Environmental Ethics is the philosophy revolving around the environment and decisions that impact the environment. Although it covers a vast realm of environmental questions and topics, one of the most intriguing questions, and arguably most important, are those that entail our moral obligations to the environment. These questions are broad, so to answer concretely, they must be categorized into four separate questions to be analyzed. First, what are our individual obligations to just the Earth, independent of humans. Second, what are our individual obligations to maintain the Earth for the sake of the people who currently inhabit it. Third, what are our obligations to maintain Earth for the sake of the people who will inhabit it. Finally, what are our obligations to ensure a fair distribution of environmental burdens and benefits. With the exception of ensuring a fair distribution of environmental burdens, it was determined that we have some form of moral obligation to maintain the Earth for the sake of the Earth, humans, and future humans at a proportional rate to which we contribute to its deterioration.

All moral obligations discussed in this paper will be individual moral obligations. A moral obligation means that you have to do something for it to be considered right, and to not do it would be morally wrong. In order to establish a moral obligation, one must contribute to a harm, even if they don’t cause it directly. If that harm is impacting something of value, then they are indirectly causing that harm and they have a moral obligation to mitigate their actions contributing to the harm. The actions taken should be proportionate to their contribution to the harms. This line of reasoning will be followed and explained further throughout the paper, but once a fact is proven, it will be taken as true for the remainder of the paper.

As individuals, we have a moral obligation to maintain the natural environment for the sake of the Earth. As technology has evolved, more and more natural resources are consumed, and there is only a finite amount of natural resources. Human actions are releasing greenhouse gasses, through activities such as fracking or the excess use of water and electricity. These actions use the resources of the Earth and release harmful fossil fuels, which break away at the ozone layer. The ozone layer prevents sunlight from disastrously warming up the Earth, so with its gradual diminishment, the Earth is slowly heating up. Because it is so gradual, the warming of the Earth cannot be felt, but it is still present. This warming upsets the equilibrium of many ecosystems, specifically of tundra ecosystems. Global warming melts the ice and raises water levels leading to floods, which destroys the habitat of many animals like penguins and polar bears. Throughout this paper, global warming and climate change will be used interchangeably.

It is clear that there is a problem on the Earth caused by human actions. But we also need to prove that the Earth has value from within, independent of humans, commonly referred to as intrinsic value. The Earth is composed of thousands of different types of animals, plants, and bugs, all residing in various habitats. Each organism preys on another, with the sun growing the plants to be eaten by the bugs. The bugs are eaten by the small animals eaten by the bigger animals, with every organism playing an exact role in this complex web of energy transfer. It is the complex system and its interactions that gives the Earth intrinsic value. The interconnection that permeates all of nature, matched with the cyclic transfer of energy throughout the Earth proves that it possesses intrinsic value. When something heavily disrupts that interconnected ecosystem, such as global warming, that value is harmed. We are each contributing to harming the Earth, which matters due to its possession of intrinsic value.

Now that Earth is proven to have intrinsic value and global warming caused by human actions harms that value, the only question remaining is whether or not humans have an obligation to minimize that harm. Some arguments can be made that one must directly cause the harm in order for them to have a moral obligation to decrease the harm. However, just because someone doesn't directly cause harm doesn’t mean they don’t have a moral obligation. In this case, you contribute to the problem as you commit actions that lead to global warming. It may be true that your actions themselves don’t directly cause global warming, but in the end, they contribute to the problem. Even if that contribution may be infinitesimally small, you are still contributing. If everyone changed their actions accordingly, then global warming would not be threatening the Earth. Ultimately, you are responsible for your actions and for the impact they have. If your actions are a part of a harmful cause, then there is a moral obligation to not contribute to that cause. Therefore, people have a moral obligation to refine their behavior to not contribute to global warming since it harms the Earth, which possesses intrinsic value. If the Earth had no intrinsic value, then we could harm it all we wanted; its possession of intrinsic value makes it morally wrong to harm it.

Our moral obligations exist because we are part of the problem, even if we are not the sole cause. Logically, it follows that the preventive measures taken should be reducing our actions that contribute to global warming. We have no obligation to protest or to write to our congressman, since that has nothing to do with our actions that we commit. So it can be summarized that our moral obligations to maintain the Earth extend only to reducing our personal footprint. The actions that we are morally obligated to take involve things like not wasting water or electricity. Using only the electricity or water necessary would fulfill your moral obligation, even though it doesn’t end global warming. Your moral obligation extends to how much you contribute to global warming. If you waste a lot of water, for example, then you would have a heavier moral obligation than someone who wastes little water. Simply put, your moral obligation is directly proportional to how much you contribute to global warming.

The second obligation to be examined is maintaining the Earth for the sake of humans who currently rely on the Earth as a source of their needs. As previously discussed, global warming is becoming an increasing problem. The warming of the planet and emission of harmful gasses is a reality that is slowly making our planet less and less hospitable. As already shown, global warming will harm the environment and cause the glaciers to melt, resulting in disastrous floods and famines. Naturally, less developed countries are more susceptible to these floods and famines, and they will therefore be most impacted by these harmful consequences of global warming. However, those undeveloped countries are not the ones causing this climate change; it is the developed countries, like the United States or China who are causing it. So there are developed countries harming the environment, and in turn innocent undeveloped countries are being harmed. Put another way, it is citizens of developed countries contributing to global warming, and in turn disproportionately harming citizens of undeveloped countries.

As already discussed, it is the individuals in each of these developed countries who are contributing to the problem, not one individual or one country who is directly causing it. We contribute to it simply by partaking in the actions that, when performed in a group, cause global warming, and therefore are consequently responsible for the harmful effects. Similar to having a moral obligation to the Earth, we also have a moral obligation to the current people who rely on the Earth, specifically those who are in undeveloped cause and are disproportionately harmed by our actions. This is because, much like the Earth, every human has intrinsic value. The Earth has intrinsic value because of its unique interactions and interconnectedness of the world ecosystem. Similarly, each human is a unique and incredibly complex person with a set of values, characteristics, and personality that provides it with intrinsic value. Contributing to something that harms a human is wrong since the human has intrinsic value. Therefore, it is morally wrong to contribute to global warming since it harms humans, so we have a moral obligation to maintain the Earth for the sake of humans currently living on it.

With a moral obligation to maintain the Earth for the sake of current humans, we must also establish a course of action to fulfill this obligation. Quite simply, this can be accomplished in the same way that we resolved our moral obligation to the Earth, as both stem from the same problem. We must reduce our global footprint and stop contributing to global warming. Once again, this should be done by not using resources beyond our minimum demands, such as not taking excessively long showers or wasting electricity. We also must change our actions by the amount we contribute to global warming; if we contribute heavily, then we must make heavy changes to our actions, and vice versa. This will ultimately minimize our contribution to the harm of global warming, discharging our obligation to people currently living on Earth.

Now our third question arises as to whether or not we have an obligation to maintain the Earth for future human beings. Essentially, this is the same question as before, but current humans are replaced with future humans. As previously proven, we have an obligation to maintain the Earth for the sake of current human beings. The problem of global warming is getting increasingly and increasingly worse, so it will have an even more disastrous impact on future human beings. “Future” is a relative term, but we can assume this is at least one generation in the future. By then, ecosystems will be altered, species will be extinct, floods and famine will be even more rampant; the world will be very different from the one we know today. Pretty much universally, it can be agreed that if we continue down the current road, future human beings will have a massive problem facing them, one that we’ve contributed to.

The question that sets this apart from the previous question is “do future human beings have value”. If future people have value, then harming them is morally wrong and we have a moral obligation to not contribute to global warming. Future people don’t exist, so it could easily be thought that they have no value. However, future people possess what is known as potential intrinsic value. They will have the same intrinsic value that current people have once they’re born, so for the time-being they possess potential intrinsic value. This simply means they have the potential to possess intrinsic value. Because they have the potential to have intrinsic value, their needs must be considered, no different than a living human. Operating under the assumption that future human beings have potential intrinsic value, we have a moral obligation to not contribute to global warming and harm them.

Our actions taken to fulfill our obligation to future humans is exactly the same as the other two obligations. We need to change our actions so that we don’t contribute to climate change, and we must do this at a corresponding amount to our contribution. By minimizing our contribution to climate change, we are no longer harming the value of future humans, and our moral obligation has been satisfied.

Finally, we need to look at our moral obligations of equally distributing environmental burdens. Environmental injustice can come in many forms, both on a micro and macroscopic scale. We have already examined it on the macro scale, with undeveloped countries being disproportionately impacted by global warming. Environmental injustice also exists on a microscopic scale, most notably environmental racism. Environmental burdens can be exposure to hazardous waste or pollution, often stemming from factories or power plants, which in turn reduce air quality or access to fresh water. These burdens disproportionately impact poor or black communities, since it is often cheaper to build the waster-producing factories near lower income houses. Much of this lower income housing, historically speaking, is taken up by the black community, so they are impacted more than other communities. It is not fair for these environmental burdens to be dumped, literally, on certain ethnic or socioeconomic classes. Morally, this environmental racism is wrong and certainly poses a real problem that must be addressed.

With the problem of environmental injustice being established, we can now examine our moral obligation to spread the burdens more fairly. The key difference in this moral obligation compared to the other three is that we are not contributing the problem here. In each of the others, we contributed to the harm in some capacity; we committed acts that contributed to climate change. With that contribution, we therefore were partly, no matter how infinitesimally small, responsible for global warming. This is why we have a moral obligation, and this is the defining trait in order to have a moral obligation. If one does not contribute to a harm, as is the case with environmental injustice, then they do not have a moral obligation to resolve the harm. The harm is unfair distribution of environmental burdens. We might contribute to climate change, but we have no impact on how the harms of climate change are distributed. Even though we may be able to try to act against environmental injustice, and it certainly might be ideal for us to do, we have no moral obligation to do so, for the simple fact that we don’t contribute to it. Some would argue that you have the ability to remediate environmental injustice, so you are morally obligated to do so. Simply having the ability to resolve a problem does not morally obligate you to do so. It may be a problem, and you may be able to resolve it or lessen it, but you are not contributing to it, and without that key element, there cannot be a moral obligation present.

Moral obligations to the environment and its inhabitants is a tricky subject. Ultimately, our moral obligations depend on our contributions to the problem, on a proportional basis. If we contribute a lot to the problem, then we have a heavy moral obligation proportional to our contribution, and vice versa. As far as maintaining the Earth for the sake of the Earth, current humans, and future humans, we do have moral obligation since we do in fact contribute to the deterioration of the Earth in some capacity. We do not contribute to the uneven and unfair distribution of environmental burdens, so we lack a moral obligation to evenly distribute those burdens.