November 30, 2008
Ethics is as old as philosophy, but on the contrary environmental ethics is rather new. Thus moral philosophy has a great deal to offer to the critical study of mankind's responsibility to nature; namely, concepts, theories, principles, and, most of all, methods of analysis. Why is this so? Because ethics is, in large part, the critical study of personal and collective responsibility toward vulnerable things -- most acutely, toward persons, social institutions and human communities. Until recently, nature was believed to be too large and too permanent to be vulnerable. Now, at last, the science of ecology has shown us that this is not so. We now know that nature itself is imperiled by deliberate human action, and, reciprocally, that human beings are affected by the way they deal with nature. So now we see that our dealings with nature are matters of moral responsibility. Hence environmental ethics. In my research I will try and illustrate the history, current events and the future of environmental ethics. I will use one primary example of bad ethics in relevance to the environment. And throughout this paper I will illustrate my position on environmental ethics and explain the imperativeness of this study.
Lets first look at the history of environmental ethics. The inspiration for environmental ethics was the first Earth Day in 1970 when environmentalists started urging philosophers who were involved with environmental groups to do something about environmental ethics. An intellectual climate had developed in the last few years of the 1960s in large part because of the publication of two papers in Science: Lynn White's "The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis" (March 1967) and Garett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" (December 1968). Most influential with regard to this kind of thinking, however, was an essay in Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, "The Land Ethic," in which Leopold explicitly claimed that the roots of the...