The Futures of Environmental Ethics: A comparative analysis of bio- and eco-ethics.

What has environmental ethics done? This field, where combinations of analysis and praxis come together to make sense of the human-nature moral relationship, has done much for theory-building. It has confronted the premise that humans are the center of the moral world and has introduced alternative frameworks for valuing nature such as deep ecology and ecofeminism, among others. Yet, it has also been faulted for being more of a philosophical exercise in value clarification than a practical field, it has had a limited relationship to policy and resource management, and has been accused of neglecting empirical methods of inquiry. If we think we should mitigate environmental crisis, and we think ethics can inform ethical environmental action, it is crucial that we get a clearer understanding of current states of the field. This thesis uses bioethics – a field with a notable amount of public and political influence on national and global scales – as an analytical starting point to better understand what factors may be contributing to the relative obscurity and underuse of eco-ethics outside of philosophy. It then explores a potential future for environmental ethics through the creation of at least two “spheres” of practice. This approach is loosely based around bioethics’ presence in the “spheres” of academia, the clinic, and in policy, where each sphere warrants different aims, methods and scopes of practice. This first sphere remains largely an academic enterprise focused mainly on theory building, and the second sphere relates more explicitly to “the field” via direct interaction with communities, policymakers and other stakeholders. Under this structure, eco-ethics can continue its important theoretical work but also expand into a less internalised, abstracted academic endeavour to an ethic which integrates itself in more embodied, case-based work. In this way, the future of eco-ethics need not be a total abandonment of the project of establishing non-anthropocentric valuing, but rather a diversification of methods and value based around cases uncovered directly in the field.