Study On The Practical Turning Of Environmental Ethics

Environmental ethics is a kind of practical philosophy,which belongs to the area of applied ethics.The initial end for environmental ethics is to provide the philosophical explanation for the conflicts of values of the environmental movement and the proper ethical foundation for the environmental protection,leading the movement to develop further.Although series of new theories were created by the efforts of professional philosophers,such as the enlightened anthropocentrism,animal welfare ethics,bio-centrism and eco-centrism,which made environmental ethics a noted school of philosophy,environmental ethics as an academic discipline started to show the inclination of abstract,meta-philosophical and academic theoretical style.With the branch of non-anthropocentrism became the main stream,the intrinsic value of nature and nature's right became the core concepts of environmental ethics,the wilderness became the main research object and holism became the fundamental methodological principle,even a kind of dogma.Environmental ethics deviated from its initial promise and become isolated from the practice of environmentalism,so that it loses the power to put positive impact on the environmental issues in the real world.By analyzing the works of different schools of environmental ethics at different stages,this paper followed the trace of environment ethics to deviate the track of being an practical philosophy and turned back to its initial promise and analyzed the reasons to account for the the change.By introducing the new trends of the environmental ethics research in recent years,such as turning from abstract nature to human beings and the vital environmental agenda in the real world and real social life,it puts forward three routes for the turning,which represents the efforts of environmental ethics turning to be practical.Chapter one reviewed the arising of environmental ethics and its relation with modernization.Industrialization as the way of production,urbanization as the way of living and market economy as the drive for the running of the society in modern time,created the new epoch of human civilization while unfortunately led to the unprecedented tension between human beings and nature.Kinds of environmental movements sprung up to fight against the environmental crisis.In order to give proper explanation to the value conflict in the movement and provide philosophical and ethical basis for the practice of environmentalism,environment ethics arose.Chapter two reviewed all the major meta-ethical argument of environmental ethics since it was born.Then it analyzed the prosperity of environmental ethics as an academic area and its embarrassing failure to affect the real world.During the debate of the academic community of environmental ethics,non-anthropocentric value and holistic methodology gradually become the main stream.However,the prosperity of academic research can hardly conceal the weakness of environmental ethics to be applied in the practical area of environmental protection.The dogmatic theoretical principles even led to the split of the academic community for a time.The following three chapters introduces three new routes of environmental ethics,environmental pragmatism,environmental virtue ethics and environmental justice,which represent the efforts of environmental ethics to turn towards practical philosophy in recent years.Based on the classical pragmatism of America,environmental pragmatism declines the abstract research approach,which encourages to engage in policy-making on environmental regulation and the solution of public issues concerning environmental protection,making it the new methodological basis of environmental ethics as a practical philosophy.With the revival of virtue ethics,environmental virtue ethics applies the theory of virtue ethics to study what the character and virtues that human should have towards nature?How should we improve our morality during the interaction with nature?How should we apply our practical wisdom to solve the environmental problems in our lives and how to go after the excellence as human beings and keep the inter-growth and prosperity of both nature and human beings.Environmental virtue ethics relocates human beings as the active moral agents in the central place of environmental ethics study,and combines the efforts of environmental protection with the pursuing for excellence in personality so as to answer the challenges of environmental crisis and human nature crisis of our time.Environmental justice is also the core agenda of modern environmental movements.Non-anthropocentric environmental ethics had been neglected environmental justice as the core environmental ethical agenda in the real society.The research of environmental justice had extended from NIMBY to a series of topics,such as the environmental justice under the perspective of the 3rd world,the distribution of environmental goods and vices between current and future generations,the procedural justice concerning the qualification and capability of moral agents to the distribution of environmental resources and the just social order,which works as the condition to guarantee just distribution.In recent years,the study of environmental justice even extended to the out space environment with the increasing concern on the space rubbish.In the ending part,it puts forward the directions of practical turning of environmental ethics,which includes to expanding ethical agents,integration of environmental ethical values,going back to the real natural world and the real social environment that we are living in,from the divergence to convergence in theory and from isolation to synergy in practice,to cooperate with other areas to form the joint force for sustainable development and eco-civilization.It also predict the ultimate destiny of environmental ethics to disappear as an independent academic discipline with the universal acceptance of it as common consciousness of ordinary people.