Basic Ethics Concepts

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Now that weve seen a bit about what ethics is, were going to introduce some basic ethics
concepts and questions. This will later help us recognize and categorize specific views on
ethics.
Virtue and Action
The first major concept to consider is the distinction between virtue and action. Virtue ethics
emphasizes what we shouldbe, whereas action ethics emphasizes what we should do. For
example, is it more important to be someone who cares about the environment, or is it more
important to be someone who takes actions helping the environment? Of course, virtues and
actions are not totally separate. Someone who cares about the environment will often take
actions to help the environment, and someone who takes actions to help the environment will
often be someone who cares about the environment. But virtue ethics starts with what we
should be, whereas action ethics starts with what we should do. Almost all major ethics views
can be described in terms of virtue or action, or in terms of some combination of the two. Most
of the views that well see in Geog 030 are within the realm of action ethics, so thats where well
focus most here.
Within action ethics, a core question is whether the ends justify the means. In other words, is
the important thing the action itself, or the consequences of the action? For example, is it
fundamentally wrong to ever perform the action of chopping down a tree, or is it acceptable to
chop down trees when the consequences of chopping the tree down are good enough? We
might even chop down some trees in order to save others. Forest managers do this often, such
as to prevent fires from spreading. The managers are acting on the principle that the ends
saving more trees justifies the means cutting some trees down. The views we'll see in Geog
030 are mostly ends ethics, but some of them are means ethics.
These three types of ethics virtue, ends, and means are the three major types of ethics.
They are ways of categorizing and describing specific ethical views. But they do not give us
specific guidance, because they don't tell us which virtues, ends, or means we should follow.
The remainder of this page presents some more specific ethical views that are important to
GEOG 030 and to sustainability and human-environment interactions more generally. These
views generally fall within the realm of environmental ethics, because they are views about the
environment and our relationship to the environment.
Justice
Justice is a very important ethics concept. There are two major forms of justice: distributive and
procedural.
Distributive justice emphasizes the distributions of gains and losses across populations.
Distributive justice is thus mainly interestested in the consequences of our actions, and how
these consequences are distributed. Often, distributive justice is concerned with distributions
between the rich and the poor, or between the better-off and the worse-off. (Being rich does not

necessarily mean being better off.) Should we act in ways that help the poor, the sick, and other
worse-off members of society? For example, we should give to charity, or have a progressive
tax system, or public health care? Sometimes, distributive justice is concerned with distributions
between humans and non-humans. For example, should we sacrifice benefits to humans in
order to help non-human animals or ecosystems? All of these considerations can be very
important to decisions about what we should do about environmental issues.
Procedural justice emphasizes how decisions are made, instead of what decisions are made.
Procedural justice is thus mainly interested in the process for deciding which actions to take, as
opposed to the consequences of the actions. A core procedural justice principle is that everyone
who is affected by a decision should have some say in how the decision is made. There are
many ways to implement procedural justice. Democracy is one of them and we'll explore the
concept in depth later in this module. Procedural justice can be either a means or an ends. For
example, is democracy inherently good (means ethics) or is it only good to the extent that it
produces better results for society (ends ethics)? Theres another way of looking at a means vs.
an end form of procedural justice: Should just processes be an end that people strive for, using
whatever means (ends ethics) or should people strive to use just processes, regardless of what
ends result from it (means ethics)?
Environmental change is very challenging for procedural justice, because it is very difficult to
include everyone's opinions in a decision. The following reading develops this challenge further.

Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism

An important distinction in environmental ethics is between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism.
Anthropocentrism is the view that humans are what is ultimately important. Ecocentrism is the view
that ecosystems are what is ultimately important. Both anthropocentrism and ecocentrism can be
used with either distributive justice or procedural justice.
For example, suppose we're deciding how to manage a forest. Under anthropocentric ethics, we
would aim to manage the forest for human benefit. This could mean cutting down trees for wood, or
building roads, or conserving the forest as a park. Under ecocentric ethics, we would aim to manage
the forest for its own benefit. This could mean protecting it from human development, or from
invasive species. The distinction between anthropocentric ethics and ecocentric ethics is very
important to understanding what we mean by "sustainability," as we will discuss later in this lesson.

Speciesism
One additional view that is important to consider for environmental ethics is speciesism. Speciesism
is the view that some species are more ethically important than others. It's similar to racism, which
says that some races are more ethically important than others, or sexism, which says that one sex is
more important than the other. When we encounter speciesism, it's usually in the form of
anthropocentrism: viewing humans as more important than other species.
This raises major questions. Should any species human or othertherwise be treated as more
ethically important than any other species? On what grounds could this be? People have tried
arguing that humans are worthy of special treatment because of human reasoning, emotional
capacity, and other abilities. But biologists consistently find that, while humans are relatively strong
in these ways, they are not unique: other animals can use reason or feel emotions. Thus many

people argue that we should care about non-human animals similarly to how we care about humans.
(We say "other animals" and "non-human animals" because humans are classified as animals, too!)
For example, if we care about human welfare about human happiness and suffering and life
flourishing then perhaps we should care about the welfare of non-human animals as well. Such
considerations are especially important in discussions about food and agriculture, given the very
many livestock animals are alive in our agriculture system.

Altruism and Selfishness

Finally, two more important ethical concepts are altruism and selfishness. These are familiar
concepts to most of us already. The key question here is how hard we should try, or how much we
should sacrifice, to help others. The more selfish we are, the less we will try to help others; the more
altruistic we are, the more we will try to help others. This holds regardless of which "others" we
would try to help: our friends and family, the poor and sick, non-human animals, ecosystems, or
anything else.
How altruistic should we be? This is a timeless question that lacks a definitive answer. What do you
think? Is there any reason to treat your life as more important than that of others? Should there be
limits to how much we ask of ourselves? And what do answers to these questions mean for how you
live your life? These are all important questions. Reflect on them a bit now and keep them in mind as
you continue with the course. These questions become very central later in the course when we
discuss individual and collective action.

Optional: Additional Reading & Ethics Terminology

There are several great resources online that explain these basic ethics concepts in much more
detail. The two most comprehensive resources are Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (SEP). The SEP is particularly valuable because it contains high-quality content written
by experts. If you read and understand these, then you will have a strong understanding of ethics as
it is relevant both to this course and to much more. These online resources, as with most other
discussions of ethics, don't always use the same terms for basic ethics concepts that we used here.
We have used the simplest terms we could to introduce the concepts. In ourEXPERIENCE , the
terms used elsewhere can be needlessly confusing to students in this course. But if you would like to
study the ethics further, then you should learn the terms used by ethicists: