Environmental ethics investigates the moral relationship between humans and the natural environment, asking whether nature—ecosystems, species, animals, and the biosphere—has intrinsic value (value in itself) or only instrumental value (value as a means to human ends). Shallow ecology (e.g., Singer's sentience-based approach) extends moral consideration to sentient animals. Deep ecology (Naess) holds that all living things and ecosystems have intrinsic value regardless of sentience. Land ethics (Leopold) treats the biotic community as the fundamental unit of moral concern. These views challenge anthropocentrism and raise practical questions about climate obligations, biodiversity preservation, and intergenerational justice.
Read Aldo Leopold's 'The Land Ethic' (A Sand County Almanac), Peter Singer's arguments for animal liberation, and a deep ecology text. Identify what moral status is being ascribed to what entities and on what grounds in each view.
From your introduction to applied ethics, you know that applied ethics takes the conceptual tools of normative theory — consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics — and brings them to bear on specific moral problems. Environmental ethics is one of the most philosophically demanding areas of applied ethics because it forces a prior question: *who or what counts morally in the first place?* Most traditional ethical frameworks were designed with human beings in mind. Environmental ethics asks whether that anthropocentrism is justified, or whether it is a form of arbitrary moral narrowness analogous to other biases we now recognize as wrong.
The key distinction organizing the field is between intrinsic value and instrumental value. Something has instrumental value if it is valuable as a means to something else — lumber has instrumental value for building houses. Something has intrinsic value if it is valuable in itself, regardless of its usefulness. Traditional anthropocentrism grants nature only instrumental value: forests matter because humans need oxygen, biodiversity matters because it provides medicines, rivers matter because people fish in them. Environmental ethicists challenge this. Shallow ecology (Peter Singer's position is an example) extends moral consideration beyond humans to any creature capable of experiencing pleasure and pain — sentience is the criterion. Animals can suffer, therefore their suffering matters morally, regardless of their usefulness to humans. This is an important extension but still draws the moral line at sentience.
Deep ecology, developed by Arne Naess, makes a more radical claim: *all* living things have intrinsic value, not just sentient ones. Trees, fungi, ecosystems — these are not merely resources for sentient beings; they have value in themselves. The argument draws on a sense of biocentric equality: every organism has its own good, its own life-project, and the fact that humans cannot experience that good from the inside does not mean it is morally negligible. Aldo Leopold's land ethic extends the moral community even further, to the biotic community as a whole — soils, waters, plants, and animals collectively. Leopold's famous principle: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." This shifts the fundamental unit of moral concern from the individual organism to the ecological system.
These frameworks have different practical implications. Shallow ecology licenses eating factory-farmed animals only if their suffering is adequately addressed; it does not inherently condemn clear-cutting old-growth forests if no sentient creatures are harmed. Deep ecology condemns clear-cutting as intrinsically wrong even in the absence of animal suffering. Land ethics licenses some culling of deer populations if the ecosystem requires it, whereas individualist animal rights frameworks would resist. Environmental ethics also raises distinctive questions about intergenerational justice: what do we owe to future people — and future ecosystems — who don't yet exist and cannot advocate for themselves? And climate ethics: how should moral responsibility for collective, diffuse harms be distributed across billions of individual actors? These questions cannot be resolved by simply applying existing frameworks — they require extending and sometimes revising our deepest moral concepts.
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