The deep and lasting changes to human behaviour that are required to address the global environmental crisis necessitate profound shifts in moral foundations. They amount to a change in what individuals and societies conceive of as progress. This imperative raises important questions about the justification, ends, and means of large-scale changes in people’s ethics. In this essay I will focus on the ends—the direction of moral change as prescribed by the goal of sustainable human flourishing. I shall present a meta-ethical (...) critique of anthropocentrism and propose that only an ecocentric ethic can support the sustainable flourishing of humanity. This proposition does not necessarily contradict itself. My claim will be that the values subsumed under the broad concept of anthropocentrism are categorically counterproductive, informing an undesirable concept of “progress”. I support this claim with two lines of argument. On the one hand, the end values of anthropocentrism are shallow and the “flourishing of humanity” is ill-defined. The conceptual constraints of anthropocentrism itself preclude a more concise definition which would take into account the utter dependence of the flourishing of humanity on the health of ecological support structures. On the other hand, pursuing the values that inform the actions of anthropocentrists (which may be identical with the “flourishing of humanity”) leads to unintended and undesirable outcomes, even from the view of the anthropocentrist herself. Those problems are not encountered with an ecocentric ethic, and the conceptual steps necessary to adopt it are not insurmountable. (shrink)

Even if contemporary liberal political thought fails to provide an adequate basis for environmental protection, investigating its environmental implications may be a worthy enterprise, if only to foster discussion among liberal thinkers about the obligation to protect the environment. Examination of four contemporary liberal views of distributive justice?those of Rawls, Arneson, Sen, and the libertarians?shows that in these theories, environmental protection turns either on obligations to future generations or on the rights of individuals. The extent of environmental protection the four (...) views implicitly require may be quite extensive, and is probably far beyond what proponents of each view might have imagined. (shrink)