Christian Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems

INTRODUCTION

According to a widely used definition, pollution is ‘the introduction by humans into the environment of substances or energy liable to cause hazards to human health, harm to living resources and ecological systems, damage to structures or amenity, or interference with legitimate uses of the environment’. Inreflecting common uses of the word ‘pollution’ the definition also reflects the different, and sometimes competing, rationales for its regulation. Thus, on the one hand, it indicates that by ‘pollution’ some are put in mind principally of what, in affecting the natural world, does harm to humans (and speciically to their ‘health’, and to the ‘legitimate uses of’ and the ‘living resources’ and ‘amenity’ they find in the environment). On the other hand, however, it recognises that others use ‘pollution’ to describe not only what adversely affects humans through affecting the environment, but to describe in addition what, quite simply, adversely affects the environment; thus there is reference to harm not only to ‘living resources’ but also to ‘ecological systems’, and to damage not just to ‘amenity’, but also to ‘structures’ (not, as it might have been, ‘structures of value to humans’).

The existence of competing rationales for protection of the environment reflected in this deinition has been the stuff of much of the debate in the field of environmental ethics over the last few decades, certainly as it has been received outside the discipline itself.