This is Environmental Ethics: An Introduction

1 MORAL PRINCIPLES AND THE LIFE WORTH LIVING

1.1 Philosophy and the Environment

1.1.1 Philosophy and the Life Worth Living

While many disciplines have a vested interest in the environment, its inhabitants and ecosystems, its biotic diversity, and its future stability, it falls to philosophy perhaps more than to any other to offer organizing concepts for a viable—actionable, livable, realistic—environmental ethic. Ethics isn’t about what merely is the case, but what should be. As an organizing feature of our ways of life, moral decision-making always has one foot in the context or conditions of our present actions and another pointed toward the future. A life that lacks self-reflection concerning our place in the many contexts or roles we occupy, the impacts of our decisions on our relationships with others, human and nonhuman, present and future, is not as likely, as Socrates might have put it, to be a life worth living. Even from the point of view of simple self-interest, such a life is bound to reap more pain than pleasure, more sorrow than joy. The reason, of course, is that life on planet Earth includes more than human beings and human relationships. Our self-interested motives and the consequences that follow from our actions are rarely constrained to ourselves alone. Our lives include values that reach beyond the moral, for example, the aesthetic, the economic, the social, and the civic. As our recent confrontation with the Covid-19 pandemic surely reminds us, we cannot ...