THEORIES AND

PRINCIPLES IN ETHICS
Types of Ethical Theories

• UTILITARIANISM/CONSEQUENTALISM
• DEONTOLOGY
• THEORY OF JUSTICE
1. Utilitarianism/Consequentalism
• Often government officials defend sustainable development or
environmental decisions on utilitarian ethical grounds
• Utilitarian theory has been particularly influential in economic
analysis of environmental policy and regulatory decision-making.
• Can you find one example??
• Classical utilitarian theory was developed in the 19th century by
Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
• Utilitarian ethical positions assert that those actions are right or good
that bring about the best end results.
• utilitarianism is usually classified among "consequentialist" ethical
theories.
• According to utilitarian theory, no act is good or bad in itself; its
wrongness depends on the consequences of the action.
2. DEONTOLOGY: RIGHTS AND DUTIES
THEORIES
• The second most commonly encountered ethical justifications for environmental or
sustainable development policy are justifications that ground action or inaction on
the notion that certain actions are intrinsically right or wrong.

• Because such justifications assume that rightness or wrongness turns on some higher
standards than the consequences of the action, these justifications often are
classified among ethical theories known as nonconsequentialist theories.

• speak of rights of individuals to take certain actions or of duties to refrain from action.
• classified as deontological theories because the word deontological is derived from
the Greek word for "duty."
• Deontological ethical theories are often encountered in
environmental policy discourse in reaction to the limits of utilitarian
theory.
• For instance, because of the difficulty in knowing with certainty the
consequences of certain human actions on the environment and
therefore determining the rightness of the consequences, persons
that support environmental policies often talk of duties to other
humans or future generations to refrain from action in the face of
uncertainty.
• The best-known Western deontological theory is that of the 18th-century German
philosopher Immanuel Kant.
• Kant believed that humans could derive absolute rules of morality based on reasoning
alone.
• Kant held that to determine whether an action was right or wrong, one should look
to the rule authorizing the action and ask if logically it could be universalized.
• If it could not, it would be unreasonable for individuals to give permission to
themselves to do things that they could not advocate should be a generally applicable
rule for others in society.
• Thus Kant held that humans are ethical beings because they are rational beings who
can freely choose to follow rules that others should be bound by. If one chooses to
follow a rule that everyone should follow, one is acting morally. The fundamental
ethical duty, called by Kant the "categorical imperative," is to act only in those ways
that could be acceptable to all rational beings.
• An important corollary of the categorical imperative is the notion that
because other humans are rational beings, they should always be treated
as ends and never as means.
• humans are to be respected as autonomous individuals and not be treated
as a means for other humans' interests.
• Such ideas often become manifest in environmental policy when persons
assert that individuals or future generations should not have to suffer the
pollution caused by another without consent.
• Many future sustainable development policies will undoubtably have to deal
with issues about the scope of individual procedural rights to consent to
sustainable development decisions.
• Consider a trolley barrelling down a track that will kill five people
unless diverted. However, on the other track a single person has been
similarly demobilized. Should you pull to lever to divert the trolley?
Our ethical theories produce the following advice:

• Consequentialism says: pull the lever! One death is awful, but better
than five.

• Deontology says: don’t pull the lever! Any action that takes innocent
life is wrong. The five deaths are awful, but not your fault.
• Things get interesting if we modify the problem as follows. Consider
the footbridge dilemma:
Consider a trolley barrelling down a track that will kill five
people unless diverted. You are standing on a bridge with a
fat man. If you push the fat man onto the track, the trolley
will derail, sparing the five people.
• Notice that the consequences for the action remain the same. Thus,
consequentialism says “push the fat man!”, and deontology says
“don’t push!”

• What about you? Would you push the fat man? Good people
disagree; however, most people confess they would not push the fat
man off the bridge.
• government lying about pollution levels???
• Most Kantians would assert, for instance, that government lying
about pollution levels is always wrong even if the lie resulted in no
harm to the person lied to. Similarly, Kantians will argue that
humans have a right to a healthy environment undiminished by the
actions of another without consent.
limitations of the Kantian approach to sustainable development:

• 1. Kantian ethics is always difficult to apply where a decision involves conflicts between
two competing goods. That is, because environmental controversies often involve
conflicts between goals that are not objectionable in themselves, such as the use of
property for food and shelter versus habitat protection, the categorical imperative is not
useful in giving advice about such conflicts. That is, the categorical imperative instructs
individuals to act according to rules that can be universalized but gives no advice on how
these rules are to be formed.
• 2. According to Kantian ethics, only humans or other rational beings are intrinsically
valuable. This is particularly problematic for environmental controversies because the
Kantian ethical system does not contain any basis for giving value to any being that is not
rational and therefore provides no basis for asserting intrinsic value for plants and
animals. Although some Kantians have attempted to extend rights to nonhumans, most
philosophers see rational human beings as the only compelling locus of Kantian morality.
3. THEORIES OF JUSTICE
• Theories of justice are particularly important to environmental and
sustainable development policy because the other two common
theories, both utilitarian and deontological theories, give no obvious
guidance on how goods or bads should be distributed throughout
society.
• Because much environmental and sustainable development policy is
grounded on utilitarian justifications, a common criticism of many
environmental and sustainable decisions is the failure to satisfy
concepts of distributive justice.
• Four types of justice claims are encountered in public policy debates.
• distributive justice prescribe ways of distributing the benefits and
burdens of society.
• Exchange justice deals with fair exchange of remuneration for
products or services.
• social justice deal with the duty to be fair to all members of society.
• restitutive justice requires that when one harms a moral subject, the
person causing the harm must make restitution.
distributive justice
• understanding issues of distributive justice is particularly important in SD.
• because environmental policy decision-making usually fails to consider
distributional effects of proposed actions.
• For instance, a common justification for environmental policy is some
form of cost-benefit analysis, which rarely identifies which subgroups in
society will obtain the benefits or who will suffer the burdens of the
decision under consideration.
• That is, cost-benefit-based decisions consider aggregate costs versus
benefits, not the fairness of how benefits and burdens will be distributed
• Principles of distributive justice assert that benefits and burdens
should be distributed according to concepts of equality or merit or
some combination of these two.
• Principles of distributive justice attempt to resolve tensions between
treating people equally and making distributions on the basis of merit
or deservedness.