ABSTRACT
Environmental ethics, as an applied ethics, may be regarded as an application of some general ethical theory to specific environmental issues. Alternatively, as traditional ethical theories are basically limited to human beings as moral patients (recipients of action), environmental ethics can also be seen as their expansion, to include the non-human parts of the ecosystem among moral patients. In either case, environmental ethics is closely related to general moral theories. Similar to ethics in general, consequentialism, which focuses on the consequences of actions, and deontology, which focuses on moral rules or principles, dominated much of the initial development of environmental ethics. However, virtue ethics, which focuses on the characters of moral agent, has now become a powerful alternative in environmental discourses (Hill 1983, van Wensveen 2000; Thoreau 1951; Carson 1956; Bardsley 2013), partially due to its own attractiveness and partially due to the respective deficiencies of deontology (see Kant 1997: 212; O’Neill 1993: 22-24; Sandler 2007: 113) and consequentialism (see Zwolinski and Schimdtz 2013), either in these theories themselves or in their applications/expansions to environmental issues.
