Environmental Ethics

Environmental Ethics
May L. Lopez
Introduction to Ethics & Social Responsibility (ABJ1034B)

Robert Wengrzyn
30 AUG 2010

Ethics and Our world

To describe ethics and how it has shaped our world is a vast and open area. Ethics has been around for centuries if not to the beginning of time. Ethics can be found in everything that we do or say.
In the beginning of civilization people were not really given the freedom to think for themselves. Everything was a command and if you did not obey then you were tortured or killed. Everything had its place in life. People knew their place in life and so there were no confrontations. As time went by people began to think for them self and were able to move out from under the rule of a higher human command. Ethics than became more of a “spiritual counterpart of medicine, its function to provide care of the soul as medicine provides the care of the body.” After a while there was great spiritual influence.   People pondered whether God had a plan and how it affected mankind.   As mankind came in to their own. They questioned life, and the world around them. The population noticed that everything had a purpose and tried to make it something that they could understand more easily.   Science and scientific theory’s came along at a higher more powerful rate, and with that more probing to find an answer to everything. Why is the sky blue? Why do apples fall from tress? How can one brother be a good man when the other is evil? There were many questions with many ethical answers.
Today we had more sources and reasoning behind everything. That in it can become very confusing. “Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its nonhuman contents”.   One of the huge environmental issues surrounding us today is the huge oil spill in the gulf right now. We as consumers need oil to make and use so many of our... [continues]

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