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IB DP ESS — HL Lenses: Environmental Ethics | HL Only | Paper 2B
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define environmental ethics, social justice, intergenerational equity, and environmental justice using IB-aligned ESS terminology.
- Explain the key ethical frameworks — consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, and care ethics — and how each applies to environmental decision-making.
- Distinguish between anthropocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric ethical perspectives and their implications for environmental policy.
- Analyse how environmental burdens and benefits are distributed unequally across society, using the concepts of environmental justice and procedural justice.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of ethical frameworks in addressing real-world environmental issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
- Discuss the tensions between development, social equity, and environmental protection from multiple perspectives including indigenous, LEDC, and MEDC viewpoints.
- To what extent can ethical reasoning alone resolve conflicts between economic growth and ecological sustainability?
Real-World Context & Relevance
In 2019, Cyclone Idai struck Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, killing over 1,000 people and displacing nearly 3 million. Mozambique contributes less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet its coastal communities face some of the most severe consequences of a climate crisis they did not create. This stark disparity — between those who cause environmental damage and those who suffer its consequences — sits at the heart of environmental ethics and social justice. It forces us to ask not just "what is happening to the environment?" but "who is responsible, and who bears the cost?"
The same pattern repeats across scales. In the United States, a 2018 study by the Environmental Protection Agency found that Black Americans are exposed to 1.54 times more particulate matter pollution than the overall population, despite contributing proportionally less to industrial emissions (EPA, 2018). In the Niger Delta, Shell Oil's operations have caused oil spills affecting over 1,000 km² of wetland ecosystems, devastating the livelihoods of Ogoni communities who had no meaningful voice in the decisions that led to that destruction (Amnesty International, 2017). These are not merely environmental problems — they are ethical problems, and understanding them requires a systematic framework for moral reasoning.
🌍 Why This Matters Environmental ethics provides the philosophical foundation for every major international environmental agreement, from the Paris Agreement to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Without ethical frameworks, environmental policy reduces to a competition between economic interests. Social justice dimensions — who benefits, who suffers, who decides — determine whether environmental solutions are durable, equitable, and legitimate. IB ESS students who can reason through these frameworks are equipped to evaluate real environmental governance, not just describe it.
Core Concepts & Definitions
Before we can evaluate whether a policy is "right" or "fair," we need to understand what we mean by those terms. Ethics is the branch of philosophy concerned with questions of right and wrong, good and bad, and how we ought to act. When applied to the environment, ethics asks: what moral obligations do humans have toward nature, toward other species, and toward future generations? The answers to these questions are not obvious — they depend on underlying assumptions about what has value, who counts morally, and how we weigh competing interests.
📖 Key Definition — Environmental Ethics Environmental ethics is the philosophical discipline that considers the moral relationship between human beings and the natural environment, including questions about the intrinsic and instrumental value of nature, the moral status of non-human species, and the obligations of present generations to future ones.
Environmental ethics is not a single theory but a family of competing frameworks, each offering a different answer to the question of what we owe to nature and to each other. These frameworks have direct practical consequences: they underpin the arguments made in international climate negotiations, biodiversity treaties, and