ABSTRACT
Proponents of environmental ethics pay insufficient attention to the socio-economic context in which environmental problems arise and are tackled. For in modern societies most people are not directly involved in many of the interactions with the natural environment on which they depend. The ethicist assumption is that ‘bringing it about that people adopt environmentally benign attitudes will play an important part in realising solutions’. The adoption of environmentally benign principles and beliefs could still be a necessary condition of solutions, or more plausibly a condition necessary in some situations. However, the economic pressures against choosing environmentalist options will be strong and pervasive, both from firms that stand to lose money, and from workers and unions fearing loss of jobs. Environmental ethics, then, is not destined to be inert outside academic institutions. Awareness of environmentalist opinion sometimes supplies a tie-breaker between benign and more harmful policies.
