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John Stuart Mill thought that the state should never interfere with the individual except to prevent harm to others.
It may occasionally be right to prevent people making choices that are obviously not rationally based and which we can be sure they will later regret.
Kant said that if I cannot will the maxim of my action to be a universal law, then it must be wrong.
In many stable, tradition-oriented human societies, the prevailing culture strongly emphasizes preservation. Our culture, on the other hand, has great difficulty in recognizing long-term values.
Can we be sure that future generations will appreciate wilderness? Not really; perhaps they will be happier playing electronic games more sophisticated than any we can imagine.
the appreciation of wilderness has never been higher than it is today, especially among those nations that have overcome the problems of poverty and hunger and have relatively little wilderness left.
for many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation, rising to an almost spiritual intensity.
‘By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature's independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.’
Behind many attempts to derive values from ecological ethics at this level lies some form of holism – some sense that the species or ecosystem is not just a collection of individuals but really an entity in its own right.
The ‘internal voice’ is more likely to be a product of one's upbringing and education than a source of genuine ethical insight.
the principle of majority rule does carry substantial moral weight.
By not resisting the force of the law, by remaining non-violent and by accepting the legal penalty for their actions, those who engage in civil disobedience make manifest both the sincerity of their protest and their respect for the rule of law and the fundamental principles of democracy.
What is ‘the ethical point of view’?
The question asks for reasons for going beyond this personal basis of action and acting only on judgments one is prepared to prescribe universally.
what greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?
