Environmental Ethics

Environmental ethics represents an emerging area of philosophical inquiry concerning the morality governing human responsibility, valuation, and behavior toward the nonhuman biophysical environment. Traditionally, philosophical approaches to ethics have involved questions of personal, interpersonal, or societal behavior. The search for the moral life inspires questions such as “What is our moral responsibility toward each other?” and “How do we decide which behaviors are right and which are wrong?” This central concern of ethics is to establish an appropriate moral code for living and interacting with others around you. Social ethics are self-reflective; they help determine the guidelines by which we orient our behavior toward others. They inspire, limit, and regulate interpersonal or societal interactions. Environmental ethics is the extension of social ethics beyond the realm of interpersonal human interaction. As such, environmental ethics generate or reflect ideals that limit and inspire human behavior regarding the physical environment and ecological systems.

In the United States, the practice and systematic inquiry now termed environmental ethics began to emerge during the growing environmental awareness of the 1960s and 1970s. Seminal writings by Rachel Carson, Garrett Hardin, and Lynn White resonated with the widespread public realization that large-scale, rapid, and perhaps irreversible changes to physical environments and ecological systems were causally linked to people. Human behavior, values, and attitudes became the problem—they were the causes of the environmental crisis. One outgrowth of this “Green Revolution” was a new form of environmental activism that led to the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, and a body of federal legislation highlighted by the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), Clean Air Act (1970), Clean Water Act (1972), and Endangered Species Act (1973). Another outcome was a loss of faith in the dictum of modernistic progress and a desire to challenge the set of moral rules condoning patterns of human behavior contributing to environmental and ecological crises. To do so would require diagnosing why traditional ethics allow and even justify widespread degradation and despoliation and systematically eliminating these elements from a pro-environmental conception of ethics.

In response, writers and philosophers began turning their attention to reconstructing normative modes of morality and behavior that would not only counter but also reverse human-induced degradation of environmental and ecological systems. The goal for many of these ethicists was to establish a moral code that could impose limitations on human freedom of action with respect to the Earth. But far from viewing environmental ethics as a purely philosophical enterprise, practitioners always looked to apply these ideals to help solve environmental crises. J. Baird Callicott and others explicitly linked the products of their ethical theories to the goal of influencing human behavior at the structural scale as well as the personal scale. The immediacy of environmental problems led many activists to employ these ethical formulations in justifying emerging environmental laws and regulations, giving their ideas tacit institutional authority.

Modernism, scientific progress, and human exceptionalism came to be understood by environmental ethicists as separating humans from nature. This philosophical dualism, grounded in Western traditions dating back to Aristotle and [Page 926]reasserted by René Descartes, lies at the root of environmentally destructive behavior because natural environmental systems are largely defined in opposition to people and society. As a counterweight to Cartesian dualism, much of the work within environmental ethics seeks to emphasize a more holistic, ecological approach.

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