Callicott Multicultural Environmental Ethics

NE MAIN APPROACH to a theory of environmental ethics is “anthropocentricism”—that is, the human-centered approach. A single individual’s actions with regard to the environment may have an impact on all human beings. We are outraged by a direct assault perpetrated by one human being against another, especially if the perpetrator is more powerful and privileged than the victim. When the assault, however, is indirect, mediated by a vector of some sort, then our moral sensibilities may remain untouched, especially if the powerful and privileged perpetrators work to direct attention away from the causal chain of events beginning with their actions and ending with injury to the weaker and poorer. As Donald Brown notes in his essay in this issue of Dædalus, there is another, by now well-developed, way of thinking about environmental ethics—the nonanthropocentric approach. If nature has “intrinsic value,” if it is a “sacred object . . . it should not be treated in a cost-benefit analysis,” even if we justly consider the costs and benefits from the point of view of all human parties affected, poorer people as well as richer, and future human generations too. The idea of justice for all human beings is not new to most world religions, but many have only just begun to explore the conceptual resources of their sacred texts or oral traditions for a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic. This search for faith-based environmental ethics—whether an-