Environmental Ethics
SOC 120: Introduction to Ethics and Social Responsibilities
Environmental Ethics
“Ethics is the study of the choices people make regarding right and wrong” (Ruggiero, 2008). As for environmental ethics, it is more of a study about moral relationships of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its nonhuman contents. As human beings sharing our lives with nature, we have to make many ethical decisions with respect to the environment. We have been so focused on finding ways and ideas to make our lives easier, and sometimes we have forgotten to take in the consideration of the wrong we might be doing to our environment. In the past, future and even present, there have been many controversial issues on environmental ethics. These issues will be explained in more detail later in this essay. I have a strong belief for environmental ethics, as noted by Yamamoto (2001), “In Buddhism, human life and other forms of life are regarded as being of the same matter. Therefore, since they are always related to living things, Buddhism regards environmental problems as essentially an issue of ethics”.
There are many environmental issues that have been an ethical issue in the past, present and probably the future. One main issue would have to be deforestation. Throughout history and even today, we have depended on trees as a resource to our everyday life. We build homes, paper, and many other products from trees. If the forest provided us with low cost homes and so many good resources, why is it an ethical issue or problem? It is a problem because deforestation destroys not only forests but also reduces the biodiversity, which means a reduction in the amount, as well as variation of, living things which can cause havoc on whole ecosystems. The cutting down of tropical rain forests is particularly detrimental to wildlife and other living things (Yamamoto, 2001).
We have been so concern in finding...