published on January 11, 2025

Was Environmental Ethics a Mistake?

Steven Vogel¡¯s work makes two main points: 1) environmental philosophy should be about environments that are always, at least partially, human built, rather than about a nonhuman nature and 2) environmental problems require collective political solutions rather than individual ethical ones. This paper addresses both themes, although its primary focus is on the second. It presents a sort of genealogy of environmental ethics, which seeks to answer the question, why, given the obviously political character of environmental problems, have English-language environmental philosophers focused so intently on ethics? It is argued the dominance of environmental ethics amongst philosophers reflects an uninvestigated commitment to liberal, individualist, political principles. That is, the implicit rejection of politics in favor of ethics is itself a (tacit) political decision with real political and environmental ramifications. I then turn to Vogel¡¯s work, in which he commits an analogous, but lesser, mistake, accepting J¨¹rgen Habermas¡¯s view of politics which is itself, in many ways, a reformulation of the same liberal political views that have misled so many environmental ethicists.