Environmental ethics considers extending traditional ethics from solely including humans to also include the non-human world. It influences many disciplines and considers questions about how humans make decisions that impact the environment, such as clearing forests, propagating the human species, using gasoline vehicles, and obligations to future generations. Environmental ethics refers to the moral relationship between humans and nature, balancing environmental awareness with meeting human needs. While some value in nature is instrumental for humans, environmental ethics considers whether nature has intrinsic value beyond human use.
Environmental ethics considers extending traditional ethics from solely including humans to also include the non-human world. It influences many disciplines and considers questions about how humans make decisions that impact the environment, such as clearing forests, propagating the human species, using gasoline vehicles, and obligations to future generations. Environmental ethics refers to the moral relationship between humans and nature, balancing environmental awareness with meeting human needs. While some value in nature is instrumental for humans, environmental ethics considers whether nature has intrinsic value beyond human use.
Environmental ethics considers extending traditional ethics from solely including humans to also include the non-human world. It influences many disciplines and considers questions about how humans make decisions that impact the environment, such as clearing forests, propagating the human species, using gasoline vehicles, and obligations to future generations. Environmental ethics refers to the moral relationship between humans and nature, balancing environmental awareness with meeting human needs. While some value in nature is instrumental for humans, environmental ethics considers whether nature has intrinsic value beyond human use.
Environmental ethics considers extending traditional ethics from solely including humans to also include the non-human world. It influences many disciplines and considers questions about how humans make decisions that impact the environment, such as clearing forests, propagating the human species, using gasoline vehicles, and obligations to future generations. Environmental ethics refers to the moral relationship between humans and nature, balancing environmental awareness with meeting human needs. While some value in nature is instrumental for humans, environmental ethics considers whether nature has intrinsic value beyond human use.
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INTRODUCTION:
Environmental ethics is the part of environmental philosophy which
considers extending the traditional boundaries of ethics from solely including humans to including the non-human world. It exerts influence on a large range of disciplines including environmental law, environmental sociology, ecotheology, ecological economics, ecology and environmental geography. There are many ethical decisions that human beings make with respect to the environment. For example:
Should we continue to clear cut forests for the sake of human
consumption?
Why should we continue to propagate our species, and life itself?
Should we continue to make gasoline powered vehicles?
What environmental obligations do we need to keep for future
generations?
Is it right for humans to knowingly cause the extinction of a species
for the convenience of humanity?
How should we best use and conserve the space environment to
secure and expand life?
DEFINITION OF ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS.
Environmental ethics refers to the moral relations between human beings and their natural environment. . More specifically, it refers to the value that mankind places on protecting, conserving, and efficiently using resources that the earth provides. It is a standard that we use to view issues pertaining to the environment. Some people may have varying degrees of consciousness in this area, but everyone has an environmental ethic that they hold to. The key is to balance an awareness and motivation for environmental issues while not neglecting the needs of people.
The Challenge of Environmental Ethics
In the literature on environmental ethics the distinction between instrumental value and intrinsic value (meaning noninstrumental value) has been of considerable importance. The former is the value of things as means to further some other ends, whereas the latter is the value of things as ends in themselves regardless of whether they are also useful as means to other ends. For instance, certain fruits have instrumental value for bats who feed on them, since feeding on the fruits is a means to survival for the bats. However, it is not widely agreed that fruits have value as ends in themselves. We can likewise think of a person who teaches others as having instrumental value for those who want to acquire knowledge. Yet, in addition to any such value, it is normally said that a person, as a person, has intrinsic value, i.e., value in his or her own right independently of his or her prospects for serving the ends of others. For another example, a certain wild plant may have instrumental value because it provides the ingredients for some medicine or as an aesthetic object for human observers. But if the plant also has some value in itself independently of its prospects for furthering some other ends such as human health, or the pleasure from aesthetic experience, then the plant also has intrinsic value. Because the intrinsically valuable is that which is good as an end in itself, it is commonly agreed that something's possession of intrinsic value generates a prima facie direct moral duty on the part of moral agents to protect it or at least refrain from damaging it (see O'Neil 1992 and Jameson 2002 for detailed accounts of intrinsic value). Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, are anthropocentric or human-centered in that either they assign intrinsic value to human beings alone (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a strong sense) or they assign a significantly greater amount of intrinsic value to human beings than to any nonhuman things such that the protection or promotion of human interests or well-being at the expense of nonhuman things turns out to be nearly always justified (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a weak sense).
Furthermore, some prudential anthropocentrists may hold what might be
called cynical anthropocentrism, which says that we have a higher-level anthropocentric reason to be non-anthropocentric in our day-to-day thinking. Suppose that a day-to-day non-anthropocentrist tends to act more benignly towards the nonhuman environment on which human well-being depends.
3. Environmental Ethics and Politics
3.1 Deep Ecology Deep ecology was born in Scandinavia, the result of discussions between Nss and his colleagues Sigmund Kvaly and Nils Faarlund (see Nss 1973 and 1989; also see Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999 for a historical survey and commentary on the development of deep ecology). All three shared a passion for the great mountains. On a visit to the Himalayas, they became impressed with aspects of Sherpa culture particularly when they found that their Sherpa guides regarded certain mountains as sacred and accordingly would not venture onto them. Subsequently, Nss formulated a position which extended the reverence the three Norwegians and the Sherpas felt for mountains to other natural things in general. The shallow ecology movement, as Nss (1973) calls it, is the fight against pollution and resource depletion, the central objective of which is the health and affluence of people in the developed countries. The deep ecology movement, in contrast, endorses biospheric egalitarianism, the view that all living things are alike in having value in their own right, independent of their usefulness to others. The deep ecologist respects this intrinsic value, taking care, for example, when walking on the mountainside not to cause unnecessary damage to the plants. The identity of a living thing is essentially constituted by its relations to other things in the world, especially its ecological relations to other living things. If people conceptualise themselves and the world in relational terms, the deep ecologists argue, then people will take better care of nature and the world in general.
3.2 Feminism and the Environment
Broadly speaking, a feminist issue is any that contributes in some way to understanding the oppression of women. Feminist theories attempt to analyze women's oppression, its causes and consequences, and suggest strategies and directions for women's liberation. By the mid 1970s, feminist writers had raised the issue of whether patriarchal modes of thinking encouraged not only widespread inferiorizing and colonizing of women, but also of people of colour, animals and nature. Sheila Collins (1974), for instance, argued that male-dominated culture or patriarchy is supported by four interlocking pillars: sexism, racism, class exploitation, and ecological destruction. Not all feminist theorists would call that common underlying oppressive structure androcentric or patriarchal. But it is generally agreed that core features of the structure include dualism, hierarchical thinking, and the logic of domination, which are typical of, if not essential to, malechauvinism. These patterns of thinking and conceptualizing the world, many feminist theorists argue, also nourish and sustain other forms of chauvinism, including, human-chauvinism (i.e., anthropocentrism), which is responsible for much human exploitation of, and destructiveness towards, nature. The dualistic way of thinking, for instance, sees the world in polar opposite terms, such as male/female, masculinity/femininity, reason/emotion, freedom/necessity, active/passive, mind/body, pure/soiled, white/coloured, civilized/primitive, transcendent/immanent, human/animal, culture/nature. Furthermore, under dualism all the first items in these contrasting pairs are assimilated with each other, and all the second items are likewise linked with each other. Feminism represents a radical challenge for environmental thinking, politics, and traditional social ethical perspectives. It promises to link environmental questions with wider social problems concerning various kinds of discrimination and exploitation, and fundamental investigations of human psychology. However, whether there are conceptual, causal or merely contingent connections among the different forms of oppression and liberation remains a contested issue. The term ecofeminism or ecological feminism was for a time generally applied to any view that combines environmental advocacy with feminist analysis. However, because of the varieties of, and disagreements among, feminist theories, the label may be too wide to be informative and has generally fallen from use.
3.3 Social Ecology and Bioregionalism
Apart from feminist-environmentalist theories and Nss's deep ecology, Murray Bookchin's social ecology has also claimed to be radical, subversive, or countercultural (see Bookchin 1980, 1987, 1990). Bookchin's version of critical theory takes the outer physical world as constituting what he calls first nature, from which culture or second nature has evolved. Environmentalism, on his view, is a social movement, and the problems it confronts are social problems. While Bookchin is prepared, like Horkheimer and Adorno, to regard (first) nature as an aesthetic and sensuous marvel, he regards our intervention in it as necessary. He suggests that we can choose to put ourselves at the service of natural evolution, to help maintain complexity and diversity, diminish suffering and reduce pollution. Bookchin's social ecology recommends that we use our gifts of sociability, communication and intelligence as if we were nature rendered conscious, instead of turning them against the very source and origin from which such gifts derive. Exploitation of nature should be replaced by a richer form of life devoted to nature's preservation. Deep ecology, feminism, and social ecology have had a considerable impact on the development of political positions in regard to the environment. Feminist analyses have often been welcomed for the psychological insight they bring to several social, moral and political problems. There is, however, considerable unease about the implications of critical theory, social ecology and some varieties of deep ecology and animism. Some recent writers have argued, for example, that critical theory is bound to be ethically anthropocentric, with nature as no more than a social construction whose value ultimately depends on human determinations (see Vogel 1996). Others have argued that the demands of deep green theorists and activists cannot be accommodated within contemporary theories of liberal politics and social justice (see Ferry 1998). A further suggestion is that there is a need to reassess traditional theories such as virtue ethics, which has its origins in ancient Greek philosophy (see the following section) within the context of a form of stewardship similar to that earlier endorsed by Passmore (see Barry 1999). If this last claim is correct, then the radical activist need not, after all, look for philosophical support in radical, or countercultural, theories of the sort deep ecology, feminism, bioregionalism and social ecology claim to be.
4. Traditional Ethical Theories and Contemporary
Environment Ethics Although environmental ethicists often try to distance themselves from the anthropocentrism embedded in traditional ethical views, they also quite often draw their theoretical resources from traditional ethical systems and theories. Consider the following two basic moral questions: (1) what kinds of thing are intrinsically valuable, good or bad? (2) What makes an action right or wrong?
For instance, utilitarianism, a paradigm case of consequentialism,
regards pleasure (or, more broadly construed, the satisfaction of interest, desire, and/or preference) as the only intrinsic value in the world, whereas pain (or the frustration of desire, interest, and/or preference) the only intrinsic disvalue, and maintains that right actions are those that would produce the greatest balance of pleasure over pain . As the utilitarian focus is the balance of pleasure and pain as such, the question of to whom a pleasure or pain belongs is irrelevant to the calculation and assessment of the rightness or wrongness of actions . Note that the ethics of animal liberation or animal rights and biocentrism are both individualistic in that their various moral concerns are directed towards individuals only -- not ecological wholes such as species, populations, biotic communities, and ecosystems. None of these is sentient, a subject-of-a-life, or a teleological-center-of-life, but the preservation of these collective entities is a major concern for many environmentalists. Moreover, the goals of animal liberationists, such as the reduction of animal suffering and death, may conflict with the goals of environmentalists. For example, the preservation of the integrity of an ecosystem may require the culling of feral animals or of some
indigenous populations that threaten to destroy fragile habitats. So there
are disputes about whether the ethics of animal liberation is a proper branch of environmental ethics
5. AWARENESS AND CONCLUSION
There has always been a casual approach toward the environmental issues and since it is about environmental ethics its a primitive subject and earlier environmental studies was called as the environmental ethics subject. There are various measures and awareness that needs to come up as there is very less awareness about environmental ethics which include environmental as well as social issues. The issues discussed are the most popular and more often need to be put light on them. Environmental ethics is the part of the subject where one gets the knowledge of what mistake should not be made and what measures should be taken.