Environmental Ethical Issues

Environmental Ethics web journal readings for this week.

We need ethics in our society. We are faced with ethical and moral decisions in our everyday lives. Ethics is the study of right and wrong choices that we make. We recognize the existence of moral standards for all humans regardless of personal desires and preferences. Most people recognize that guidelines and general rules should exist between individuals when they interact with one another because if they did not, nothing in our lives would be predictable or safe. That is the reason why we have laws, not only to protect people, but they are based on ethics. Ethics goes further that laws, is a way of living, even if the laws were not around, ethics is what will guide people to make the moral choice of what is considered to be right or wrong. So even in a society that has so many laws, ethics is still important, as ethics are in an essential part of the foundation on which our society is build. Ethics are recognized standards of behavior, and our society will behave according to these standards, not merely by the laws. Ethics are standards of behavior. People need to know that besides actual laws, there are some basic, common ethics or principles of what is right and what is wrong that everyone agrees upon and usually follows or lives by. Ethics is sometimes called moral philosophy because it is concerned with what is morally good and bad or what is right and wrong. When we think of ethics, it is not only limited to human relations, but it also concerns everything that surrounds us. Our earth, and everything that lives in it, is also part of our ethical world. As a specialized part of ethics, environmental ethics is concerned with the morality (right and wrong) of human actions as they affect the environment and the natural world we live in.

We can associate the beginnings of today's environmental ethics with the first Earth Day held on April 22, 1970, in the United States. Organizers around the country rallied and demonstrated to make people and political leaders aware of the importance of caring for and preserving the environment. That first Earth Day launched the beginning of an environmental awareness in the United States and later around the world. It made many people realize that some sense of environmental responsibility should be developed and applied to our daily lives. (Environmental Ethics).

System that holds that all forms of life: