Ethics & the Environment

Scientists are warning of environmental catastrophe. The Enlightenment’s “instrumental” view of nature has led to terrible exploitation that environmental education has failed to stop. A new generation of ethicists now argues that we need an environmental ethic — that we have moral obligations to the environment just as we have to each other.

But can we possibly have ethical obligations to animals, to rivers, to trees? You can’t derive an ought from an is, but faced with the is of environmental destruction, a remarkable spectrum of secular and religious thinkers is doing just that.