ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an assessment of the ethics of persuasion as it manifests in the environmental management industry. First, it exposes the harms suffered by animals living in the wild—those fundamentally targeted by environmental management—both anthropogenic and naturogenic. Second, it focuses on paradigmatic instances of persuasive strategies used in the environmental management communication and assesses their ethical justification. It claims that even if they might qualify as ethical in the weak sense (they ensure some consistency with previously held beliefs), they nevertheless fail to qualify as ethical in the strong sense. This is because they aim at influencing individuals, groups, and society at large to do or believe something ethically unjustified: In particular, to disregard the well-being of individual wild animals, through reinforcing speciesist attitudes. Given that persuasion can only be properly ethical in the strong sense, whatever strategy furthers speciesist attitudes will turn out to be unjustified.
