The Ethical Examination Of Environmental Law

As the environmental problems are more and more serious , it has become people's common sense to protect the environment with law. Since 1980s in our country, environmental legislation has been developing rapidly. But to our disappointment, environmental situations haven't been better along with that environmental legislation. One of the causes is that the development of China's environmental legislation has been affected seriously by the irrational train of thought, lacking thick ethical basis. Some scholars have paid attention to that and called for a revolution to our country's environmental law, but because of all kinds of reasons, little has been done. This thesis has offered some exploration on environmental ethics, made ethical analysis of every period of the operation of our country's environmental law, and tried to find the ethical grounds of environmental law.I've employed the following ways of research: 1) the way of philosophical abstraction; 2) all kinds of ways of humane and social science, such as, the way of social investigation, the way of historical analysis, the way of system analysis, and the way of comparison; 3) the way of ecological and economic analysis.Environmental law has its particular ideas. In our opinion, the ethical ideas of environmental law are the idea of sustainable development, the idea of valuing the ecological rules and the idea of justice. The essence of sustainable development is the complete concern of human beings on the basis of self-questioning on the human essential alienation brought by traditional industrial civilization. In order to value the ecological rules, two problems must be made clear: the first one is the value of the nature; the second one is the right of the nature. "Justice" or "equity" is the value aim of law. The justice of environmental law includes "intragenerational justice" and "intergenerational justice".Making environmental law is the beginning of the operation of environmental law. So it is necessary to conduct the ethical analysis of the aims and contents of environmental legislation. The aim of our country's basic law of environmental protection doesn't agree to sustainable development, the laws on protection of natural resources only attach importance to the economic value of resources, and other departmental laws, for example, the criminal law, lack ecological sense. We think that human beings are the subjects of environmental law, who are the owners of rights and bearers of obligations in environmental law, while nature can't be the subject of law relationship. As the subjects of environmental law relationship, human beings enjoy the environmental rights. It's a certain requirement of protection of citizens' rights of living, development and freedom to remake the environmental system by putting environmental rights on the center.The correct application of environmental law not only requires that the rules of environmental law agree to legislation ethics, but also depends on environmental law enforcement and environmental law observation. In environmental law enforcement, the agencies of environment protection and management act as the holders of public power, realizing the will of the state, thus take the advantageous place. So it is an effective method to strengthen the moral building of the environmental law enforcers. In environmental law observation, many citizens are abided by law because of their moral habits. As a result, it is a requisite and guarantee of environmental law observation to breed the citizens' environmental sense.