Norva Y. S. Lo

Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies themoral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moralstatus of, the environment and its non-human contents. This entrycovers: the challenge of environmental ethics to theanthropocentrism embedded in traditionalwestern ethical thinking; the development of the discipline fromthe 1960s and 1970s; the connection of deep ecology, feministenvironmental ethics, animism and social ecology to politics; theattempt to apply traditional ethical theories, includingconsequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to supportcontemporary environmental concerns; the broader concerns of somethinkers with wilderness, the built environment and the politics ofpoverty; and the ethics of sustainability and climate change.