and Mathijs 2014a, 2014b; Kenis 2016; Pepermans and Maeseele 2016). Moreover, these authors propose the urgent re-politicization of environmental issues, especially those related to climate change, as only the critical perspective is capable of providing tools for socio-ecological change.
1.3.2. Environmental ethical issues
Environmental ethics is a value system that aims to guide human action in the environmental field. In terms of power relations, while environmental ethics has focused on the relationship between humans and nature, this has mainly been by criticizing the vision of humans dominating nature (Ballet et al. 2013).
1.3.2.1. Environmental ethics: a democratic deliberation rich in political teachings
A meta-ethical analysis of environmental ethics (Létourneau 2010) shows the presence of two positions: principled positions and situational (contextual) positions.
Larrère (2010) identifies biocentrism and ecocentrism as the two main currents of principled position in environmental ethics:
– biocentric ethics is opposed to a position that recognizes moral dignity only for human beings (anthropocentrism). Its ambition is to show that natural entities possess intrinsic value, by substituting a multiplicity of individuality for the anthropocentric duality of the opposition between humans and things. It insists above all on the principle of the equal status of all living beings;
– ecocentric ethics considers that value should be given not to individual entities but to the biotic community as a whole by advancing the formula that “something is right when it tends to preserve integrity, the stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is unjust when it leans in the opposite direction” (Leopold, quoted by Larrère 2010, p. 408). Unlike biocentrism, ecocentric environmental ethics emphasizes the interdependence of elements in biotic communities: it is indeed a holistic ethics that opposes the individualism of biocentric ethics.
The main characteristics of biocentrism (intrinsic value) and ecocentrism (biotic community) are also at the origin of the criticisms put forward for these two trends in environmental ethics. For biocentrism, Larrère (2010) raises the question of the capacity of such an overly individualistic approach to respond to the needs of a nature protection policy that necessarily involves choices between several possible scenarios and where the protection of the environment is not a priority and where the protection of nature necessarily implies the consideration of complex entities such as populations, ecosystems and landscapes.
For ecocentrism, the consequentialism adopted, which measures the quality of an action by its effects on the biotic community, tends to sacrifice individuals to the common good of the community, whereby humans are doubly sacrificed as individuals and as a species.
Both of these trends in environmental ethics are based on the condemnation of anthropocentrism. They are opposed to a narrow vision of the conception of instrumental value that does not take into account the diversity of instrumental values.
The monistic vision of value is replaced among pragmatists by a pluralist and rational vision within a democratic framework defining a new position of environmental ethics: the pragmatist posture of applied ethics (Larrère 2010).
The contextual posture corresponds to the pragmatism of applied environmental ethics.
This pragmatic approach uses the democratic foundation of “value pluralism”: the solution to an environmental moral problem corresponds to a hierarchy of values derived from public deliberation and debate for the justification of environmental action.
This ethical orientation has the advantage of going beyond the limits of the anthropocentric approach (instrumental value ethics), the biocentric approach (intrinsic value ethics condemning anthropocentrism and which is principally deontological) and the ecocentric approach (mainly consequentialist, where the value of action is measured by its effects on the biotic community). In fact, at the heart of ethical pragmatism are the democratic values of value pluralism that promote democratic deliberation on the “appropriateness” between certain moral positions and scientific positions (Larrère 2010). This ethical deliberation is modeled by Legault (2003), who assumes that any ethical decision is worked out in two stages. This has two inseparable aspects: the first consists of deciding on the end objectives, and the second on the means of achieving the desired objectives. This conception implies that the reasons for the decision must take into account both the ends and means by allowing for a pluralism of moral action in concrete decisions (Legault 2003). Ethical deliberation on the values of the environment, which makes it possible to go beyond the limits of deontology or consequentialism, is thus rich in political teachings.
1.3.2.2. A risk of political impoverishment
According to Kopnina (2012), the ethical discussion in environmental and sustainable development education programs has not escaped dominant political ideologies such as neoliberalism. These ideologies have played inhibiting roles in democratic deliberation to create a situational or contextual hierarchy of environmental values. They impose a communicative deliberation that is detrimental to pluralist ethical problematization in favor of an anthropocentric ethical approach at the expense of ecocentric or biocentric values. The sources of this depoliticization of the environmental ethical question are identified by Sauvé (2011), at the educational level, in an economic globalization program claiming a focal role for economic growth in resolving environmental and social problems. In this program, education is considered as “an engine of globalization” responding primarily to a mission of economic development through the development of human resources or human capital.
1.3.3. Sustainable development issues
The prospect of sustainable development suggests the need to integrate environmental and equity issues with economic growth so as to preserve what is at stake with sustainable development. Hopwood et al. (2005) proposed an analytical framework for the different political positions taking place in debates on sustainable development. To do so, the authors used two analytical variables: justice on the one hand and environmental values on the other. They distinguish between two opposing approaches or points of view: the status quo and the transformative viewpoint and another intermediary, which is the reformist approach.
According to Hopwood et al. (2005), the status quo perspective assumes that sustainable development requires adjustments that do not require a genuine change to means of decision-making or power relations. Generally, positions that support this view (ecological modernization, green consumption, green economy, natural resource management, etc.) advocate the primordial role of the market in sustainable development. This is “green” capitalism practicing corporate citizenship.
The transformist viewpoint corresponds to a heterogeneous set of trends (social ecology, ecofeminism, ecosocialism, etc.) but share the same point of view, which assumes that environmental and social crises are interconnected and that social and environmental systems risk collapse crises in the absence of radical change (Hopwood et al. 2005).
Social ecology presupposes a dialectical relationship between humanity and nature. This leads to considering that environmental concerns must be rooted in social criticism by aiming to achieve radical social reconstruction.
Ecofeminism advances the relationship between environmental degradation and the subordination of women. This trend runs parallel to ecosocialism by assuming that capitalism attempts to detach social life from nature through its class and gender-dividing politics.
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