Ethics and Sustainability, a lecture delivered by UCI Professor Richard A. Matthew on February 16, 2010. Global environmental change poses significant challenges to human welfare and security. This is not simply a technical matter to be resolved through innovation and adaptation, but one that also involves ethical reflection and practice. Progress on investigating the ethical dimensions of environmental change has been slow for two key reasons. First, so much environmentalism cloaks itself in a discourse of prudence and security that moral concerns tend to be side-stepped or minimized. Second, many scholars of environmental ethics concentrate on the harm humans to do the natural world, encouraging us to assign intrinsic value to nature and extend moral concern to other species. As important as this line of inquiry may be, it has been criticized for ignoring and even trivializing the needs of the poor and vulnerable. The concept of sustainable development suggests other ways of linking ethics and the environment. It explicitly asks us to think about how to reduce poverty and improve the welfare and security of the world's poor while protecting the natural resources and ecosystems that development practices often overexploit and damage. It also asks us to consider the world future generations will inherit. And it demands that we explore the many ways humans exploit and harm each other through the medium of nature.
Author: Richard Matthew
Title: Associate Professor and Director
Department: Department of Planning, Policy and Design
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