eLS

Environmental Ethics: An Overview [A24201]

Attfield, Robin

Robin Attfield

Cardiff University

Cardiff

United Kingdom
 Environmental Ethics: An Overview [A24201]

ABSTRACT

Environmental ethics is the study of normative issues and principles relating to human

interactions with the natural environment. It comprises an increasingly significant

field of applied ethics, crucial for the guidance of individuals, corporations and

governments in shaping the principles affecting their lifestyles, their actions and their

policies across the entire range of environmental issues. Debates include theories of

normative ethics and of meta-ethics, and the adequacy of individualist, holist and

ecofeminist stances. It is characteristically concerned with the good of future

generations and of nonhuman species as well as that of contemporary human beings.

Its scope includes the interpretation and application of the precautionary principle and

of policies of sustainable development, grounds and policies for biodiversity

preservation, and the nature and basis of obligations to assist adaptation to global

warming, and to mitigate the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions widely

recognised to constitute one of its principal sources.

KEY WORDS

anthropocentrism, biodiversity, climate change mitigation, ecofeminism,

environmental ethics, future generations, intrinsic value, non-human creatures,

Precautionary Principle, sustainable development

KEY CONCEPTS

Environmental ethics is a field of study, adjacent and comparable to business ethics

and bioethics, and not itself a normative stance. (For Bioethics, see also DOI:

10.1002/9780470015902.a0003473.)
Stances in environmental ethics characteristically take into account future generations

and non-human creatures as well as contemporary human interests.

Environmental ethics as a branch of philosophy arose in the 1970s through the work

of Richard Routley, John Passmore, Arne Naess and Holmes Rolston.

Far from being unavoidable, anthropocentrism disregards the intrinsic value of non-

human flourishing and the prevalence of moral concern for nonhuman suffering.

Despite their differences of emphasis, animal ethics and environmental ethics need

not conflict, and need to be informed by each other.

Environmental ethicists can adhere to a range of meta-ethical stances, but objectivism

and cognitivism have clear advantages concerning the status of reasons for action.

Ecofeminists such as Val Plumwood and Marti Kheel have well argued against

excessive rationalism in environmental ethics and for a greater role for the emotions.

Rival theories of the causes of ecological problems often undermine each other, but

solving these problems may require a restructuring of the global economic system.

Policies of sustainable development, as presented in the Brundtland Report of 1987,

seek to address these problems through combining development and sustainability.

The Precautionary Principle suggests that a global agreement is urgently needed to

mitigate emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

INTRODUCTION
Environmental Ethics is the study of normative issues and principles relating to

human interactions with the natural environment, and to their context and

consequences, and thus to how ecological problems should be addressed. It comprises

an important area of applied ethics, crucial for the guidance of agents such as

individuals, corporations and governments in shaping the principles affecting their

lifestyles, their actions and their policies across the entire range of environmental

issues. How should we respond to such issues, and which actions, policies and

lifestyles best address them?

I. WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS?

While the phrase ‘environmental ethics’ is sometimes used to refer simply to the

ethical (or unethical) character of people’s behaviour where it affects the natural

environment, it is important that this phrase is also used not just of behaviour but also

of the normative principles applicable to it, and their critical study. This critical study

is itself widely known as ‘environmental ethics’, the subject of this overview.

Environmental ethics is sometimes differently defined as the kind of approach to

environmental issues which finds independent value located not only in the interests

of intelligent or of sentient creatures, but also in natural living creatures in general, or

in the natural world in general (Thompson, 1990). While many influential

philosophical perspectives are committed to this kind of approach, many others say

otherwise, and base their justifications on the interests of sentient creatures or even of
human beings only. Since the latter kind of approach is adopted by many

environmentalists, and undeniably offers not only specifications of environmental

problems but also solutions to them, it is wise not to adopt a definition of

‘environmental ethics’ which treats this approach as lying outside environmental

ethics. If the phrase ‘environmental ethics’ is used more inclusively, the debate about

the location of independent value can continue to take place within its boundaries, and

its boundaries need not be treated as themselves a battleground about values.

Similarly environmental ethics can be recognised as a neighbour of e.g. business

ethics or medical ethics, concerned with a different sphere, but not as a rival discipline

with distinctive values of its own.

The sphere of environmental ethics has made it much more aware than ethicists have

usually been of the interests of future generations and nonhuman creatures. Where the

interests of prospective people used to be neglected in general theories of normative

ethics, such an omission has now become unsustainable. This change is due at least in

part to certain pioneering works in environmental ethics (including Passmore (1974)

and Sikora and Barry (1978)). Simultaneously the anthropocentrism of traditional

ethics has widely been qualified so that at least sentient animals are taken into

account, as a result of the work of ethicists such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan (e.g.

Singer, 1976; Regan, 1983). Thus environmental ethics tends to be based on the

interests of future generations and of nonhumans, as well as current humans.

Meanwhile anthropocentric philosophers have become conscious that they hold a

minority standpoint in normative ethics, which cannot be assumed and needs defence.

II. ORIGINS OF MODERN ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

When Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection became widely

accepted in the late nineteenth century, recognition of the interdependence of living

species became possible, and at the same time recognition of the far-reaching

unintended side-effects of human action. This recognition began when George

Perkins March published Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by

Human Action (Marsh 1865). The efforts of early American conservationists to

preserve wild species and tracts of wild nature soon led to the setting up of National

Parks such as Yellowstone (in Wyoming) and Yosemite (in California). (For Darwin’s

theory, see also: DOI: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0005883.pub2.)

But an extension of ethics to cover every species of the living systems of the planet

was not proposed until the mid-twentieth century, in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County

Almanac. In Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic’, the land is the community of the interdependent

species of the planet, including the other components of their ecosystems. It was

Leopold’s claim that ‘a thing is right when it tends to promote the integrity, stability

and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ (Leopold,

1949, 224-5).

During the 1960s environmental concern became widely prevalent, with increasing

alarm being voiced about nuclear fall-out, population growth, and also about

pesticides, as in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Carson, 1962). Before long the

Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess was classifying ecology movements by the depth

of their concerns (Naess, 1973); and the need for a new environmental ethics was

presented to a World Congress of Philosophy by Richard Routley (Routley, 1973).

What was distinctive about such a new ethic was investigated in a ground-breaking

paper by Holmes Rolston (Rolston 1975). By this time, the first environmental

philosophy conference had been convened by William T. Blackstone at Athens,

Georgia, and environmental ethics courses were being taught at Universities, both in

Wisconsin and at Cardiff.

Environmental Ethics, the first journal in the field, was founded by Eugene C.

Hargrove as Editor-in-Chief in 1979, and is now based at Denton, Texas; Rolston

serves as Associate Editor. By now there are several other journals, such as

Environmental Values, founded at the University of Lancaster, and work in this field

can increasingly be found in mainstream philosophy journals. Meanwhile in 1990

Rolston, the author of the leading monograph in the field (Rolston, 1988), founded the
International Society for Environmental Ethics, of which he became President. The

Society has organised sessions at major philosophy conferences all over the world.

The discipline of environmental ethics is thus institutionally entrenched in many parts

of the developed world. Third world scholars have also played an active part in its

development. The late Henry Odera Oruka was the founding director of an

Ecophilosophy Centre at Nairobi, Kenya, and organised in Nairobi in 1991 a World

Conference of Philosophy on the links between environment, development and

philosophy. A further example is supplied by the International Conference on

Development, Ethics and the Environment, organised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in

1995 by Azizan Baharuddin, of the University of Malaya. Third World environmental

philosophers frequently underline the importance of blending environmentalism with

the need for economic and social development to remedy the problems of poverty and

injustice. Priorities between these values continue to be debated.

III. SOME NORMATIVE DEBATES

Most environmental ethicists do not restrict moral standing to human beings, and
distance themselves from anthropocentrism. This is sometimes argued on the basis

that many nonhuman animals are sentient, and that their interest in not being made to

suffer has to be recognised as morally relevant; indeed discrimination on the sole

basis of species-membership has been labelled ‘speciesism’ (Singer, 1976) and

compared to other kinds of discrimination such as sexism and racism. Others appeal

beyond sentience to the capacity of all living organisms to develop and flourish in the

manner of their own kind; while others again claim that rights belong to species, and

even to ecosystems.
Anthropocentrists may respond that human beings cannot help appropriating

resources from nature, and thus prioritising their own interests, and that, as agents,

they inevitably operate within a humanity-focused perspective. However, these claims

are consistent with a non-anthropocentric stance in ethics; a humanity-focused

perspective is compatible with recognising ethical considerations independent of

human interests, whether motivated by sympathy, by identification, or by respect for

nature’s otherness. Others claim that the underlying ground for identification with

nature is nothing but the good of the person whose understanding is thus enlarged and

humanised; but this stance has been accused of narcissism, and also seems blind to the

independent significance of e.g. animal suffering.

Those who reject anthropocentrism also engage in a debate between those who regard

all bearers of moral standing as having equal moral significance, and those who

recognise differing degrees of moral significance, related usually to differing

capacities (in point of sentience and/or intelligence). The egalitarian camp regards

belief in degrees of significance as discriminatory and arbitrary; the other camp

respond that environmental justice demands that priorities be observed when clashes
of interest occur. While the kind of biospheric egalitarianism which makes each

organism count for one may in theory be a consistent position, it suffers from the

handicap of making life unliveable in practice (Attfield, 1992, 1994).

A further debate arises between campaigners for animal welfare and campaigners for

the conservation of species, ecosystems or wilderness. This debate often maps onto a

radical difference of values, with animal welfarists arguing from the well-being of

individual sentient creatures, and conservationists, when not appealing to human

interests, sometimes arguing that species or ecosystems have an independent, holistic

value. These camps are allies for many practical purposes (as over preserving the last
members of an endangered species), but they often diverge, as over the culling of deer

in Scotland, of seals in Canada, and of elephants in southern Africa.

Debates of this kind often turn on ‘intrinsic value’ (value which is neither

instrumental nor in any other way derivative, but depends entirely on the nature of its

bearer) and on its location. Both animal welfarists and many conservationists reject an

anthropocentric view of its distribution. But while the former locate it in individual

well-being, some of the latter locate it in diversity, in wildness, in independence from

human impacts, or simply in nature (understood as the realm independent of human

agency), sometimes adding that pain and suffering are intrinsically neutral (rather than

bad), besides being instrumentally good where they contribute to the maintenance of

ecosystem stability. However, the value of diversity seems to depend on its

contribution to stability; the criterion of wildness would deprive all domestic animals

of intrinsic value; and the independence criterion elides the distinction between living

creatures and abiotic nature. Further, if pain does not count as an independent reason

against what causes it, it is difficult to see what else counts. This reasoning applies

irrespective of whether the pain is experienced by a human being or a nonhuman

animal.

This does not mean that welfarists have nothing to learn from the conservationist

camp. Conservationists, for example, can explain the importance of predation to both

predators and prey, and thus why human beings should seldom if ever intervene to

prevent it. Predation, parasitism and suchlike apparent evils turn out to carry a

positive (but derivative) value for the species and systems involved. Further, if human

society is to attain sustainability, and avoid undermining the interests of future

generations, ways must be found of not undermining the ongoing operation of those

natural systems on which human life depends. Unless welfarists grasp the networks of
interdependence pervading the natural world, their contribution to environmental

ethics is fatally flawed. This, however, need not detract from their principled

objections to factory farming, or to sport-hunting, or make them any less valid.

Another debate concerns whether environmental philosophy should concern itself

with values or with ethics at all. In face of robust criticisms from Richard Routley of

Deep Ecology, with its belief in the value of nature as a whole, and in the self-

realization which this belief makes possible, Warwick Fox claimed in its defence that

talk of value on the part of Deep Ecologists such as Arne Naess and George Sessions

should not be taken literally, that advocacy of beliefs about value and ethics was

futile, and that the underlying message of Deep Ecology concerned the identification

of the self with the greater Self of nature. Once self-realization of this kind is

achieved, agents will in any case be motivated to defend nature, and no purpose will

be served by ethical talk, or talk of values either (Fox, 1990). Replies have mentioned

the self-undermining character of identification with nature as a whole, the lack of

guidance available once values are discarded, and the need for the interpersonal

reasons that are implicit in values if action is to respond proportionately to current

problems. Deep Ecology also seems to underplay nature’s otherness, an equally

important source of environmental concern as empathy and identification.

IV. META-ETHICAL DEBATES

In addition to enriching value-theory and normative ethics through its stress on future

generations and on nonhuman creatures, environmental ethics has had to examine the

status of its own claims, and has thus breathed new life into the discipline of meta-

ethics. Objectivists hold that claims about value, about rightness, and about obligation

admit of truth, and present interpersonal reasons for action, as opposed to being
simply expressions of emotion or prescriptions. Objectivists usually also hold that

knowledge is sometimes possible in these areas (Rolston, 1988; Attfield, 1995).

Subjectivists, by contrast, maintain that value is always value either for someone or

some group or some valuational framework, and that ultimately there are no

independent standards by which such valuings or frameworks can be compared. Such

views appear to deprive claims about value or obligation from supplying reasons for

action capable of being treated as serious or binding.

Related debates concern whether any single theory of value or obligation should be

accepted, or whether adopting a plurality of theories might be preferable to seeking

such closure. Such debates continue to figure in journals of environmental

philosophy, and in mainstream philosophy journals too, such as The Monist.

V. ECOFEMINISM

Ecofeminists often find connections between the oppression of nature and that of

women, sometimes maintaining that these kinds of oppression are indivisible

(Warren, 1990). Others have replied that some societies oppress women but not nature

(Kelbessa, 2011), while sometimes, as in the wearing of furs and the hunting of foxes,

women have apparently been among the oppressors rather than the oppressed. Each
kind of oppression needs to be resisted, whether they are connected or not.

Another kind of ecofeminism has been voiced by Val Plumwood, herself one of the

founders of environmental philosophy. Environmental ethics, in her account, is often

excessively rationalist in approach, and has an inadequate place for the more

traditionally female trait of emotion. (Plumwood, 1991). A similar point had earlier

been argued by Marti Kheel, responding to J. Baird Callicott’s ‘Animal Liberation: A

Triangular Affair’ (Callicott, 1980) in ‘The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair’.

Kheel objects to entrenched dualisms, and maintains that, in place of Callicott’s three

starkly opposed options of traditional humanism, animal liberation and holistic

environmental ethics, we should envisage a continuum of stances forming a circle

(Kheel 1985). Certainly animal welfarism and environmental ethics need not be

regarded as polar opposites (Attfield, 2012).

VI. CAUSES OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

Problems such as pollution, resource depletion, loss of cultivable land, and loss of

wilderness are often assigned common causes. For example, the theory that certain

religious attitudes are responsible for these problems has often been put forward, but

has also been severely criticised (Attfield, 2009). More material causes need to be

considered.

Population growth is often suggested as a principal cause, and many ecologists

actually advocate reductions of the human population. Yet environmental problems

are more concentrated in areas of intense industrial activity than in areas of population

concentration. While some environmental problems can be correlated with population

growth, this kind of growth in turn is often driven by poverty, and these problems are

thus unlikely to be resolved until poverty itself is tackled. Meanwhile the causes of

environmental problems in industrial areas cannot be set down to population growth,

since problems of this kind can be found in its absence; for those problems, the

proposed causes include affluence and, additionally, modern technology, and

proposed solutions sometimes commend in response an ethic of simpler life-styles,

reliant on technology of a less consumptive kind.

However, economic forces, rather than levels of individual consumption, are likely to

drive the polluting processes; and this has led to advocacy of limits to economic

growth, and sometimes of abandonment of modern technology. But humanity is

unlikely to be fed, let alone global problems to be solved, without the aid of modern

technology, and, if so, then not all growth should be rejected. Nor would the adoption

of self-sufficiency, whether by individuals or by regions (as is sometimes proposed),

contribute much to the solution of these problems. The problems have to be

understood against the background of the current inequitable international economic

order, and are unlikely to be comprehensively solved unless this order is radically

restructured. Theories in which all this is neglected are likely to prove transitory.

VII. SUSTAINABILITY

Environmentalists used in the 1970s to advocate limits to growth and no-growth

societies, but their successors from the late 1980s have often been advocates instead

of sustainable development. ‘Sustainable Development’ was the central theme of the

Brundtland Report (World Commission for Environment and Development, 1987),

where it was defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without

compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Besides

stressing that not all growth comprises beneficial change (or development), the

authors of this report stressed that development must be sustainable, and thus

introduce economic and social processes capable of being continued indefinitely,

without undermining either themselves or the ecosystems on which both nonhuman

creatures and human economic systems depend. The United Nations Conference on

Environment and Development at Rio de Janeiro (1992) took some promising steps

toward converting this notion into reality.

Supporters of sustainable development, however, encounter problems of definition,

together with opposition from diverse directions. When they attempt to specify what

is to be sustained, one account, which makes this the economic value of natural

resources, would allow the elimination of species and habitats whenever this would

result in enhanced technological options for humanity, while another account, which

would debar all such changes, would prevent almost all development in regions (for

example) of rain-forest, at the cost of failure to satisfy basic human needs. Sustainable

development, insofar as it diverges from policies supported by traditional economics,

needs to blend the criteria of satisfying current human needs, providing for future

needs, and preserving the bearers of intrinsic value (nonhuman creatures included).
Some radical environmentalists would still criticise the concept of sustainable

development for permitting ‘business as usual’, and for being too easily appropriated

into the vocabulary of capitalist enterprises. Certainly conventional politicians and

business leaders often pay lip-service to ‘sustainable development’, meaning thereby

nothing but sustained economic growth. These environmentalist critics sometimes

urge an ethic which would reject development and/or industrialism altogether, and

focus on stabilising economic processes. Meanwhile other critics object to departures

from cost-effectiveness, and claim that sustainability is not always a virtue. However,

both sustainability and development embody values which should not be discarded

lightly. Hence work continues both on the theory and the practice of sustainable

development, both at international, national and local levels.

VIII. PRACTICAL SOLUTIONS

Ideal solutions, such as a radical restructuring of the world economy would involve,

are not the only concern of ethics. It is also concerned with what should be done while

systems and structures remain largely as they are, by agents with limited powers and

limited opportunities for action. Despite having greater powers than individuals,
governments and corporations are often in this position with little more freedom of

action than individuals. The approaches which follow are suited to agents and

agencies in situations of these kinds.

A. The Precautionary Principle

In view of the danger that environmental impacts will cross critical thresholds or

prove irreversible, and of evidence that environmental risks are often underestimated

until it is too late for an adequate response, the principle has increasingly been

accepted by European governments in recent years that action such as regulation may

justifiably be taken to avert serious or irreversible environmental harm in advance of

the availability of scientific evidence confirming that harm. This Precautionary

Principle is not a basic principle, is all too liable to be given an anthropocentric

interpretation or a pro-Western bias, and needs to be applied in conjunction with

principles both of sustainability and of justice. It is also often mis-represented as

advocating preventive action in face of all risks. But its adoption involves little more

than common prudence, and its earlier implementation could have curtailed acid rain,

ozone-depletion and even global warming of the period since its anthropogenic nature

became known.

B. Biodiversity

While environmentalists take different views about the grounds for preserving

biological diversity (diversity, that is, of species, sub-species and habitats), there is

widespread agreement that such preservation is vital for humanity, quite apart from

the intrinsic value of the creatures preserved. Such preservation involves the funding

of species-rich but materially poor countries (biodiversity hot-spots) on the part of

richer ones, and the willingness of such species-rich countries to forego certain forms

of development in species-rich areas to make possible such preservation.

Significant progress was made in an international agreement at Nagoya, Japan in 2010

in pursuance of the Convention on Biodiversity (adopted at Rio in 1992). Much now

depends on the willingness of the 190 signatory countries to deliver on their

commitments under the agreement.

C. Climate Change

Climate change and global warming are now widely recognised to be largely caused

by human activity, through the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide

and methane, and likely to raise the level of the oceans through the melting of polar

ice-caps enough to threaten the continued existence of islands such as the Maldives,

and the inundation of low-lying areas such as much of Bengal, plus their flora and
fauna, human beings included. Even before scientific consensus existed, application

of the Precautionary Principle already implied that constraints on carbon emissions, at

least on the part of developed countries, were ethically obligatory. Developing

countries, however, cannot justly be expected to curtail energy generation until they

are able to satisfy the basic needs of their citizens, although low-carbon forms of

generation should, where possible, be used instead of conventional forms, technology

transfer permitting. Emission quotas must therefore be internationally agreed and

observed, preferably through the treaty which the parties to the Durban Summit of

December 2011 have agreed to negotiate. (For climate change, see also: DOI:

10.1038/npg.els.0003488.)

Meanwhile, philosophers have recently turned their attentions to the study of climate

ethics. Some (like Henry Shue) adopt an historical and collectivist approach, others

(like Simon Caney) an individualist one grounded in human rights. The most

prominent collection in this field is Gardiner et al (2010).

An agreement on carbon emissions will not make the Earth an ecological paradise,

But rudimentary steps such as this one are ethically indispensable, and could supply a

paradigm for the further measures which will be needed on the part of the global

citizens of the future, and of their countries.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Some of the above material appeared previously in Robin Attfield, ‘Environmental

Ethics (Overview)’, in Ruth Chadwick (ed.), Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, San

Diego: Academic Press, 1998, vol. 2, 73-81, and is used here in accordance with

Academic Press permission policies; the author is grateful for this permission.
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New York: Cambridge University Press
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University Press, and West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press
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VT: Ashgate
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What Really Works, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press
GLOSSARY
Anthropocentrism: the type of theory of normative ethics which locates independent

value solely in human interests, as opposed to nonhuman interests.

Biospheric egalitarianism: the theory that every living organism in the system of

ecosystems of the planet (biosphere) has the same moral significance as every other.

Intrinsic value: value which is neither instrumental nor in any other way derivative,

and depends entirely on the nature of its bearer.

Ecofeminism: the kind of feminism (the movement against the oppression of women)

which relates ecological and feminist themes.

Ecosystem: a localised and more-or-less self-regulating system of interacting living

and non-living organisms, such as a wetland or a forest.

Environmental ethics: the study of normative issues and principles relating to human

interactions with the natural environment, and to their context and implications.

Intrinsic value: value which is neither instrumental nor in any other way derivative,

and depends entirely on the nature of its bearer.

Meta-ethics: the study of the nature and status of valuational and ethical claims and
discourse.

Precautionary Principle: the principle that action, involving the best available

technology, or alternatively prohibitions of action, may justifiably be adopted to avert

environmental harm, in advance of the availability of scientific evidence confirming

that harm.

Sustainable development: development that meets the needs of the present

generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own

needs; or alternatively: desirable socioeconomic change capable of being sustained

into the indefinite future without undermining either other desirable socioeconomic

processes or natural species and ecosystems.