Chapter 2:

Environmental Ethics
2.2 Environmental Ethics

 In the most general sense,

environmental ethics
invites us to consider three
key propositions:
 (1) The Earth and its
creatures have moral status,
in other words, are worthy
of our ethical concern.

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2.2 Environmental Ethics
 In the most general sense, environmental ethics
invites us to consider three key propositions:
 (2) The Earth and its creatures have intrinsic value, meaning
that they have moral value merely because they exist, not
only because they meet human needs.
 (3) Based on the concept of an ecosystem, human beings
should consider “wholes” that include other forms of life and
the environment.

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Environmental Ethics

 Ethics
 Right vs wrong
 Morals
 Feelings
 Cultural relativism
 Not everyone shares the same ethical commitments.

Despite the presence of some differences, there are many cases

in which ethical commitments can and should be globally
agreed upon.
Ethics and Laws
 What's ideal?
 Laws= ethical commitments
 Environmental issues
 Legislation versus individual sense
 A strong personal ethical commitment can help guide behavior
in the absence of supporting laws.
The Greening of Religion
 Environmental issues were considered to be the
concern of scientists, lawyers, and policy makers.
What is our moral responsibility toward future
generations?
 The natural world figures prominently in the world’s major
religions.
 Religious leaders recognize that religions, as enduring
shapers of culture and values, can make major
contributions to the rethinking of our current
environmental impasse.

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Three Philosophical Approaches to
Environmental Ethics

 Anthropocentrism
 Biocentrism
 Ecocentrism

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 Three Philosophical Approaches to
Environmental Ethics

 Anthropocentrism
(human-centered)
 Humans are the center of
the universe.
 Instrumental value of
things to humans?
 Three Philosophical Approaches to
Environmental Ethics

Biocentrism
(life-centered)
 All life forms have an inherent right to
exist.
 Three Philosophical Approaches to
Environmental Ethics

 Ecocentrism
 Natureas the center of
the universe
Three Philosophical Approaches to
Environmental Ethics
 “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity,
stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong
when it tends otherwise….We abuse land because we
regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see
land as a community to which we belong, we may begin
to use it with love and respect.”
—Aldo Leopold
A Sand County Almanac, 1949
The Gaia Hypothesis

The Gaia Hypothesis

The world is a living
organism.
All living things are
interconnected, interrelated
and completely dependent
on each other.

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Other Philosophical Approaches
 Other areas of philosophical thought address
environmental issues:
 Ecofeminism
 Social ecology
 Deep ecology
 Environmental pragmatism
 Environmental aesthetics
 Animal rights/welfare
2.3 Environmental Attitudes
 Because ethical commitments pull in different directions
at different times, it is often easier to talk in terms of
environmental attitudes or approaches.
 The three most common attitudes/approaches are:
 Development approach
 Preservation approach
 Conservation approach

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Development
 This approach is the most anthropocentric.
 It assumes the human race is, and should be, master of nature.
 It assumes that the Earth and its resources exist solely for our
benefit and pleasure.
 This approach is reinforced by the capitalist work ethic.
 This approach thinks highly of human creativity and holds that
continual economic growth is a moral ideal for society.

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Preservation
 This approach is the most ecocentric.
 It holds that nature has intrinsic value apart from human uses.
 Preservationists such as John Muir, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman all viewed nature as
a refuge from economic activity, not as a resource for it.
 Some preservationists wish to keep large parts of nature intact
for aesthetic or recreational reasons (anthropocentric
principles).

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Conservation
 This approach finds a balance between unrestrained
development and preservationism.
 Conservationism promotes human well-being but
considers a wider range of long-term human goods in its
decisions about environmental management.
 Many of the ideas in conservationism have been incorporated
into an approach known as sustainable development.

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 Environmental Attitudes

Development, preservation, and conservation

are different attitudes toward nature. These
attitudes reflect a person’s ethical commitments.
Sustainable Development
2.4 Environmental Justice
 In 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
defined environmental justice as fair treatment, meaning:
 “No group of people, including racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic
groups, should bear a disproportionate share of the negative
environmental consequences resulting from industrial,
municipal, and commercial operations or the execution of
federal, state, local, and tribal programs and policies.”
 Environmental justice is closely related to civil rights.

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2.4 Environmental Justice

 Studies show that the

affluent members of society
generate most of the waste,
while the impoverished
members tend to bear most
of the burden of this waste.

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2.4 Environmental Justice
 Environmental justice encompasses a wide range of
issues, including:
 Where to place hazardous and polluting facilities
 Transportation
 Safe housing, lead poisoning, and water quality
 Access to recreation
 Exposure to noise pollution
 Access to environmental information
 Hazardous waste cleanup
 Exposure to natural disasters (e.g., Hurricane Katrina)

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 Environmental Justice

The direct action in Warren County, NC, marked the birth of the
environmental justice movement in the U.S.
Erin Brockovich
 Contamination of drinking water with hexavalent chromium, also known as
chromium(VI), in the southern California town of Hinkley.
 Between 1952 and 1966, PG&E used hexavalent chromium to fight corrosion
in the cooling tower. The wastewater dissolved the hexavalent chromium
from the cooling towers and was discharged to unlined ponds at the site.
 Some of the wastewater percolated into the groundwater, affecting an area
near the plant approximately two miles long and nearly a mile wide. [6]

The case was settled in 1996 for US$333 million, the largest
settlement ever paid in a direct action lawsuit in US history.
A study released in 2010 by the California Cancer Registry
showed that cancer rates in Hinkley "remained
unremarkable from 1988 to 2008."[7]
Environmental Justice
 Environmental justice encompasses a wide range of issues,
including:
 Where to place hazardous and polluting facilities
 Transportation
 Safe housing, lead poisoning, and water quality
 Access to recreation
 Exposure to noise pollution
 Access to environmental information
 Hazardous waste cleanup
 Exposure to natural disasters
2. 6 Corporate Environmental Ethics

 Corporations are legal

entities designed to operate
at a profit.
 Although a corporation’s
primary purpose is to generate a
financial return for its
shareholders, this does not
mean that a corporation has no
ethical obligations to the public
or to the environment.
 Shareholders can demand that
their directors run the
corporation ethically.

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Waste and Pollution

 The cost of controlling waste

can be very important in
determining a company’s
profit margin.
 Ethics are involved when a
corporation cuts corners in
production quality or waste
disposal to maximize profit
without regard for public or
environmental well-being.

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2.6 Corporate Environmental Ethics

 Because stockholders expect

a return on an investment,
corporations can be drawn
toward making decisions
based on short-term
profitability rather than long-
term benefit to the
environment or society.

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Is There a Corporate Environmental
Ethic?
 Actions such as dumping waste in a river rather than
installing a wastewater treatment facility or using
expensive filters externalize the costs of doing business
so that the public, rather than the corporation, pays those
costs.
 Greenwashing is a form of corporate misinformation where a
company will present a green public image and publicize green
initiatives that are false and misleading.

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Profitability and Power
 Profit margin determines expansion.
 The more demand exists for a company’s products
 financial resources
 power
 The greater a company’s power, the more influence it
has over decision makers who can create conditions
favorable to the company’s expansion plans.
Is There a Corporate Environmental Ethic?
 Corporations face real choices between using
environmentally friendly or harmful production processes,
and are facing more pressure to adopt more
environmentally and socially responsible practices.
 ISO 14000
 CERES Principles
 GRI’s Sustainability Reporting Guidelines

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 Corporate Environmental Ethic

Corporate

Environmental Harmful
Friendly

 The International Organization for Standardization

(www.iso.org) has developed a program called ISO
14000 to encourage industries to adopt the most
environmentally sensitive production practices.
Coalition for Environmentally Responsible
Economics
Strive to be better than government regulations
 10 business practices

1) Protect the biosphere

2) Sustainably use natural resources
3) Reduce and dispose of waste safely
4) Conserve energy
5) Minimize environmental risk
6) Reduce
7) Restore environmental damage
8) Inform the public
9) Consider environmental policy in management decisions
70 companies have
10) Report the results endorsed
13 Fortune 500 Firms
Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
 Mission:
 to develop globally applicable guidelines for reporting on
economic, environmental, and social performance, initially for
corporations and eventually for any business, governmental, or
nongovernmental organization.
 Around 2000 companies followed this
Green Business Concepts
 It makes little sense to preserve the environment if
preservation causes economic collapse.
 Natural capitalism is the idea that businesses can both
expand their profits and take good care of the
environment.
 The 3M Company is estimated to have saved up to $500
million over the last 20 years through its Pollution Prevention
Pays (3P) program.

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Green Business Concepts

 Industrial ecology links industrial production and

environmental quality.
 It models industrial production and biological production,
forcing industry to account for where waste is going.
 In nature, nothing is wasted or discarded; all materials ultimately
get reused.
 A pollutant is a resource out of place.
 Good environmental practices are good economics.

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Green Business Concepts
 The triple bottom line has been referred to as the ethical
criteria for business success.
 It includes social, environmental, and financial concerns.

People
Profit
Planet

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2.8 The Ethics of Consumption

 Food
 Fertilizers, pesticides, and high-yield crops have more than
doubled world food production in the past 40 years.
 Food distribution, not food production, is the cause of hunger.
 Energy
 At current rates of consumption, known oil reserves will not last through the current
century.
 Foresighted energy companies are looking ahead by investing in the technologies that
will replace fossil fuels.
 Nuclear power, solar, wind, wave, and biomass technologies are meeting increasing
proportions of national energy needs in other countries.

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2.8 The Ethics of Consumption

 Water
 Currently humans use about half the planet’s accessible supply of
renewable, fresh water.
 More than any other resource, water may limit consumerism in the
next century.
 Wild Nature
 Every day in the U.S., between 1000 and 2000 hectares of
farmland and natural areas are permanently lost to development.

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2.9 Personal Choices
 Individuals can make many lifestyle changes that
significantly reduce their personal impact on the planet.
 Eating food produced locally, that is low on the food chain, and is grown with a
minimum of chemical fertilizers and pesticides reduces the environmental impact
of food production.
 Buying durable consumer products and reusing or repairing products with usable
life reduces the raw materials that must be extracted from the ground.

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Personal Choices
 "The Ecological Footprint is a measure of the 'load'
imposed by a given population on nature. It represents the
land area necessary to sustain current levels of resource
consumption and waste discharge by that population.“
 Total EF of a country is a function of population
size X resource use
Ecological footprint
Lifestyle and Environmental Impact
 Personal Choices
(Homework)

Without decreasing my
standard of living drastically,
what could I change
(realistically) to reduce my
footprint?
Calculating my ecological footprint
(Homework)

http://www.footprintcalculator.org/