• It can create a climate of support for attitudes that harm women

• Sex discrimination

Environmental Ethics: is the discipline that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its nonhuman contents

Anthropocentrism:

A human-centered perspective: humans only (or mainly) have intrinsic value

Nature or environment has no value in itself: the value of nature is measured by how it affects human beings

Human Environmental Impact:

Four examples:

• Global Warming

• Ozone Depletion

• Waste Disposal and Pollution

• Wilderness Preservation

Global Warming:

Greenhouse Effect: the burning of fossil fuels (by industry, automobile exhaust…) spread into the atmosphere gases that prevent the sun’s infrared rays from radiating back into space. The trapped solar radiation contributes to increased air temperature.

Possible Solutions:

• Better public transportation

• Alternative Sources of power (such as bio-fuel, wind, solar. What about nuclear?)

• Carbon Tax

Ozone Depletion: this is a gas present in the upper reaches of the stratosphere that protects us from the damaging effects of excessive ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which causes for example skin cancer.

Waste Disposal and Pollution:

• We produce an enormous amount of garbage every day, but where do we put it? Usually we don’t want to live nearby a dump,

• E-waste (outdated cell phones, TVs and computers) containing a huge amount of toxins

• Air and water pollution produced by industries and automobiles causing serious health problems like allergies and tumors

Possible solutions:

• Recycling

• Reduction of emissions through strict legislation

Problems:

• Costs

• Developing countries

Wilderness Preservation:

• John Muir opposed utilitarian policies

• Destroying nature is destroying God’s work; he founded the Sierra Club – an environmental organization;

• Nature deserves to exist for its own sake, regardless of its usefulness for human beings

Ecocentrism: a set of theories promoting the idea that not only humans have intrinsic value

• Humans should not disturb natural processes; wildlife are natural (let them happen), hence regenerating

• Humans should not make profits from natural things (trees); cutting trees, especially large trees, is wrong, trees have the same right to live as humans

An Ecosystem: is a “whole of interacting parts within a circumscribed locale”, it has:

• Integrity (a unit of interdependent elements combining to make a whole with a unique character)

• Stability (it changes only gradually)

• Beauty (harmony and well-ordered form, or unity in diversity)

Arne Naess: a holistic view of nature. It requires that any intrusion in nature in order to change it requires a justification

Sustainable Development: the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long- term ecological balance

Problem: The conflict between economic reasons in developing countries and environmental issues

Animal Rights:

Sentience: Jeremy Bentham said that in order to think about the ethical status of animals we do not need to ask whether they can speak, but whether they can suffer. Obviously the answer is positive, animals can suffer, and we can also add that they have emotions

Laws against cruelty

Should we only be bound by the idea of not causing pain? For example, not being cruel with animals just for the pleasure of being cruel

Obviously animals cannot claim to have rights, but also future generations cannot claim they have rightsà not moral actors, but moral patients

The idea of rights for animals may be derived from the fact that animals have interests: not to respect the interests of animals has been defined as “Speciesism” by Peter Singer

Bioethics

Model I: Interdisciplinary bioethics

• Bioethics investigates ethical issues arising in the life sciences (medicine, health care, genetics, biology, biotechnology, ecology) through multi-disciplinary enquiry

Model II: Philosophical bioethics

• Bioethics investigates ethical issues arising in the life science by applying the principles of moral philosophy to these issues