Environmental ethics

Some environmental philosophers and ecological economists considered the reductionish approach of neoclassical economics as an ethic by itself in constrast to deontological understanding of the nature of some people in the society. Values in economic sense is narrowly defined in an atomistic, individual-driven way. But the new wave of social-environmental movement is built on rights-based approach, based either on an environmental-consequentialist mentality or absolute rights of non-human and advocating collective values.


Now there is a trend towards deontological values as an ethical basis of sustainable development. To this end, Funtowicz & Ravetz (1993) suggested that we are in the age of 'post-normal' science. Provided that the environment is a public good,they suggested that for achieving environmental sustainability, we have to move from the past utilitarian ethics and atomistic understanding of the world characterising science (both physical science and neoclassical economics) to an open, delibreractive approach emcompassing norms, values and different ethical stances of human in a collective social context. It is because past utility-based policy tools are actually an inapproriate way to deal with the environment as a public good. A self-interested individual may be willing to pay for better quality of drinking water but not global warming mitigation. Decision-makers have to think about what ethical motivations people have when dealing with global environmental problems - a different ethics is needed comparing to the exclusive economic pursit in the past few centuries.

So, there is tendency of (re)constructing a new ethics, new value theory as the world is confronted global issues like enhanced greenhouse effect. This is different from the emphasis of using technical means (by assuming high scientifc certainty) or economic tools (still based on utility maximization) in the past few decades.