Environmental racism is a concept that has been around for a few decades. It involves race, economics, health, and a lot more. Find out what it is as well as some ethical dilemmas posed by it Jun 03, · Environmental ethics is the 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. This entry covers: (1) the challenge of environmental ethics to the anthropocentrism (i.e., human-centeredness) embedded in traditional western ethical 1 day ago · Write a short essay on minerals an inspector calls theme essay environmental Short on ethics essay twitter sentiment analysis case study. Short essay on sound pollution wonder of science essay in hindi short. Write an essay about two friends. Best book for writing research papers sample personal response essay, essay themes ielts, example of
Short essay on environmental ethics
Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, environmental ethics essay, the environment and its non-human contents.
This entry covers: 1 the challenge of environmental ethics to the anthropocentrism i. Suppose putting out natural fires, environmental ethics essay, culling feral animals or destroying some individual members of overpopulated indigenous species is necessary for the protection of the integrity of a certain ecosystem.
Will these actions be morally permissible or even required? Is it morally acceptable for farmers in non-industrial countries to practise slash and burn techniques to clear areas for agriculture? Consider a mining company which has performed open environmental ethics essay mining in some previously unspoiled area.
Does the company have a moral obligation to restore the landform and surface ecology? And what is the value of a humanly restored environment compared with the originally natural environment? If that is wrong, is it simply because a sustainable environment is essential to present and future human well-being? These are among the questions investigated by environmental ethics. Some of them are specific questions faced by individuals in particular circumstances, while others are more global questions faced by groups and communities.
Yet others are more abstract questions concerning the value and moral standing of the natural environment and its non-human components. The former is the value of things as means to further some other environmental ethics essay, 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 environmental ethics essay 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. 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, environmental ethics essay.
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. Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, are anthropocentric or human-centered in that either they assign intrinsic value to human beings alone i, environmental ethics essay.
For example, Aristotle PoliticsBk, environmental ethics essay. Generally, anthropocentric positions find it problematic to articulate what is wrong with the cruel treatment of non-human animals, except to the extent that such treatment may lead to bad consequences for human beings.
From this standpoint, cruelty towards non-human animals would be instrumentally, rather than intrinsically, wrong. Likewise, anthropocentrism often recognizes some non-intrinsic wrongness of anthropogenic i.
human-caused environmental devastation. Such destruction might damage the well-being of human beings now and in the future, since our well-being is essentially dependent on a sustainable environmental ethics essay see Passmore ; Bookchin ; Norton et al. When environmental ethics emerged as a new sub-discipline of philosophy in the early s, it did so by posing a challenge to traditional anthropocentrism.
In the first place, it questioned the assumed moral superiority of human beings to members of other species on Earth. In the second place, it investigated the possibility of rational arguments for assigning intrinsic value to the natural environment and its non-human contents. It should be noted, environmental ethics essay, however, that some theorists working in the field see no need to develop new, non-anthropocentric theories.
Instead, environmental ethics essay, they advocate what may be called enlightened anthropocentrism or, perhaps more appropriately called, prudential anthropocentrism. Briefly, this is the view that all the moral duties we have environmental ethics essay the environment are derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants.
Enlightened anthropocentrism, they argue, is sufficient for that practical purpose, and perhaps even more effective in delivering pragmatic outcomes, in terms of policy-making, than non-anthropocentric theories given the theoretical burden on the latter to provide sound arguments for its more radical view that the non-human environment has intrinsic value cf.
Nortonde ShalitLight and Katz 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 environmental ethics essay environment on which human well-being depends. This would provide reason for encouraging non-anthropocentric thinking, environmental ethics essay, even to those who find the idea of non-anthropocentric intrinsic value hard to swallow.
The position can be structurally compared to some indirect form of consequentialism and may attract parallel critiques see Henry Sidgwick environmental ethics essay utilitarianism and esoteric morality, and Bernard Williams on indirect utilitarianism.
Although nature was the focus of much nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, contemporary environmental ethics only emerged as an academic discipline in the s, environmental ethics essay. The questioning and rethinking of the relationship of human beings with the natural environment over the last thirty years reflected an already widespread perception in the s that the late twentieth century faced a human population explosion as well as a serious environmental crisis.
Commercial farming practices aimed at maximizing crop yields and profits, environmental ethics essay, Carson speculates, are capable of impacting simultaneously on environmental and public health, environmental ethics essay. In a much cited essay White on the historical roots of the environmental crisis, historian Lynn White argued that the main strands of Judeo-Christian thinking had encouraged the overexploitation of nature by maintaining the superiority of humans over all other forms of life on Earth, environmental ethics essay, and by depicting all of nature as created for the use of humans.
Central to the rationale for his thesis were the works of the Church Fathers and The Bible itself, supporting the anthropocentric perspective that humans are the only things that matter on Earth. Consequently, environmental ethics essay, they may utilize and consume everything else to their advantage without environmental ethics essay injustice.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, environmental ethics essay subdue it: and have dominion over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. According to White, the Judeo-Christian idea that humans are created in the image of the transcendent supernatural God, who is radically separate from nature, also by extension radically separates humans themselves from nature.
This ideology further opened the way for untrammeled exploitation of nature. Clearly, without technology and science, the environmental extremes to which we are now exposed would probably not be realized.
Nevertheless, White argued that some minority traditions within Christianity e. Around the same time, the Stanford ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich warned in The Population Bomb Ehrlich that the growth of human population threatened the viability of planetary life-support systems. Here, plain to see, was a living, shining planet voyaging through space and shared by all of humanity, a precious vessel vulnerable to pollution and environmental ethics essay the overuse of its limited capacities.
In a team of researchers at MIT led by Dennis Meadows published the Environmental ethics essay to Growth study, a work that summed up in many ways the emerging concerns of the previous decade and the sense of vulnerability triggered by the view of the Earth from space. In the commentary to environmental ethics essay study, environmental ethics essay, the researchers wrote:.
The new field emerged almost simultaneously in three countries—the United States, Australia, and Norway. In the first two of these countries, direction and inspiration largely came from the earlier twentieth century American literature of the environment. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, environmental ethics essay, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Leopold —5. However, Leopold himself provided no systematic ethical theory or framework to support these ethical ideas concerning the environment. His views therefore presented a challenge and opportunity for moral theorists: could some ethical theory be devised to justify the injunction to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biosphere?
The land environmental ethics essay sketched by Leopold, attempting to extend our moral concern to cover the natural environment and its non-human contents, was drawn on explicitly by the Australian philosopher Richard Routley later Sylvan, environmental ethics essay. According to Routley cf.
From the human-chauvinistic or absolutely anthropocentric perspective, the last person would do nothing morally wrong, since his or her destructive act in question would not cause any damage to the interest and well-being of humans, who would by then have disappeared. Nevertheless, Routley points out that there is a moral intuition that the imagined last acts would be morally wrong, environmental ethics essay.
An explanation for this judgment, he argued, is that those non-human objects in the environment, whose destruction is ensured by the last person or last people, have intrinsic value, a kind of value independent of their usefulness for humans. From his critique, Routley concluded that the main approaches in traditional western moral thinking were unable to allow the recognition that natural things have intrinsic value, and that the tradition required overhaul of a significant kind.
The U. It would be wrong, he maintained, to eliminate a rare butterfly species simply to increase the monetary value of specimens already held by collectors. Species, Rolston went on to argue, are intrinsically valuable and are usually more valuable than individual specimens, since the loss of a species is a loss of genetic possibilities and the deliberate destruction of a species would show disrespect for the very biological processes which make possible the emergence of individual living things also see RolstonCh Meanwhile, the work of Christopher Stone a professor of law at the University of Southern California had become widely discussed.
Stone proposed that trees and other natural objects should have at least the same standing in law as corporations. This suggestion was inspired by a particular case environmental ethics essay which the Sierra Club had mounted a challenge against the permit granted by the U. Forest Service to Walt Disney Enterprises for environmental ethics essay preparatory to the development of the Mineral King Valley, which was at the time a relatively remote game refuge, but not designated as a national park or protected wilderness area.
The Disney proposal was to develop a major resort complex serving visitors daily to be accessed by a purpose-built highway through Sequoia National Park, environmental ethics essay. The Sierra Club, as a body with a general concern for wilderness conservation, challenged environmental ethics essay development on the grounds that the valley should be kept in its original state for its own sake. Stone reasoned that if trees, forests and mountains could be given standing in law then they could be represented in their own right in the courts by groups such as environmental ethics essay Sierra Club.
Moreover, like any other legal personthese natural things could become beneficiaries of compensation if it could be shown that they had suffered compensatable injury through human activity. When the case went to the U. Supreme Court, it was determined by a narrow majority that the Sierra Club did not meet the condition for bringing a case to court, for the Club was unable and unwilling to prove the likelihood of injury to the interest of the Club or its members.
Only items that have interests, Feinberg argued, can be regarded as having legal standing and, likewise, environmental ethics essay, moral standing. For it is interests which are capable of being represented in legal proceedings and moral debates.
This same point would also seem to apply to political debates. Granted that some animals have interests that can be represented in this way, would it also make sense to speak of trees, forests, rivers, environmental ethics essay, barnacles, or termites as having interests of a morally relevant kind? This issue was hotly contested in the years that followed. Skeptical of the prospects for any radically new ethic, Passmore cautioned that traditions of thought could not be abruptly overhauled.
Any change in attitudes to our natural surroundings which stood the chance of widespread acceptance, he argued, environmental ethics essay, would have to resonate and have some continuities with the very tradition which had legitimized our destructive practices.
The confluence of ethical, political and legal debates about the environment, the emergence of philosophies to underpin animal rights activism and the puzzles over whether an environmental ethic would be something new rather than a modification or extension of existing ethical theories were reflected in wider social and political movements.
It is not clear, however, that collectivist or communist countries do any better in terms of their environmental record see Dominick Since the work of Næss has environmental ethics essay significant in environmental politics, the discussion of his position is given in a separate section below, environmental ethics essay.
All three shared a passion for the great mountains. Subsequently, Næss formulated a position which extended the reverence the three Norwegians and the Sherpas felt for mountains to other natural things in general. 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 idea that a human being is such an individual possessing a separate essence, Næss argues, radically separates the human self from the rest of the world.
To make such a separation not only leads to selfishness towards other people, but also induces human selfishness towards nature. 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 environmental ethics essay. 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.
As developed by Næss and others, the position also came to focus on the possibility of the identification of the human ego with nature. The idea is, briefly, that by identifying with nature I can enlarge the boundaries of the self beyond my skin, environmental ethics essay. To respect and to care for my Self is also to respect and to care for the natural environment, which is actually part of me and with which I should identify.
Environmental Ethics: Deep Ecology
, time: 4:57Environmental Ethics | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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