Though largely a theoretical endeavour, environmental ethics also has a practical agenda to help humans achieve environmental sustainability. Environmental ethicists have extensively debated the grounds, contents and implications of our moral obligations to nonhuman nature, offering up different notions of an ‘environmental ethic’ with the presumption that, if humans adopt such an environmental ethic, they will then engage in less environmentally damaging behaviours. We assess this presumption, drawing on psychological research to discuss whether or under what conditions an environmental ethic (...) might engender pro-environmental behaviour. We focus discussion on three lines of scholarship in the environmental ethics literature, on 1) intrinsic value, 2) care ethics, and 3) the land ethic. We conclude by commenting generally on both the limits and transformative potential of an environmental ethic in its larger sociocultural context. (shrink)

In the first place, I propose to specify the debate between non-anthropocentrists and anthropocentrists as one between those who defend that the environment has intrinsic value, that is, value that while independent of all relation to human beings is still morally binding, and those who deny this, i.e., assert that the environment only has extrinsic value. I argue for the second option but claim that this should not be an obstacle to address some of the worries of environmental ethics, since (...) extrinsic value is not limited to instrumental value. In this regard, I present sentimentalism as an alternative according to which there are ways of valuing things as ends in themselves and not only as means. (shrink)