Environmental Ethics

Kees Vromans’ environmental ethics has five other editors and seven additional contributors. Among the three books under review, given it is a learning guide, it is the most pedagogically well-crafted book. Its preface discusses environmental ethics and the author’s `Environmental Ethics Project’ (www.env-ethics.com). Lesson one of the first chapter —introduction to environmental ethics— starts with a case study on `Clean and Clean Chemical Inc.’. The chapter comprehensively explains why environmental ethics is important and how this relates to real-live problems such as, for example, management. The chapter has three parts: the complexity of environmental problems; the socio-economical background; and the history of environmentalism. Each section closes with `Check Your Understanding of the Lesson’. This structure is repeated in the subsequent chapters: 2. ethics – the search for decision criteria, 3. the challenge to environmental ethics; 4. main approaches to envi- ronmental ethics; 5. the need for political and legal regulation; and 6. from environmental ethics to sustainable decision-making. The book concludes with a summary. Overall, the book provides an accomplished, easy-to-read and understandable introduction to the key issues related to environmental ethics. Having outlined the complexities associated with environmental ethics, the book prefers a somewhat utilitarian definition of ethics, e.g. `good or not good ends’ while also discussing the non-utilitarian philosophy of Kant. However, the book somewhat negates perhaps the world’s greatest moral philosopher – Aristotle. It mentions `deep ecology’ in passing while lacking Bookchin’s most illuminating and far-reaching work on environmental ethics. Nonetheless, the authors define environmental ethics in three ways: i) as a condition of life; ii) by having intrinsic value; and m) as a means of production. The authors also outline the two main perspectives on environmental ethics: the anthropocentric and the non-anthropocentric view. The distinction is whether only human beings have value (anthropocentric) or whether other elements of nature and environment also have value in-itself to use a Kantian term (non-anthropocentric). Chapter three discusses the ethics of resources, animal ethics, and the ethics of nature while dividing environmental ethics into a philosophical level (ethics), a political-legal level (laws), and a causalistic level (single cases and actions). The book also explains ethical decision-making, and why we need political-legal regulation and the regulation of environ- mental behaviour. In other words, environmental ethics can never be separated from the economic, political, and managerial realm. On that, the book suggests three steps for environment decision-making: i) description and analysis; ii) assessment; and m) justification with a proposal for a `six hat thinking’ creating a multi-perspective viewpoint on environ- mental ethics. Overall, the introduction to environmental ethics presented as a well-crafted pedagogically useful `learning guide’ providing a thoughtful and commendable introduction to environmental ethics. -- Thomas Klikauer, Philosophy of Management, Volume 13, Number 1, 2014