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IB DP ESS — HL Lenses | HL Lens: Environmental Ethics | Paper 2B
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define environmental ethics and distinguish it from other branches of ethical inquiry.
- Explain the philosophical foundations of intrinsic value, instrumental value, and moral considerability in the context of non-human nature.
- Distinguish between the three major environmental worldviews — ecocentrism, anthropocentrism, and technocentrism — and explain how each frames human–environment relationships differently.
- Describe the key ethical frameworks used in environmental decision-making: utilitarianism, deontological ethics, virtue ethics, and rights-based approaches.
- Analyse real-world environmental dilemmas using contrasting ethical frameworks and worldviews, applying ESS analysis parameters including perspectives, trade-offs, and sustainability.
- Evaluate the strengths and limitations of different ethical positions when applied to environmental management decisions such as species conservation, climate policy, and resource extraction.
- Discuss the role of indigenous and non-Western ethical traditions in broadening the scope of environmental ethics beyond dominant Western philosophical frameworks.
- Justify an ethical position on a specific environmental issue using reasoned argument, named real-world examples, and awareness of competing perspectives.
Real-World Context & Relevance
In 2019, the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand became one of the first rivers in the world to be granted legal personhood — the same legal status as a human being. This was not a scientific decision. It was an ethical one, rooted in the Māori worldview that the river is an ancestor, a living entity deserving of rights independent of its usefulness to people. The New Zealand Parliament's Te Awa Tupua Act (2017) formalised this recognition, appointing human guardians to speak on the river's behalf in legal proceedings. The Whanganui case forces a profound question: does nature have value in itself, or only because humans find it useful?
Contrast this with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in which approximately 4.9 million barrels of crude oil were released into marine ecosystems, causing catastrophic damage to fisheries, coastal wetlands, and biodiversity. BP's initial response was framed almost entirely in economic and legal terms — liability, compensation, and cleanup costs — rather than in terms of the moral wrong done to the ecosystems themselves. The contrast between these two cases — a river granted rights and a sea treated as a resource to be compensated for — illustrates the central tension in environmental ethics: who or what counts morally, and why?
🌍 Why This Matters Environmental ethics is not an abstract philosophical exercise. Every environmental policy decision — from carbon pricing to species reintroduction to deep-sea mining — rests on implicit or explicit ethical assumptions about what has value, whose interests count, and what obligations we have to future generations and to non-human life. Understanding these foundations is essential for rigorous ESS analysis and for constructing well-reasoned Paper 2B essays.
Core Concepts & Definitions
Before we can evaluate competing positions on environmental issues, we need to understand what environmental ethics actually is and why it emerged as a distinct field of inquiry. Traditional Western ethics — from Aristotle to Kant to Mill — was almost exclusively concerned with relationships between human beings. The natural world appeared only as a backdrop, a resource, or a means to human ends. It was not until the ecological crises of the twentieth century — the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, the first Earth Day in 1970, and the growing scientific evidence of biodiversity loss and climate change — that philosophers began to ask seriously whether ethics needed to