Today’s world is facing plenty of environmental problems. Recognizing those problems may make you wonder: What’s the role of ethics in trying to solve them? Should moral considerations extend to animals, plants, and trees or just to the environment in general? Central to thinking in moral terms about environmental problems are questions about value. Specifically, you need to think about the kind of value that the nonhuman world has and whether that type of value demands moral recognition.
Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest happens at a rate of over 10,000 square kilometers per year, affecting global carbon absorption and climate regulation.
Asking why environmental problems exist in the first place also is important. How did the world end up in this sorry state? This lesson addresses three answers to that question: conservationism, social ecology, and deep ecology, each of which sees the origin of environmental problems as being in a different place. We also survey some of the standard criticisms of environmental ethics.
The field of philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to the environment and its nonhuman contents.
What exactly is your moral relationship to the environment?
Canvassing Environmental Ethics
Environmental ethics recognizes that the world faces a large number of ethical problems that don’t involve direct human-to-human interaction. So, recognizing environmental issues as moral problems means expanding your notion of ethics beyond direct human-to-human contact. Doing so usually means that environmental ethics attributes moral status or value to nonhuman things such as animals, plants, or even whole ecosystems. As a result, your direct interactions with those entities morally matter.
In other cases, seeing environmental issues as having a moral dimension means recognizing the interaction with the environment can hurt or harm other humans. As a result, indirect human-to-human encounters by means of your relationships with the environment become morally relevant.
How might your everyday actions—like what you buy, eat, or drive—affect the environment in ways that are ethically significant?
Recognizing Environmental Problems
Whether or not you think that the nonhuman world has an independent moral status of its own, denying that the world faces pressing environmental concerns isn’t easy. At the very least, you can’t deny that these problems will grow more significant as time goes on. As a consequence, focusing on these problems and thinking more about what obligations you have to solving them makes sense.
- Climate change: If the world’s temperature rises and the polar ice caps melt, the global ecosystem may experience devastating changes.
- Population growth: The world’s population is growing, and the Earth isn’t growing bigger to accommodate it. Humans use up a lot of natural resources, and feeding the population and providing basic energy needs may eventually lead to drastic forms of environmental damage as people aggressively strip the planet of those resources. If the population swings out of control, pollution and waste control will inevitably become more and more of a problem.
- Rainforest desecration: Studies show that the Amazon rainforest may end up 75 percent smaller within 40 years. The effects on the world’s ecosystem and the living beings within it would be grim, as local soil is horribly damaged and excess carbon dioxide fails to be absorbed by lost trees, contributing to climate change.
This list of problems goes on and on. So what do you need to do with this list of problems? You need to assess the moral relevance of each of them. In other words, what exactly is your moral relationship to the environment?
- Environmental ethics asks us to consider the moral status of nonhuman entities.
- Major global problems like climate change, population growth, and deforestation carry ethical weight.
Many countries now create policies—like carbon taxes or wildlife protections—based on environmental ethics, aiming to balance human needs with the interests of the planet.
Expanding Care Past Human Beings
In order for the environment to be morally relevant, you have to expand your idea of traditional ethics of governing simply direct human-to-human interaction to a more expansive notion of ethics that includes interactions with nonhuman beings. For instance, denying that something unethical is going on when someone beats a dog in the middle of the street is difficult. If you agree, you need to know how to understand human-to-animal interaction as having an ethical dimension. Maybe polluting a stream or destroying a landscape also has ethical dimensions. In such cases, human-to-environment interaction is ethically charged.
Only by thinking in such ways will questions like “how big should I build my house?” or “how much energy should my new appliance use?” become ethical questions as opposed to just affordability or lifestyle questions.
When have you noticed a conflict between what’s convenient for you and what’s best for the environment? How did you respond?
Environmental issues are only about preventing harm to humans.
Environmental ethics recognizes that nonhuman beings and ecosystems may have moral value in their own right, not just for their usefulness to humans.
You can go about seeing the environment as having moral status in two ways:
- By recognizing that you have an obligation to treat the nonhuman world better because mistreating it negatively affects human life. Viewing environmental issues as ethically charged involves seeing how your treatment of the environment involves indirect effects on human beings, and humans do have ethical responsibilities to other humans. If your environmental behaviors make it more difficult for others to breathe and have clean water or if they lead to the starvation of others due to poisoning of the soil, you’re indirectly harming other human beings. That’s morally charged.
- By recognizing that you have an obligation to treat the nonhuman world better regardless of whether or how this in turn affects humans. Eyeing environmental issues as ethically charged involves seeing how entities within the environment (or the environment itself as a whole) have an independent moral status that demands recognition. If that’s true, then environmental ethics requires you to extend your care beyond human beings in a direct sense. In other words, your ethical responsibilities to the environment have nothing to do with whether your environmental behaviors affect (future or present) human beings. Instead it’s a question of whether your treatment properly respects the independent moral status of the environment.
Either way, environmental ethics suggests that ethical concerns should stretch beyond direct human-to-human interaction. To figure out which approach to environmental ethics strikes you as the right one, however, you first have to take a closer look at different notions of value so you can try to figure out how you value (or ought to value) the environment itself. The next two sections examine these two main ways environmental ethics categorizes the world’s value.
Want to go deeper? The science behind climate change and deforestation
Climate change is primarily driven by the release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, which trap heat in the atmosphere. Deforestation not only reduces the planet’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, but also disrupts local water cycles, soil fertility, and biodiversity—leading to cascading effects felt far beyond the original site of forest loss.
Which approach to environmental ethics—caring for the environment because it affects humans, or because it has value in itself—feels more persuasive to you, and why?
Instrumentalism: The Environment is Just a Valuable Tool
To say that something has instrumental value means that its value is determined by how it serves as a tool for something else (this notion of value springs from consequentialist thinking about ethics). Seeing the environment as instrumentally valuable doesn’t mean that you’re off the hook as to ethical responsibilities with regard to your treatment of the environment, however. Instead, it means you understand those responsibilities in terms of the interests of other people. Because your behavior toward the environment can impact other people’s interests, you must be morally conscientious in how you treat the nonhuman world.
Think for a second about how you value a tool in your garage. For example, a hammer is a tool. How do you value a hammer? You likely think that its value lies in its capacity to do the job you want it to do. A hammer has little value if you have no projects to use it for or if it’s broken; after all, in such situations the hammer can’t help to complete the projects or satisfy the interests that you have.
The value that something has as a means to achieve something else, rather than for its own sake.
When you think of instrumental value, consider it as a kind of paint that gets applied to something by another thing that has interests. If you want to build a house, you paint the forest and hammers as valuable because they’re needed in order to complete your project. Without your interests, there’s no paint to express the value.
What is environmental ethics?
Tap to revealThe study of moral relationships between humans and the environment, including nonhuman entities.
Define instrumental value.
Tap to revealValue based on usefulness as a means to an end, not for its own sake.
Give an example of a pressing environmental problem discussed in this lesson.
Tap to revealClimate change, population growth, or rainforest desecration.
Reflect on who and what you consider when making ethical decisions.
- Draw a circle and write your name in the center.
- List people, animals, or environmental features you care about in wider circles.
- Notice: Do your circles include only humans, or do they extend to nonhuman life and ecosystems?
- Think about why you drew your circles the way you did.
Imagine a scenario where a new housing development is being built in your town, which will destroy a local wetland. How would you decide whether this is ethically justified? Consider both instrumental and intrinsic value perspectives in your response.
Which of the following best describes the concept of instrumental value in environmental ethics?
Environmental ethics challenges us to expand our moral circle, considering not just human interests, but also the intrinsic and instrumental value of the nonhuman world.
How we define value—whether instrumental or intrinsic—shapes our ethical responsibilities toward nature and future generations.
How confident are you that you can explain the difference between instrumental and intrinsic value in environmental ethics?
The Shift
- Environmental ethics expands the scope of moral concern to nonhuman entities and ecosystems.
- Instrumental value reflects usefulness, while some approaches argue for the intrinsic value of nature.
- Our ethical decisions about the environment shape the future for both humans and the planet.