Welcome to our course on Environmental Management and Ethics. Today I would like to introduce you to Environmental Ethics. My name is Steffen Foss Hansen and I'm associate professor at the Technical University of Denmark, Department of Environmental Engineering. Normally, we talk about three normative ethical approaches. The first one is known as virtue ethics. It focuses on the inherent character of a person rather than the specific actions of this person. The original father of virtue ethics is often said to be Aristotle. The second major normative ethical approach that we talk about is consequentialism. The morality of an action is dependent on the outcome of this action or the results of the action. It's not the ethical considerations of the action itself that is the purpose, but whether the action and the outcome are the results of the action are good or bad. Finally, we have deontology, where decisions should be based considering factors of one's duties and other's rights. The founding father of the deontology is often said to be Immanuel Kant, whereas the founding father of consequentialism is often said to be Bentham. Very often the traditional normative approaches that we have to ethics, they take outset in humans. So the humans are the center of ethical considerations. Environmental ethics has emerged as a protest to this very anthropocentric worldview. Rather than just considering humans as subject to ethical evaluation, environmental ethics includes considerations to the environment or regarding nature in itself. So when you have to judge whether an action or a given course of actions are necessarily good or bad, you would have to include not only you, humans but also nature and the environment. So environmental ethics is a sub-discipline and very new subdiscipline of philosophy. It deals with problems surrounding environmental protection and it aims to provide ethical justification or and moral motivation for the courses of environmental protection. It thereby extends the scope of ethical concern beyond just community and nations to include all people everywhere, animals, the whole of nature, as well as future generations. Environmental ethics is often said to be interdisciplinary as it overlaps environmental politics, environmental economics, environmental sciences, as well as ethical and theological considerations. The perspectives and methodology used provide very important input from these various disciplines, and in that nature, you kind of need other disciplines in order to really grasp with environmental ethical problems and dilemmas, and vice versa, environmental ethics often offer value foundations for some of the other disciplines. Environmental ethics is also said to be plural, and different ideas and perspectives very often compete with one another simultaneously. We have terms such as anthropocentrism, animal liberation/rights theory, biocentrism, ecocentrism, and they all provide new- in some sense reasonable ethical justifications for environmental protection, but they're all clustered under what we would call the umbrella of environmental ethics. And environmental ethics is also said to be global since the ecological crisis that we face at the moment is not- It's gone beyond local. It's a global issue. Environmental pollution furthermore, does not seem to respect normal classical national boundaries, and in that sense it's a very global phenomenon. Furthermore, the problems that we face as a society- as a global society, they also very often require global solutions. And in that sense environmental ethics is global in nature. Yang from 2016 has written a very nice publication for UNESCO called Towards an Egalitarian Global Environmental Ethics, and in it- in this publication, where you can find the link down here, he states that at a practical level environmental ethics forcefully critiques the materialism, hedonism, and consumerism accompanying modern capitalism and calls instead for a green lifestyle that is harmonious with nature. He furthermore states it advocates a more equitable international economic and political order that is based on the principle of democracy, global justice, and universal rights. So in that sense you can see that environmental ethics is not just about environment, it's not just about how we approach or have we manage environment, but it's also about the broader way that we structure our lives, what we wish to achieve and how we wish to achieve these according to Yang. Of course, there might be other perspectives than Yang, but at least it gives you an impression about some of the values- some of the core ideas that people very often put under the umbrella of environmental ethics. In general, we speak about three kinds of environmental ethics that I will introduce in the subsequent lecture of the course. But for now, it's enough to know that there are three different kinds of environmental ethics that we normally discuss. The first one is land ethics, which originates from the mid of the 20th century. Then we have deep ecology, and finally we have ecofeminism which both originate from the early 70s. With that, thank you very much for your attention.
