environmental ethics See ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOS -. OPH. environmental philosophy, the critical study of concepts defining relations between human beings and their non-human environment. Environmental ethics, a major component of environmental philosophy, addresses the normative significance of these relations. The relevance of ecological relations to human affairs has been recognized at least since Darwin, but the growing sense of human responsibility for their deterioration, reflected in books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975), has prompted the recent upsurge of interest. Environmental philosophers have adduced a wide variety of human attitudes and practices to account for the perceived deterioration, including religious and scientific attitudes, social institutions, and industrial technology. Proposed remedies typically urge a reorientation or new ‘ethic’ that recognizes ‘intrinsic value’ in the natural world. Examples include the ‘land ethic’ of Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), which pictures humans as belonging to, rather than owning, the biotic community (‘the land’); deep ecology, a stance articulated by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (b.1912), which advocates forms of identification with the non-human world; and ecofeminism, which rejects prevailing attitudes to the natural world that are perceived as patriarchal. At the heart of environmental ethics lies the attempt to articulate the basis of concern for the natural world. It encompasses global as well as local issues, and considers the longer-term ecological, and even evolutionary, fate of the human and non-human world. Many of its practitioners question the anthropocentric claim that human beings are the exclusive or even central focus of ethical concern. In thus extending both the scope and the grounds of concern, it presents a challenge to the stance of conventional interhuman ethics. It debates how to balance the claims of present and future, human and non-human, sentient and non-sentient, individuals and wholes. It investigates the prospects for a sustainable relationship between economic and ecological systems, and pursues the implications of this relationship with respect to social justice and political institutions. Besides also engaging metaethical questions about, for example, the objectivity and commensurability of values, environmental philosophers are led to consider the nature and significance of environmental change and the ontological status of collective entities such as species and ecosystems. In a more traditional vein, environmental philosophy revives metaphysical debates surrounding the perennial question of ‘man’s place in nature,’ and finds both precedent and inspiration in earlier philosophies and cultures.
See also APPLIED ETHICS, ETHICS, FEMI- NISM , NATURALISM , VALU. A.Ho.