ABSTRACT
The word ethics comes from the Greek ethos, for custom, but ethics has long meant prescribing, and not simply describing, what our customs ought to be. Studying ethics, the author suggest, is like hiking on a (conceptual) mountain, where the wider paths reflect the main traditions of ethical thought, and the narrower trails branching off these paths represent the arguments of individuals. To offer an overview of moral philosophy, this author lead us along paths that reflect four patterns of thought, which he identify by the keywords duty, character, relationships, and rights, and a fifth path identified by the keyword consequences. Traditional ethics is about human life in societies. The natural world, which is center stage in environmental ethics, has for centuries been merely the backdrop for the drama of moral philosophy. The discipline of environmental ethics took off in the 1970s, in response to the environmental movement protesting air and water pollution.
