Green Ethics and Philosophy: An A-to-Z Guide

Adaptation: An evolutionary process by which organisms become better suited to their habitat over many generations, through gradual change. The process by which heritable traits that benefit the organism become more common throughout the population over many generations is called adaptive selection or natural selection.

Agriculture: The production of goods, including food, through the cultivation of crops and the herding of livestock, often also encompassing the breeding and hybridization of plants and the selective breeding of animals; one of the fundamental human enterprises. The combination of agriculture and cooking (which maximized the nutrients available to humans) enabled the creation of the earliest human civilizations, as food surpluses made possible the dense populations and non-nomadic lifestyles of ancient cities.

Alternative fuels: Various possible substitutes for the fossil-fuel-based gasoline and diesel used to power most motor vehicles; includes biofuels (see below), alcohol-based fuels, and mixtures of fossil fuels with other fuels.

Anthropocentric: Literally, “human centered.” Anthropocentrism is the belief, taken for granted in most cultures through most of human history and argued more explicitly by some schools of philosophy today, that humans are the figurative “center of the universe” and that ethical systems should thus be principally concerned with human benefit.

Anthropogenic: Man-made; used especially to underscore the human origins of a substance or phenomenon, as in “anthropogenic climate change” or “anthropogenic toxic compounds.”

Biodiversity: The total variety of life on Earth. Modern science considers biodiversity to be an inherently good thing for the ecosystem and the loss of species and of species diversity to be an alarming consequence of environmental damage. From an evolutionary standpoint, genetic diversity— the diversity of genes within a species—is also especially important.

Bioethics: The philosophical study of ethical issues arising in the medical field and the biological sciences. Bioethics, concerned with issues that arise as a result of scientific advances, is sometimes contrasted with medical ethics, the questions of which may be centuries old or older. Other usages may emphasize medical ethics as applied ethics for a particular profession, while bioethics can encompass more abstract questions. The distinction is more a matter of the speaker's preference than a formal one. Both studies include the political and legal dimensions of their issues.

Biofuel: Fuel derived from biological material (biomass), including alcohol, hydrogen gas, excreta, and plant materials (which are usually processed into some sort of burnable fuel).

By-Product: Any material other than the product that is generated as a consequence of a process or as a breakdown product.

Carbon offsets: Financial instruments, expressed in metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, which represent the reduction of carbon dioxide or an equivalent greenhouse gas. Carbon offsets allow corporations and other entities to comply with caps on their emissions by purchasing offsets to bring their totals down to acceptable levels. The smaller voluntary market for carbon offsets exists for individuals and companies that purchase offsets in order to mitigate their emissions by choice. There is a great deal of controversy over the efficacy and truthfulness of the offsets market, which is new enough that, in a best-case scenario, the kinks have not yet been worked out, while in the worst, it will turn out to be a dead end in the history of environmental reform.

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs): A family of inert nontoxic chemicals used in a variety of applications including refrigeration and air conditioning, solvents, and aerosol propellants. Because CFCs are not destroyed in the lower atmosphere, they drift into the upper atmosphere, where their chlorine components destroy ozone. Also see fluorocarbons, of which CFCs are a subtype.

Climate change: Increasingly, a term preferred over “global warming,” which refers to only one phenomenon. Climate change refers to all changes in the properties of the climate system over a long period of time (an unseasonably warm summer or an El Niño period do not constitute climate change) and may be used in reference to a smaller area than the whole Earth.

Consequentialism: An ethical framework in which the consequences of an action determine its moral value: things are right or wrong according to the effects they have. Utilitarianism is the best-known articulation of consequentialism, but altruism is essentially a consequentialist position, and not all consequentialisms need to follow utilitarianism's goal of maximized pleasure and minimized pain. Naturally, consequentialism's greatest weakness is that it is not always easy, or possible, to predict the consequences of an action—but note that this weakness cannot invalidate consequentialism's moral stance; it simply implies a morally difficult universe.

Conservation: The protection and management of a thing; in green contexts, refers usually to the conservation movement, which predates the environmentalist movement and is concerned chiefly with the sustainable use of natural resources by humans rather than the protection of the ecosystem for its own sake.

Cornucopian: The position that environmental crises—including climate change, finite nonrenewable resources, water/air/soil pollution, and problems caused by population growth or finite carrying capacity—either do not exist or will be solved by the combination of technological advances and free market forces.

Cost-Benefit analysis: A process that weighs the expected costs of an action against the expected benefits in order to determine the best possible action.

Deep Ecology: The belief, first formulated by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, that human identity should be conceived of within a larger framework called the ecological self; deep ecology was conceived as an ecological ideology that would emphasize the common ground among people of different cultural and spiritual backgrounds and has led to a social movement of the same name.

Distributive justice: An allocation of goods and resources within a society that is socially just; distributive justice is often, but not always, an explicit goal of consequentialist approaches and is a concept under much consideration (if not always named) in any discussion of globalization.

Ecocentrism: Any nature-centered belief system; contrast with anthropocentrism. Ecocentrism emphasizes the agency of the human species in the damage to its environment and holds sustainability and the health of the ecosystem as goods unto themselves.

Ecofeminism: A sociopolitical philosophy that argues that ecological destruction and global inequality are the inevitable outcomes of the unequal power distribution between the global north and global south (see north–south), between humans and nature, and between men and women.

Egalitarianism: The belief that all people should be treated as equals, or that all economic inequalities should be remedied. Egalitarianism can be articulated in many different ways, as the other political beliefs of the speaker impact his views on the cause and nature of these inequalities.

Emission: The discharge into the atmosphere from exhausts, vents, smokestacks, chimneys, surface areas, and so forth, typically used when such discharge constitutes pollution.

Environmental justice: The equitable distribution of the impact of environmental activity among the populations of the Earth. Proponents of environmental justice point to the frequency with which the owners of wealthy corporations guilty of environmental damage live far from the places where that damage occurs, or can afford the remedies to that damage, thus insulating themselves from the consequences of their actions.

Ethics: The study of moral questions. Ethics can refer to specific types of ethics (such as applied ethics or medical ethics) or to specific systems of ethics (such as Catholic ethics or Marxist ethics). Though the religions of the world always include an ethical dimension to their belief systems, ethics and religion are not coequal, and the term secular ethics is sometimes used to describe systems of ethics that derive their conclusions from logic or moral intuition rather than from religious teachings or revealed truths. Secular ethics and religious ethics can and often do reach the same conclusions and may do so by the same means; there are both secular and religious articulations of utilitarianism, for instance. Major types of ethics include descriptive ethics (which describes the values people live by in practice), moral psychology (the study of how moral thinking develops in the human species), and applied ethics (which addresses the ethical concerns of specific real-life situations and putting ethics into practice).

Etiquette: The rules of proper social behavior, either received (as “unwritten rules”) or prescribed by popular authorities such as Miss Manners and other guides to polite behavior. While ethics govern moral behavior, etiquette is simply the avoidance of appearing rude, crude, or offensive; while this may seem trivial in comparison to weighty moral issues, matters of etiquette govern a great deal of day-to-day behavior and often have greater implications. For instance, American etiquette encourages the shaking of hands and other casual physical contact between acquaintances but is uncomfortable with the idea of wearing face-masks (which conceal the expression); the combination of these points of etiquette has a significant impact on the spread of contagion in the United States.

Fallibilism: The doctrine that all claims of knowledge could be wrong (that is, fallible), that things we believe we know could be proved wrong by later evidence, and in its most robust articulations, that even truths are impossible to prove with absolute certainty.

Fluorocarbons (FCs): Organic compounds analogous to hydrocarbons in which one or more hydrogen atoms are replaced by fluorine. Primarily used in coolants and industrial processes.

Footprint: A figurative term for the impact of an activity or entity: The ecological footprint of a thing is its total environmental impact, while the carbon footprint is the total carbon emissions released by its activity.

Free market fundamentalism: The belief that free market forces are the best remedy to economic and social problems. Though the “fundamentalism” of the term is usually figurative, in the wake of the global financial crisis of the early 21st century, religious free market fundamentalists who combine strict laissez-faire economics with strict literalist interpretations of Christian scripture have become more prominent, interpreting Adam Smith's invisible hand (a metaphor for the market's self-regulation) rather more literally.

Gaia hypothesis: A view of the Earth in its entirety as a single living superorganism.

Moral absolutism: In contrast with consequentialism or robust expressions of moral relativism (which see), holds that an action can be inherently good or bad and that neither context nor consequence affects this.

Moral nihilism: The view that nothing is either moral or immoral. Though some schools of thought are legitimately nihilist, it is very often used as an exaggerated criticism: for instance, moral absolutists may accuse of nihilism a philosopher who says that an action is not inherently right or wrong but must be considered in terms of its consequences and context.

Moral relativism: The acknowledgment that different cultures have different moral standards. There are various levels of moral relativism, from the weak descriptivist articulation that simply acknowledges and describes those differences to the normative position that says that there is no universal moral standard, only culturally derived morals. Moderate positions often propose that there are certain key moral standards that form a universal ethical core such as taboos on murder, incest, or parental neglect. The question of which moral standards are universal becomes important when cultures deal with one another and when international bodies mediate between them. Most differences are not about matters as obvious or seemingly clear-cut as murder but may instead bear on matters of justice or on the distribution of responsibility: the questions of who has the responsibility to do something about climate change or of the ethical importance of avoiding polluting behaviors vary widely around the world. The opposite of relativism is universalism.

Moral skepticism: A framework of belief that claims that no one has moral knowledge—that no one confidently knows right from wrong, in some ways the most robust case of normative moral relativism. The strongest articulations of moral skepticism say that not only does no one possess moral knowledge but such knowledge is impossible.

Moral syncretism: The attempt to reconcile differing moral beliefs. Though moral syncretism descends in some sense from the efforts of early Christian missionaries to emphasize the similarities among the cultures they encountered and to find the ways that Christianity would suit those cultures, it is predicated on the certainty that religion cannot be the sole arbiter of moral truths.

Normative: Describes how a thing ought to be. A normative statement describes what should be done, regardless of what is done. Normative ethics are concerned with how people ought to behave and what actions they ought to take. “Alcohol intake impairs judgment” is a descriptive statement; “drunk driving is wrong” is a normative statement.

North–south: A model of the world that contrasts the industrialized, developed, wealthy countries of the global north with the developing, poorer countries of the global south. Geography here is partially figurative, with Australia and New Zealand included in the global north, and a number of African, Middle Eastern, and Asian nations in the Northern Hemisphere included in the global south. The term became popular in the wake of the Cold War, when a new way of distinguishing between the developed (First and Second Worlds) and developing (Third World) was desired. However, while there are many political and cultural ties between the nations of the global north, the global south—much like the Third World—is varied enough to invite criticism of the model's accuracy and usefulness.

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs): A group of toxic chemicals used in electrical transformers and capacitors as insulators and in gas pipeline systems as lubricants. Because of their toxicity, the sale and new use of PCBs is banned by law in the United States and many other countries.

Sick building syndrome: Various ailments associated with a workplace or residence, usually due to poor air quality as a result of allergenic or toxic molds, flaws in HVAC systems, insufficient fresh air (and too much recirculation of the same air throughout the building), and chemicals used in workplace activities and their resulting emissions.

Spandrel: In biology, an observable characteristic that is a by-product of the evolution of a different characteristic, not a product of adaptive selection. The term was coined by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin in their landmark paper “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” which faulted adaptationists in evolutionary biology for attributing seemingly every feature of any organism to adaptive selection, when many such features must have resulted indirectly. In recent years, both religion and the faculty for language have been suggested as possible spandrels in the human species: characteristics of the organism that resulted as a by-product of some other needed characteristic's development.

Strip mining: A machine process that scrapes soil and rock away from mineral deposits just beneath the surface of the Earth, most commonly used to mine tar sand or coal. Similar surface mining methods include open-pit mining, dredging, and mountaintop removal. All such methods are criticized for their impact on the environment, on water resources, on the health of mine workers, and on aesthetics.

Sustainability: The capacity to continue; for instance, the capacity for a process to continue without using up the resources it consumes or for a species or an ecosystem to endure.

Utilitarianism: A form of consequentialism (which see) according to which the moral value of an action is determined by the total pleasure (or happiness) that results from it. The term utilitarian, meaning a pragmatic approach focused on “the bottom line,” does not necessarily connote a stance of utilitarianism, which is defined by its very specific goal of “greatest happiness” and its denial of moral absolutism.

Waste: Unwanted materials left over from a process; see also by-products.