(a) What is meant by ‘environmental ethics’? Why is it important to study? Discuss any one environmental issue from the viewpoint of environmental ethics. (150 words) (b) Differentiate between the following: (200 words) (i) Law and ethics (ii) Ethical management and management of ethics (iii) Discrimination and preferential treatment (iv) Personal ethics and professional ethics
Subtopic: Ethics Theory · environmental ethics and key distinctions
How to structure your answer
Written within the word limit
242 words · target 250 words · 20 min
(a) Environmental ethics
Environmental ethics studies the moral relationship of human beings with the natural environment and the moral status of non-human life. It matters because it extends moral concern beyond humans (anthropocentrism) to other species and ecosystems (biocentrism, ecocentrism), grounds intergenerational responsibility, and provides a value-basis for laws and lifestyles that markets and short-term politics ignore. Issue, climate change: from an environmental-ethics view, high-emitting generations and nations impose harms on the poor, on future generations and on other species who did not cause the problem, raising duties of climate justice, equity and stewardship (the 'common but differentiated responsibilities' principle).
(b) Differentiations
- Law and ethics: law is the state-enforced minimum with external sanctions; ethics is a wider, internally binding standard of right conduct, an act can be legal yet unethical, or ethical yet illegal.
- Ethical management and management of ethics: ethical management means running an organisation by ethical values in every decision; management of ethics means the systems (codes, training, ethics committees) put in place to promote ethical behaviour, one is practice, the other is machinery.
- Discrimination and preferential treatment: discrimination is unjust, arbitrary disadvantaging on irrelevant grounds; preferential treatment is a justified, compensatory advantage to correct historic disadvantage (e.g., reservation), reasonable classification, not hostility.
- Personal ethics and professional ethics: personal ethics are one's private moral values; professional ethics are role-specific obligations (confidentiality, impartiality) that may sometimes override personal preference.
Environmental ethics and these distinctions together sharpen judgment where rules alone are silent.
What an examiner expects to see
- Environmental ethics = moral relationship between humans and nature; studies the moral status of non-human life.
- Importance: extends moral concern beyond humans, grounds intergenerational duty and gives a value-basis for law and lifestyle.
- Spectrum: anthropocentrism → biocentrism → ecocentrism.
- Climate change as an ethics issue: those least responsible (poor, future generations, other species) bear the worst harm, climate justice.
- Law vs ethics: law = enforced minimum with external sanction; ethics = wider, internal standard.
- Ethical management (practising values) vs management of ethics (codes/systems to promote ethics).
- Discrimination (arbitrary, unjust) vs preferential treatment (justified compensatory advantage); personal ethics (private values) vs professional ethics (role obligations).
Concrete cases, schemes and judgments
- 'Common but differentiated responsibilities' (CBDR) principle in UNFCCC/Paris Agreement.
- Reservation under Articles 15(4)/16(4) as justified preferential treatment, not discrimination.
- Chipko movement and Bishnoi ethic as lived environmental ethics.
- Nolan principles / organisational ethics codes as 'management of ethics'.
- Aldo Leopold's 'Land Ethic' extending moral community to soil, water and biota.