ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

environmental ethics: translation

Most ethics deals with problems of human desires and needs: the achievement of happiness, or the distribution of goods. The central problem specific to thinking about the environment, is the independent value to place on such things as preservation of species, or protection of the wilderness. Such protection can be supported as a means to ordinary human ends, for instance when animals are regarded as future sources of medicines or other benefits. But many would want to claim a non-utilitarian, absolute value for the existence of wild things and wild places; it is in their very independence of human lives that their value consists. They put us in our proper place, and failure to appreciate this value is not only an aesthetic failure but one of due humility and reverence, a moral disability. The problem is one of expressing this value, and mobilizing it against utilitarian arguments for developing natural areas and exterminating species more or less at will. See also nature, sublime.