Environmental Ethics

Copyright © 2006 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings

 How we treat the environment is a function of
How we view the environment.
How we view the environment is a function
of:
Culture – which influences our thinking through:
•Knowledge
•Beliefs
•Values
•Learned ways of life shared by a
group of people

Copyright © 2006 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings

 How we treat the environment is a function of
How we view the environment.
How we view the environment is a function
of:
Worldview – person’s or group’s beliefs about the meaning,
purpose, operation and essence of the world.
•Knowledge
•Beliefs
•Values
•Learned ways of life shared by a
group of people

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 One’s Worldview is influenced by:
• Environmental ethics
• Classical economics and the environment
• Economic growth and sustainability
• Environmental and ecological economics
• Religion

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Environmental Ethics

• Ethics is the study of good and bad, right and wrong.

• Ethical Standards – criteria that help differentiate right

from wrong. Examples?

• Environmental Ethics - the study of ethical questions

regarding human interactions with the environment

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Environmental Ethics
Culture and worldview affect perception of the
environment and environmental problems.

• People with different Worldviews and Cultures may

have different values and hence, their actions toward the
environment may differ.

• There are two possible types of ethicists:

 Relativists - Ethics should and do vary with social
context.
 Universalists - Objective notions of right and wrong
exist across all cultures and situations.
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Some questions in environmental ethics
Should the present
generation conserve Are humans justified
resources for future in driving other
generations? species to extinction?

Is is OK to destroy a Is it OK for some

forest to create jobs communities to be
for people? exposed to more
pollution than others?

The answers depend, in part, upon the ethical

standard you choose to use.
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• Businesses treat air and water as free good.
• E.g. DuPont
• Ecological System: Interrelationships and interdependent
set of organisms and environment.
• Eg. Beaver Hat
• Ecological Ethics: Moral duty to protect the welfare not
only of human beings but that of other non-human part
of the system.

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 The History of Environmental Ethics

Expansion of ethical consideration over time

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Environmental Rights
• Possession of a livable environment is not merely a
desirable state of affair but something to which each
human being has a right.~William Blackstone
• Livable environment is something that others have a
duty to allow us to have
• To a large extent, Blackstone’s concept of environmental
rights is recognised in federal laws
• Federal laws don’t rest on a utilitarian cost benefit
analysis.
• Imposition of absolute ban on pollution irrespective of
the costs involved.

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• Difficulty of Blackstone’s View:
• Fails to povide guidance on How much pollution
control is necessary?
• Should we have an absolute ban on pollution?
• How far should we go in limiting the property rights
for the sake of environment.
• Who should pay for the cost of protecting the
environment?

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Private cost and social cost

• Internal cost: Price the manufacturer pays to manufacture

a product, cost of fuel, labor, and equipment's etc.
• External cost: what the manufacture of that product costs
the society

• Firms private costs are always less than the total social
cost involves.
• Pollution is fundamentally a problem of divergence
between private and social costs.

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• E.g. Electric Power Supply
• Allocation of resources not taking into account the social
cost is not optimal because, more of a commodity is
being produced than what society would demand if they
had accurate measure of what they are paying to produce
the commodity.
• When external costs are not taken into account by
producers, they ignore these costs and make not attempt
to minimise them.
• When production of commodities impose external cost on
third parties, goods are no longer being efficiently
distributed to customers.
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Duties ofinternalising
• Ways of the Firm the costs
• Pay to all those who are being harmed. Internlise the
cost
• Eg. BP oil spill
• Stop pollution at its source

Justice
-pollution increases inequality
-Firm’s stockholders benefit but the social cost is
borne largely by poor (environmental injustice)
- Retributive Justice
- Compensatory Justice
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Early environmental ethics

• The roots of environmental ethics are ancient.

• The modern urge for environmental protection grew

with problems spawned by the industrial revolution.

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 “People have a right to what they produce
themselves, but man has another right,
declared by the fact of his existence—the right
to use of so much of the free gifts of nature as
may be necessary to supply all the wants of
that existence, and which he may use with
interference with the equal rights of anyone
else; and to this he has title against all the
world.” Henry George, Progress and Poverty,
1874
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“According to the Public Trust Doctrine, the
public owns common or shared environments
—air, waters, dunes, tidelands, underwater
lands, fisheries, shellfish beds, parks and
commons, and migratory species. . . . These
things ‘are so particularly the gifts of nature’s
bounty that they ought to be reserved for the
whole of the populace.’ (Joseph L. Sax,
1970).”

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 "The people have a right to clean air, pure
water and to the preservation of the
natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic
values of the environment. Pennsylvania's
public natural resources are the common
property of all the people, including
generations yet to come.” ~ Article 1,
Section 27 of the Pennsylvania
Constitution

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Copyright © 2006 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings
Three ethical worldviews

A human centered view of

nature. Anything not providing
positive benefit to people is
considered of negligible value.

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Three ethical worldviews

All life has ethical standing,

and any actions taken consider
the effects on all living things,
or the biotic world in general. .

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Three ethical worldviews
Considers the integrity of
ecological systems – not just
individual animals (or species).
Recognizes the need to
preserve not just entities, but
also their relationships with
each other.

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Economics

• Economics studies how people use resources to provide

goods and services in the face of variable supply and
demand.

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Ethics and economics

• Both disciplines deal with

how we value and
perceive our environment.
• These influence our
decisions and actions.

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Economics and the environment

• Most environmental and economic problems are linked.

Why?

• The root “eco” gave rise to both ecology and economics.

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Classical economics
• Adam Smith: Competition between people free to
pursue their own economic self-interest will benefit
society as a whole (assuming rule of law, private
property, competitive markets).

• This idea is a pillar of free-market thought today.

• It is blamed by many for economic inequality and

the source of environmental degradation.

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Neoclassical economics - Focuses on supply and demand.
• An economic good or service can be defined as anything
that is scarce.
• Scarcity exists when the demand for an economic good
exceeds its supply.
• Supply is the amount of a good or service people are will
to sell at a given price.
• Demand is the amount of a good or service that consumers
are willing and able to buy at a given price.
• The price of a good or service is its monetary value.
• What determines the price is the relationship between
supply and demand.

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 The market favors equilibrium between
supply and demand.

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 Assigning value to natural resources
• The value assigned to natural resources is based on
perception of scarcity.

• What are you will to pay for?

• What are you not willing to pay for?

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Conventional view of economic activity

• Conventional
economics focuses
on interactions
between households
and businesses;
views the
environment only as
an external “factor
of production.”

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Ecosystem goods and services
• Natural resources are “goods” we get from our
environment.

• “Ecosystem services” that nature performs for free include:

• Soil formation
• Water purification
• Climate regulation
• Pollination
• Nutrient cycling
• Waste treatment
• etc.
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Estimates of various Ecosystem Services
Value in trillion $
• Soil Formation 17.1
• Recreation 3.0
• Nutrient cycling 2.3
• Water regulation & Supply 2.3
• Climate regulation 1.8
• Habitat 1.4
• Flood & storm protection 1.1
• Food and raw materials 0.8
• Genetic Resources 0.8
• Atmospheric gas balance 0.7
• Pollination 0.4
• All other services 1.6
• Total value of ecosystem services $33.3 Trillion dollars (average)
• Global GNP is ~ $18 Trillion/year

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Copyright © 2006 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings
Precepts of neoclassical economics

• Resources are infinite or substitutable.

• All of Earth’s resources are limited.
• Even unlimitless ones are limiting if we use them at a rate faster
than they can renew.
e.g. Topsoil, fossil fuels.

• Long-term effects are discounted.

• The depletion of resources will happen in the distant future – no
worries.
• Events in the future are discounted.
• Items in the present are worth more than items in the future.
• It is better to acquire resources now while they are worth more than to
let them sit and use them later.

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Precepts of neoclassical economics
• Costs and benefits are internal.
• The costs of any transaction are experience only by the buyer and the seller.
• Other members of society are not affected.
• But pollution from a factory can harm people living nearby.
• The cost of cleaning up (stream) pollution might be born not by the buyer and
seller, but by the taxpayer.
• An example of a cost that has not been accounted for
• And a cost that is external to the transaction.
• In this case, since it costs taxpayers to clean-up pollution (or in the case of G.E.,
put the fisherman out of business), this is a negative external cost.

• Growth is good.
• Economic growth is required to keep employment high and maintain social
order (keep the working masses happy).

Each of these can contribute to environmental problems.

Copyright © 2006 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings