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From Environmental to Ecological Ethics: Toward a Practical Ethics for Ecologists and Conservationists

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Abstract

Ecological research and conservation practice frequently raise difficult and varied ethical questions for scientific investigators and managers, including duties to public welfare, nonhuman individuals (i.e., animals and plants), populations, and ecosystems. The field of environmental ethics has contributed much to the understanding of general duties and values to nature, but it has not developed the resources to address the diverse and often unique practical concerns of ecological researchers and managers in the field, lab, and conservation facility. The emerging field of “ecological ethics” is a practical or scientific ethics that offers a superior approach to the ethical dilemmas of the ecologist and conservation manager. Even though ecological ethics necessarily draws from the principles and commitments of mainstream environmental ethics, it is normatively pluralistic, including as well the frameworks of animal, research, and professional ethics. It is also methodologically pragmatic, focused on the practical problems of researchers and managers and informed by these problems in turn. The ecological ethics model offers environmental scientists and practitioners a useful analytical tool for identifying, clarifying, and harmonizing values and positions in challenging ecological research and management situations. Just as bioethics provides a critical intellectual and problem-solving service to the biomedical community, ecological ethics can help inform and improve ethical decision making in the ecology and conservation communities.

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Notes

  1. Although there is a potentially important distinction to be made between “applied” and “practical” ethics, these terms are used interchangeably here.

  2. “Ecological” refers here to the biological and ecological research commonly conducted within the domain of the life sciences. The ecological ethics framework, however, can certainly also accommodate the dilemmas and norms of the technical and physical environmental sciences such as environmental engineering, environmental toxicology, and related fields.

  3. See Keeley [5] for a framing of this particular issue in the conservation science community.

  4. The term “ecological ethics” is often used in different ways. Most commonly, it is employed as a synonym for “environmental ethics” to describe in general the moral position dealing with values or duties toward various elements of the natural world. But it is also used as a description of a particular form of environmental ethics, e.g., one or another strand of ecotheology, or deep ecology/biocentrism (e.g., [12]. “Ecological ethics” is used here to refer not to a substantive philosophical view or an ideological stance, but to describe a practical and professional ethics for ecologists and conservationists--and thus is roughly on the same logical and institutional plane as biomedical ethics, environmental ethics, engineering ethics, and so on.

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Acknowledgments

Research for this paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF grant # SES 0527937). The authors would also like to thank Stephanie Bird, Kim Cuddington, and Elizabeth Farnsworth for their helpful suggestions and comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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  1. School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287-4501, USA

    Ben A. Minteer & James P. Collins

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  1. Ben A. Minteer
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Correspondence to Ben A. Minteer.

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Minteer, B.A., Collins, J.P. From Environmental to Ecological Ethics: Toward a Practical Ethics for Ecologists and Conservationists. Sci Eng Ethics 14, 483–501 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9087-0

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