Original scientific paper

ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS — DEVELOPMENT, POSSIBILITIES, LIMITATIONS

Tomislav Markus ; Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb

Abstract

The author gives a survey of basic concepts and approaches of familiar environmental ethicists of the English–speaking countries for the last three decades. Environmental ethics originates from the early critique of industrial expansion in North America, especially in the works of H. D. Thoreau, J. Muir and A. Leopold, but within academic circles it spreads for the last decades as a one of many reactions to the growing environmental crisis. Opinions of significant environmental ethicists are presented in this paper, like those of Baird Callicott, Holmes Rolston, Eric Katz, Andrew Light, Robin Attfield and some short items of information on other writers, who are close to the theme of environmental ethics. In his commentary, the author emphasizes that environmental ethicists have given a valuable critique of environmental destructiveness of a modern society and anthropocentric tendencies in the Western (moral) philosophy, and pointed towards many ideological inconsistencies in relation to a man toward non–human world, as well as criticizing consumerism and other environmentally destructive behaviour, and have been dedicated to the acceptance of a personal responsibility etc. The main insufficiency of their works is the refutation to accept a more radical critique of a technical civilisation, in other words the attempt to use environmental ethics for better functioning of urban and industrial societies in which have to dominate instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and consumerism. The second insufficiency is an idealistic approach, which overestimates the significance of moral ideas and underestimates the material position of anthropogenic factor – demographic and technical expansion, urbanisation, production, consumption – as main reasons of environmental destructions. Overestimation of conceptual factors, like “social justice” and “inequality”, is suitable for the justification of technical civilisation.

Keywords

environmental ethics; anthropocentrism; ecocentrism; idealism; technical civilisation

Hrčak ID:

29016

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/29016

Publication date:

15.3.2004.

Article data in other languages: croatian german

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