2.2: Environmental Ethics and Worldviews

Environmental Ethics and Worldviews

Ethics are the principles people use to decide what is right and wrong. Environmental decisions often involve ethical questions because different people value nature in different ways. For example, some people may support clearing part of a rainforest to grow food because it benefits humans. Others may oppose it because it harms wildlife, ecosystems, and future generations.

An individual's environmental ethic reflects how they think about the relationship between humans and the environment. Some people value nature mainly for its instrumental value, meaning the benefits it provides to people, such as food, water, and recreation. Others believe nature also has intrinsic value, meaning it has worth regardless of its usefulness to humans. These beliefs help shape a person's worldview, or general way of understanding the world.

Environmental worldviews differ in who or what receives moral consideration. At the most narrow level, people may focus primarily on themselves (egocentrism). Moral concern can expand to include other people, future generations, and all of humanity (anthropocentrism). When moral concern extends beyond humans, it is called moral extensionism.

As moral concern expands, different environmental ethics emerge. Biocentrism extends moral concern to all living organisms. Ecocentrism extends moral concern to ecosystems and ecological processes. Some people extend moral concern to the entire biosphere, including all living things and the systems that support life on Earth (Figure \(\PageIndex{a}\)). 

These different ethical perspectives help explain why people may disagree about environmental issues. For example, a person may support protecting wetlands because they provide clean water and reduce flooding (an anthropocentric justification). Another person may argue that wetlands should also be protected because the organisms living there that have their own moral value (a biocentric perspective).

Environmental ethics can also be connected to sustainability and the Planetary Boundaries framework. People may support protecting Earth's life-support systems for different reasons. Some may focus on protecting human well-being and future generations, while others may also extend moral concern to other species, ecosystems, or the biosphere as a whole. Understanding environmental ethics helps explain why societies make different choices about conservation, sustainability, and environmental policy.

A Simplified Framework

Environmental ethicists have developed many theories and frameworks for evaluating human relationships with nature, including the land ethic, deep ecology, ecofeminism, social ecology, Indigenous philosophies, animal ethics, and others. This section uses a simplified framework based on moral consideration and worldviews to introduce some of ways people think about environmental issues. These categories are useful for understanding broad patterns in environmental decision-making, but individual beliefs often combine ideas from multiple ethical perspectives. 

Attribution

This page was heavily revised and rewritten by Erin Rempala and contains adapted content originally authored by Melissa Ha and Rachel Schleiger is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Modified by Erin Rempala from Hourdequin. M. 20215. Environmental Ethics: From Theory to Practice. Bloomsbury Academic. 

Modified by Rachel Schleiger from Sustainability: A Comprehensive Foundation(opens in new window) by Openstax (licensed under CC-BY(opens in new window))