Ecology, ethics and global justice

Abstract

Environmental change yields problems that require our ethical attention, but a key idea developed here is that our ecological position in the world also frames and drives our ethical concerns in more fundamental, if sometimes less obvious, ways. By learning from ecology, we can develop more appropriate ethical thinking than we otherwise might, not only regarding our treatment of the natural environment, but also regarding some fundamental questions of justice, and on a global scale. The chapter sets out an “ecological” way of seeing the place of humans in the world, as they relate both to the rest of nature and to each other. This leads to a conceptualisation of “ecological space” as what answers to the most fundamental needs of human beings, such as to be appropriately regarded as the object of a human right. It allows us to conceptualize the circumstances of justice in the world today as those of a crowded planet where some people deprive others (as well as non-humans) of access to sufficient ecological space. This way of seeing has critical implications for some influential views of justice that are premised on continuing, rather than restraining, the contemporary trajectory of economic development. For those views rest on assumptions that would seem to be contradicted by what an ecological perspective tells us about the vulnerabilities and interconnections of life on this planet.