Environmental Ethics

The value of nature has been greatly debated by h...

The value of nature has been greatly debated by humanists, scholars, social scientists and many other professionals all over the world. Whereas some argue that nature might be indirectly morally considerable, many others believe that it is morally considerable. When it comes to environmental ethics; the moral relationship of humans to the environment and its non-human contents, some actions by human beings are not morally permissible. According to Light and Rolston (2003), “nature might be directly morally considerable if it possesses some kind of value (for example some kind of value in and of itself not dependent on its value to anything or anyone else) which could be further demonstrated as the sort of value that demanded that we respect or protect it” (pg. 2).

Among many other morally wrong actions, destroying or polluting parts of the natural environment and consuming significant proportions of mother nature’s natural resources is often considered morally unacceptable (Brennan & Lo, 2016). I totally concur with this assertion. Research boldly indicates that global warming is often intertwined with destroying the environment (whether for settlement or agriculture) and polluting it. The intrinsic value of the environment or forests cannot be ignored and neither can we overlook the effects that come along with clearing or destroying the environment including depletion of the ozone layer, acid rain, as well as pollution of soil, water, and air thus impacting negatively on human beings, plants and animals.

Unlike other forms of applied ethics that focus only on the area of concern, the scope of environmental ethics moves beyond the human sphere. Environmental ethicists have shown concern over who counts morally and why when unethical events occur in the environment as well as reexamine the human-nature relationship regarding wilderness areas, endangered species and old growth forests among other things (Light & Rolston, 2003, pg. 4). Nonetheless, humans should start to develop a conscience about the way they act on their environment. Deep ecologists firmly believe that humans need to completely change their perspective about nature and appreciate it to the point of granting rights to all wild living things.

References

Brennan, A., & Lo, Y. (2016). Environmental Ethics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 13 March 2018, from https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=ethics-environmental

Light, A., & Rolston, H. (2003). Environmental Ethics: An Anthology (pp. 1-11). Malden: Blackwell Publishers.