Environmental Ethics (original) (raw)

Environmental Ethics : Issues and Solutions

Environment ethics is a critical study of the normative issues and principles relevant to the relationship between human and natural world. In this article I tried to find that on what ethical basis should we decide how to deal with nature . The main concern is that to which inherent value can be ascribed to things that are not human, including animals, vegetation, and even land .The integrated efforts are to be put so as to examine the interrelated components of environment system . Environmental ethics has much to contribute to the solution of global environmental problems and raise awareness about environmental problems . Human have a duty to act as benign stewards of the earth.

Environmental Ethics: An Overview

Environmental Ethics

This essay provides an overview of the field of environmental ethics. I sketch the major debates in the field from its inception in the 1970s to today, explaining both the central tenets of the schools of thought within the field and the arguments that have been given for and against them. I describe the main trends within the field as a whole and review some of the criticisms that have been offered of prevailing views.

Environmental Ethics: The State of the Question

The Southern Journal of Philosophy

Environmental ethics, as an academic field, was born out of professional philosophers' frustrations with anthropocentrism. In particular, philosophers such as Richard Sylvan and Holmes Rolston III found that canonical Western philosophy overlooked important questions regarding human relations to nonhuman animals and the broader world. Because many other traditions attend more closely to these relations, it is helpful to contextualize the initial development of academic environmental ethics as a critical response to a particular kind of deficiency characteristic of the Western tradition. In recent decades, the field has grown and broadened, and a more pluralistic, interdisciplinary, intercultural, and intersectional environmental ethics is emerging. This article traces developments in the field of environmental ethics during the last fifty years, beginning with discussions of the value of nature, deep ecology, the land ethic, environmental virtue ethics, and environmental pragmatism. Next, I turn to approaches that integrate social and environmental concerns through lenses that consider power dynamics and challenge relations of domination and oppression, bringing into focus questions of environmental and ecological justice. The final section considers some of the distinctive challenges associated with what some have dubbed "the Anthropocene," noting that the nature and designation of this epoch remain contested.

Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Environmental Ethics of their Manifestation in Society

The article analyzes the features, values, the need for environmental ethics and the moral content of natural rights in the global environment of the modern era. Environmental ethics reflects the essence and concepts of environmental and moral perception, describes the features of the era of environmental ethics and globalization. The norms and practical significance of the main criteria of environmental ethics are widely covered. The emphasis is on the theoretical and practical aspects of biodiversity and seeks to combine these aspects with concepts of responsibility. Today it is important to pay attention to ethical issues in solving environmental problems. It is important to explain the common interests and requirements of social responsibility as an object of study of environmental ethics.

Western Environmental Ethics: An Overview

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 2005

kathie jenni WESTERN ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: AN OVERVIEW Although Western philosophers have considered humans' relationship to nature since ancient times, environmental ethics as a systematic discipline has emerged only in recent decades. In the early stages of the environmental movement, problems such as pollution, species extinctions, and the destruction of wilderness arose as concerns for anthropocentric, or human-centered, ethics. Philosophical discussions applied traditional ethical principles and theories to these problems, and "applied ethics" expanded to include those analyses. At the same time, some thinkers extended anthropocentric ethics by addressing our potential obligations to future generations of human beingshumans who do not yet exist. Problems such as resource conservation and toxic waste disposal were examined in light of responsibilities to future humans. Environmental ethics took a new turn when philosophers began to argue for nonanthropocentric ethics, which grants direct moral importance to natural objects besides humans. Animal rights philosophers took the lead in arguing for the moral standing of nonhuman animals, but they were soon followed by others who argued that we should extend moral standing to all living things, or even to all natural objects. These philosophers proposed extensions in the scope of application of Western moral principles and concepts. A more radical development came when the moral focus on individuals was challenged by thinkers who argued for holistic ethics: the expansion of moral responsibilities to collections, communities, or wholes. In these theories, entities such as species and ecosystems were accorded moral standing in place of, or in addition to, the individuals that constituted those wholes. Holistic theories challenged not only traditional conceptions of ethics, but also assumptions in metaphysics, epistemology, and political philosophy. Recently, environmental ethics has taken other new forms, from ecofeminism and the study of environmental racism, which connect KATHIE JENNI, professor, Department of Philosophy,

Environmental Ethics: Need to Rethink

International Journal on Environmental Sciences, 2017

Moral principles define the responsibility of a particular person towards the environment. These principles, the environmental ethics establish the ethical relationship between human beings and the natural environment. The resources on earth are limited and belong to all the species that exist in nature. Though humans have right to draw their requirements from the environment but certainly not to the extent that degrades the environment and harms other species and living beings. Humans have apparently more responsibility to minimize their anthropogenic activities and to save the earth. The existing environmental ethics seem imperfect and insufficient to meet the current situation hence humans have to rethink about effective environmental ethics.

Environmental ethics: Values in and duties to the natural world

The Broken Circle: Ecology, Economics, and Ethics, 1991

Environmental ethics stretches classical ethics to the breaking point. All ethics seeks an appropriate respect for life. But we do not need just a humanistic ethic applied to the environment as we have needed one for business, law, medicine, technology, international development, or nuclear disarmament. Respect for life does demand an ethic concerned about human welfare, an ethic like the others and now applied to the environment. But environmental ethics in a deeper sense stands on a frontier, as radically theoretical as it is applied. It alone asks whether there can be nonhuman objects of duty. Neither theory nor practice elsewhere needs values outside of human subjects, but environmental ethics must be more biologically objective-nonanthropocentric. It challenges the separation of science and ethics, trying to reform a science that finds nature value-free and an ethics that assumes that only humans count morally. Environmental ethics seeks to escape relativism in ethics, to discover a way past culturally based ethics. However much our worldviews, ethics included, are embedded in our cultural heritages, and thereby theory-laden and valueladen, all of us know that a natural world exists apart from human cultures. Humans interact with nature. Environmental ethics is the only ethics that breaks out of culture. It

Environmental Ethics: A Very Short Introduction, written by Robin Attfield

Utafiti, 2019

Environmental ethics as a subfield of Anglophone philosophy was effectively inaugurated nearly half a century ago with Richard Routley's 'last man' thought experiment. In 'Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?' (Proceedings of the XVth World Congress of Philosophy, Bulgaria: Sofia Press, 1973), Routley (later Sylvan) argues that we must broaden our ethical thinking beyond 'human chauvinism' to include animals and the natural environment: The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system lays about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to basic chauvinism, but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong.