Environmental ethics and sustainable development : ethical and human rights issues in implementing indigenous rights

Environmental ethics is concerned with the issue of responsible personal conduct with respect to natural landscapes, resources, species and non-human organisms. Conduct by persons is the direct concern of moral philosophy. Moral responsibility normally implies knowledge, capacity, choice, and value significance. That is to say, if a person is morally responsible to do something, then he (a) knows of this requirement, (b) is capable of performing it, (c) can freely choose whether or not to do it, and (d) the performance thereof affects the welfare and/or liberty of other beings. Because one’s response to these requirements reflects upon his value as a moral person, a peculiarly distinctive trait of humanity, we say that this response has moral significance. This analysis of moral responsibility explains why environmental ethics has only recently attracted the attention and concern of environmentalists and the general public. Until quite recently, human effects on the environment were regarded as neutral since we assumed nature was both impersonal and too vast to be injured by our interventions. At the very least, we were quite unable to foresee the harm resulting from our dealings with nature. Now of course we know better