Environmental Ethics

Environmental ethics is theory and practice about appropriate concern for, values in, and duties regarding the natural world. By classical accounts, ethics is people relating to people in justice and love. Environmental ethics starts with human concerns for a quality environment, and some think this shapes the ethic from start to finish. Others hold that, beyond inter-human concerns, values are at stake when humans relate to animals, plants, species and ecosystems. According to their vision, humans ought to find nature sometimes morally considerable in itself, and this turns ethics in new directions. 1 The Environmental Turn Humans are the only self-reflective, deliberative moral agents. Ethics is for people. But are humans the only valuable, valuing agents in an otherwise value-free world? Humans co-inhabit Earth with five to ten million species. Nature has equipped Homo sapiens, the wise species, with a conscience. Perhaps conscience is less wisely used than it ought to be when, as in classical Enlightenment ethics, it excludes the global com-munity of life from consideration, with the resulting paradox that the self-consciously moral species acts only in its collective self-interest toward all the rest. Environmenta