. Thus the orientation towards action in the theoretical analysis is supplemented by the orientation towards action in the normative approach: Environmental Ethics. Environmental norms play an important role quantitatively in setting standards or threshold levels, and qualitatively in providing criteria for environmental quality standards. However, when environmental standards of any kind are set, the impression is often given that these are derived directly from the findings of scientific research. This is an epistemological error, since norms are established ex definitione

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  Political Theory In Transition

  • Noel O'Sullivan(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  A fourth mainstream proposition, intimately related to the previous ones, is that citizenship should be understood most fundamentally as a matter of rights-claiming within a defined political territory such as the state. Environmental political theory calls this framework into question by arguing for the rehabilitation of the idea of citizen responsibility, as well as of citizen rights, and by suggesting that this environmental responsibility should be regarded as requiring discharge non-specifically across time and space. In this context, as in others, environmental politics calls into question standard assumptions about the nature and extent of the political community, and I shall have more to say about this below. The focus on responsibility makes environmental politics part of a wider move to remoralize political life, so that other-regarding actions are undertaken for moral rather than prudential reasons.

  Underpinning all this is environmental political theory's insistence on putting the human—nature relationship on the political agenda. Environmentalism, or 'ecologism', is unique among political ideologies in its recognition of the importance of this relationship. Where the relationship has been a feature of ideological reflection, the overwhelming tendency has been to regard it in instrumental terms, with 'the Other' that is nature being appropriated for human use in indiscriminate fashion. Environmental political theory suggests bringing the non-human world into the moral orbit, either through some kind of 'moral extensionism', whereby the natural world - or parts of it - is shown to have the required characteristics for moral considerability, or through appealing in some pre-rational way to sentiments of care and compassion - even awe - for the Other. Most obviously, then, environmentalism has brought the non-human natural world sharply into focus, and I shall now outline the implications of this for political theory in more detail.

  The descriptive and the normative

  At one level, the implications are merely ('merely'!) descriptive, yet they are potentially important even for an explicidy normative enterprise such as political theory. Political theorists ignore the empirical world at their peril, and a precondition for changing the world will always be understanding it. So let us first consider the implications for normative theory of the descriptive element of our relationship with the non-human natural world.

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  Ethics and Planning Research

  • Francesco Lo Piccolo, Huw Thomas, Huw Thomas(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Vegetti 2005 ). He speaks of ethics and politics as factors in understanding the common good.

  This subject is treated in philosophy, though not, until Plato, as an independent subject, since it is cited in discussions of 'wisdom'. We probably only find it being treated on its own merits with the advent of Hellenistic philosophy (see Vegetti 2006 ). But by its very content it is clearly an issue that does or should influence all the decision-making that might have repercussions on the life of the community. It should therefore be considered, by right, an integral part of many other disciplines.

  It is probably for this reason that we find many attempts to delineate and define the exact meaning of ethics, and how to apply them. Some commentators view ethics as resting on an indisputable base and others maintain that, in view of their very essence and rationale, ethics cannot be absolute, since to be absolute they would have to have been formulated ethically at the outset (see Larmore and Renaut 2004 ).

  Ethics of the Environment

  The subject of the environment unlike that of ethics, can be viewed as a contemporary issue, which probably originated more as a 'problem' and only later became a discipline a posteriori.

  Research in this field has been firmly established for some years now. And many scholars have stated that the environmental crisis has many causes: cultural, economic, political and technical, which

  can be traced back to a single, fundamental cause, i.e. the profound change in values that came with modernity and is commonly called a moral crisis. The environmental crisis is therefore primarily an ethical crisis. And it is highly significant that the primacy of ethics in addressing ecological problems is acknowledged not just by moral philosophers or religious authorities, but also by scientists, with one of them going so far as to state that in today's world 'ethics is all"6 (Quarta 2006

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  Environmental Ethics and Policy-Making

  • Mikael Stenmark(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In making the general distinction between morality and ethics, we can also naturally apply this more specifically to the case of environment, thus distinguishing between environmental morality and Environmental Ethics. Environmental morality would thus consist of those moral attitudes to nature and the environment which actually occur. Environmental Ethics, by contrast, refers to the systematic analysis of, and reflection upon our relationship and attitudes to nature. All human beings therefore, consciously or unconsciously, have an environmental morality but not everyone has an Environmental Ethics. We can define Environmental Ethics more precisely in the following way:

  Environmental Ethics is the systematic and critical study of the moral judgments and attitudes which (consciously or unconsciously) guide human beings in the way they behave towards nature.8

  The basic question in Environmental Ethics is thus not how human beings ought to behave towards other human beings but how they ought to behave with regard to nature – animals, plants, species and ecosystems. We can thus distinguish between an environmental and what we might call a ‘human’ ethic (that is, an ethic centred on human beings).9 In contrast to Environmental Ethics, human ethics is the systematic and critical study of the moral judgments and attitudes which (consciously or unconsciously) guide human beings in the way they behave towards each other. The object of human ethics is interpersonal relations, while the object of Environmental Ethics is human beings’ relationship to their natural environment, in other words to nature. Human ethics has existed, in the Western world, from the days of antiquity when Socrates, Plato and Aristotle discussed such matters. This is not true of Environmental Ethics. While human beings in all ages have had certain moral attitudes to the environment, the academic study of Environmental Ethics did not exist before the 1960s and 1970s.10

  Environmental Ethics or more far-reaching attempts to construct a theory of Environmental Ethics began first when a number of people began to realize that we faced an environmental crisis of global proportions. Philosophers, ecologists and others could see that we had treated nature as an inexhaustible resource which is able to absorb and neutralize our waste. In so doing, we had overestimated the earth’s resources and acquired habits which threatened the welfare and continued existence of ourselves and other living creatures. Faced with this situation, these thinkers ‘discovered’ environmental morality – both their own and that of other people – and began consciously to think about different moral attitudes towards nature. It was not until 1974, however, that the first systematic book on the subject of Environmental Ethics appeared and received international attention. This was John Passmore’s Man’s responsibility for nature: Ecological problems and Western traditions . A couple of years later, Environmental Ethics

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  Radical Ecology

  The Search for a Livable World

  • Carolyn Merchant(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Environmental Ethics and Political Conflict

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203084212-3

  In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle noted that “all knowledge and every pursuit aims at some good.”1 But whether this is an individual, social, or environmental good lies at the basis of many real world ethical dilemmas. Egocentric, homocentric, and ecocentric ethics often underlie the political positions of various interest groups engaged in struggles over land and natural resource uses. These ethics are the culmination of sets of associated political, religious, and ethical trends developing in Western culture since the seventeenth century. In recent years, however, new ethical formulations such as multicultural ethics and partnership ethics have been proposed to resolve environmental problems. Conflicts of interest among private individuals, corporations, government agencies, and environmentalists often reflect variations of the ethical approaches outlined in this chapter. Thinking about environmental problems in terms of this taxonomy helps us to understand the unexpressed assumptions behind political conflicts over the environment and how they might be resolved in practice.

  These ethical differences are also at the root of some of the disagreements among radical environmental theorists and activists detailed in subsequent chapters. An egocentric ethic (grounded in the self) for example, is historically associated with the rise of laissez faire capitalism and the mechanistic worldview discussed in the previous chapter, and is the ethic of mainstream industrial capitalism today. A homocentric ethic (grounded in the social good) underlies those ecological movements whose primary goal is social justice for all people, such as social ecologists, left Greens, social and socialist ecofemi-nists, many Third World and minority environmentalists, and the mainstream sustainable development movement. An ecocentric ethic (grounded in the cosmos, or whole ecosystem) guides the thinking of most deep ecologists; many spiritual ecologists, Greens, and ecofeminists; organic farmers and bioregionalists; and most indigenous peoples’ movements. Multicultural and partnership ethics are particularly relevant to the environmental justice and global environmental movements. The following discussion is not an exhaustive description of ethics. It does not discuss valuable insights into ethics developed by thinkers such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Eastern philosophers, or feminist philosophers (on the latter two see Chapters 4 , 5 , and 8 ). Rather it is an effort to develop some of the important ethical categories relevant to the environmental topics discussed in this book (see Table 3.1

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  Applied Ethics

  An Introduction

  • Robin Attfield(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  7 Environmental Ethics and Climate Ethics

  Some Historial Antecedents

  The current environmental crisis has multiple aspects, of which the most pressing are global warming and its impacts, loss of biodiversity, and the pollution of air and oceans. Environmental Ethics studies the values that are at stake, and the actions and policies that they call for, together with the actions they enjoin or proscribe. Professional ethicists have been debating these issues since the 1970s; but environmental concern is much older.

  While the ability of humanity to affect the climate and the natural world went largely unnoticed in the ancient and the medieval worlds, there were exceptions, such as Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor (371–287 bce ), who was aware of human impacts on the local climate and on local species. Earlier, Plato (428–348 bce ) showed awareness (in his dialogue Critias) of the deforestation of Attica, but lacked concern to advocate remedies; yet elsewhere he expressed the claim, in his Phaedrus, that ‘it is everywhere the responsibility of the animate to take charge of the inanimate’ (Phaedrus 246b; Passmore 1974, 28), one of the sources of the later belief in the human stewardship of nature. Plato’s theories, however, diverted attention away from nature to the ‘forms’ which underlie it. Nor did Aristotle (384–322 bce ), despite his more empirical approach and his founding of the science of biology, express concern about environmental change, since he believed that, in spite of temporary fluctuations, nature was fundamentally permanent and unchanging (Meteorologica, 352b).

  Another exception was Albert the Great (1193–1280), who, in his On the Nature of Places, showed awareness that human interventions, as when trees are felled, can affect geography (Glacken 1967, 227–9). Albert was heir to those Church Fathers, like Basil the Great (331–379 ce ) of Asia Minor and Ambrose of Milan (fourth century ce

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  Rio

  Unravelling the Consequences

  • Caroline Thomas(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1992 ] for examples from international relations). In this article I examine whether the seeming centrality of environmental concerns is not in fact mistaken by reference to two dimensions of the role of environmental politics: within international relations as practice, and within the academic subject of international relations. I argue that there are powerful reasons, essentially political, that may keep the environment on the periphery in each setting.

  Such a view may well seem heretical to those who work within the environmental politics area. However, my overall claim is that too often practitioners and academics alike fall into the trap of being drawn by the ethical, moral or even common-sense logic of their argument or position without sufficient attention being paid to the ‘realities’ of political and economic power. As someone who works in probably the most conservative academic discipline, one which reifies the state as the centre-piece of political and economic analysis, I want to put forward a set of reasons why environmental politics may be destined to stay on the periphery of international relations (and of the discipline of international relations).

  Perhaps an historical precedent is to be found in the politics and study of European integration. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the logic of integration as a practice and as an (often interrelated) academic field, forecast the end of the states-system. Whether by functional stealth or by neo-functional co-option the state was to be overtaken by other actors. Arguably a similar neglect of high politics is present in most contemporary environmental work as was present in the heady days of European integration. Moreover, the states-system has faced many challenges before, and since, that posed by European integration. Yet for all its faults, and crucially for all its constraining and silencing of alternative notions of political community, the states-system remains the dominant political structure of international relations.

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  International Equity and Global Environmental Politics

  Power and Principles in US Foreign Policy

  • Paul G. Harris(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  I will argue in the following chapters that there is great practical significance in integrating equity into global environmental policy making. But here I have tried to suggest that there are strong ethical arguments, from a variety of philosophical perspectives, for promoting international environmental equity. While governments will continue to act primarily to promote their own national interests, ethical arguments can redirect their policies when their vital short-term interests are not threatened. Considerations of international equity can bolster these policies, and thinking about them can help scholars and laypersons understand the problems faced by negotiators at international environmental negotiations.

  Environmental issues, more than any others, are compelling governments and diplomats the world over—including those of the affluent countries—to seriously consider international equity. Questions of equity and justice in international relations were common in the 1970s—and subsequently declared moribund by most of the affluent countries in the 1980s. Yet, as the global environment becomes more polluted in the future, considerations of international equity will become increasingly germane to international relations. Environmental change and closely related requirements for sustainable development and poverty eradication in the developing world have already pushed equity back onto the global political agenda. This movement toward more serious consideration of equity in the context of global environmental politics, culminating in the Earth Summit and related international environmental deliberations, is the subject of the next two chapters.

  Notes

   1 I first discussed these ideas in greater detail in Paul G. Harris, “Affluence, Poverty and Ecology: Obligation, International Relations and Sustainable Development,” Ethics and the Environment, 2, 2 (Fall 1997), pp. 121-38.

   2 For an elaboration of this definition, see Paul G. Harris, “Defining International Distributive Justice: Environmental Considerations,” International Relations

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  Working Toward Sustainability

  Ethical Decision-Making in a Technological World

  • Charles J. Kibert, Martha C. Monroe, Anna L. Peterson, Richard R. Plate, Leslie Paul Thiele(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Arguably, some of the questions surrounding wilderness, including the preservation of endangered species and ecological restoration, are primarily environmental, at least in their ethical dimensions—and economic or social considerations come into play primarily as practical rather than philosophical concerns. On the other hand, some uses of technology involve mainly social or economic issues, because the environmental impact of various choices is either negligible or the same in every option. Medical research regarding the use of stem cells falls into this category.

  And, of course, some scientific processes entail ethical concerns that are not really about the natural environment or sustainability. This is true for some of the moral issues that arise concerning the treatment of nonhuman animals or humans in medical or scientific experiments, for example. Thus, the question of whether Environmental Ethics, sustainability ethics, or both are involved must be decided before the relationship between the two can be analyzed.

  Emphasizing Human Priorities

  Sustainability advocates have adopted a wide range of Environmental Ethics. In general, however, the framework for thinking about environmental values that is most common, and probably most fitting, within sustainability ethics is fairly anthropocentric. More human-oriented approaches can accommodate the other values that must also be brought into play. An ethic of sustainability can be defined as an ethic that coherently integrates environmental, social, and economic values without consistently prioritizing any single one. Ecocentric ethics may not meet this requirement, as they prioritize the claims of nonhuman nature, and especially of ecological wholes, necessarily subordinating at least some human values. For example, very few philosophers writing in the tradition of land ethics or Deep Ecology have made social and economic concerns central to their work.

  Some environmental philosophies do fit within this definition. Some bioregionalists and agrarians have also developed integrated sustainability ethics, although others within those streams of thought prioritize ecological concerns above social ones. The same can be said of some work in ecofeminist and social ecological perspectives. Pragmatist approaches, which at times emphasize social and economic as well as ecological concerns, may be particularly useful in the context of sustainability.

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  Wonder and Generosity

  Their Role in Ethics and Politics

  • Marguerite La Caze(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  4 The Relation between Ethics and Politics Politics says, “Be ye wise as serpents”; morals adds (as a limiting condition) “and guileless as doves.” —Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace” It is necessary to deduce a politics and a law from ethics. —Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas In the center of moral considerations of human conduct stands the self; in the center of political considerations of conduct stands the world. —Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment I n the previous chapters, we saw that many important issues straddle the divide between ethics and politics and that many ethical matters can be resolved depending on political circumstances. Furthermore, our ability to feel wonder, generosity, and love is co-implicated with political circumstances. For these reasons, it is essential to consider the question of how we should conceive the proper relation between ethics and politics. One well-known and important position is that of Immanuel Kant, who argues that ethics and politics do not come into conflict because ethics places limits on what can be done in politics, or indeed that politics is a part of ethics. I focus on his work as it represents a kind of ethical limit-point for taking ethics in politics seriously. However, it is often contended, both by philosophers and in everyday life, that politics raises particular problems independent of ethical considerations. In this chapter, I introduce the work of Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt as they challenge Kant's views and center on significant contemporary and recent political questions

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