ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

Discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also
the value and moral status of, the environment and its non-human contents.
Objectives:
 Provides an overview to the field of environmental ethics
 Discuss major debates in the field from its inception in the 1970s to today
 Explain both central tenets of schools of thought within the field and arguments
that have been against them
 Discuss main trends within the field as a whole and review some criticisms that
have been offered

History
Environmental ethics as a subfield of philosophy started in the early 1970s. Public
interest increased in questions about human’s moral relationship with the rest of the
natural world because of the growing environmental consciousness and social
movements of the 1960s.
Anthropocentrism
The inadequacy of traditional ethical theories was initially attributed to their assumption
that human beings and/ or their interests matter morally in their own right while everything
else matters morally only insofar as it affects human beings and/or their interests.
Morality simply as a matter of the obligations that humans have to one another
Example argument: Richard Routley’s ‘last person’ case
Routley asks the reader to imagine that some catastrophe has 408 Environmental
Ethics killed every other human being on earth such that there is only one person left
alive. If this person were dying, and if with his or her last dying breath it would be possible
to push a button that would destroy the rest of life on earth, would there be anything
morally wrong about doing so?
* Routley’s worry is that anthropocentric theories cannot explain why it would be morally
wrong to push the button under these circumstances. If moral obligations come from the
interests of humans, then once humans and their interests cease to exist, so do moral
obligations. To put the point another way, if the natural world has value only insofar as it
serves human interests, then in a case in which the natural world cannot possibly serve
our interests (because we no longer exist), it can have no value, and thus there is nothing
wrong with destroying it. Ethical theories need to claim that the natural world has value
that is independent of humans and/or their interests and that our moral obligations
regarding the natural world aren’t just a matter of what we owe to our fellow humans.
Intrinsic Value
An adequate environmental ethic must ascribe intrinsic value to at least some part of the
natural world. Natural world and/or its parts have value in their own right, independently
of their effect on human beings/interests.
Example argument: J. Baird Callicott that ‘how to discover intrinsic value in nature
*One can reject the view that something has value insofar as it serves human interests,
but still think that its value depends on its serving interests of some kind. Thus a view that
says that the value of a plant depends on whether it serves the interests of some divine
entity, or the interests of the ecosystem, or the interests of all sentient beings, will count
as nonanthhropocentric but not in virtue of attributing intrinsic value to the plant.
*In order for our value claims to be justified there must be at least one thing that has value
independently of its relations to other things and that serves as the ultimate justification
for all other value claims.9
*Later theorists have attempted to address these concerns, and analyses of the nature
and bearers of value within environmental ethics have increasingly incorporated
theoretical innovations developed within mainstream metaethics and normative ethics.