Winning and Losing in Environmental Ethics
— Ferré, Hartel, Ethics and Environmental Policy: Theory Meets Practice 1992

"Winning and Losing in Environmental Ethics." In Frederick Ferré and Peter G. Hartel, eds., Ethics and Environmental Policy: Theory Meets Practice (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), pages 217-234. Keynote address at University of Georgia Conference, "Environmental Ethics: Theory into Practice," April 5-7, 1992.
Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/37702

Will humans lose when they do the right by way of care for nature--animals, endangered species, old-growth forests? Humans ought to forgo certain opportunities for the sake of nature, but when humans do so, we have been corrected from a misperception about where the good lies and how to value it. No one loses who ends with more wisdom gained and more value conserved in the world in which he or she resides. The losers become winners, a classical ethical paradox now rediscovered in environmental ethics.

Reprinted in John Echeverria and Raymond Booth Eby, Let the People Judge: Wise Use and the Private Property Rights Movement (Washington: Island Press, 1995), pages 263-273.

Condensed version published in IRAS Newsletter (Institute on Religion in an Age of Science), vol 40, no. 3, 15 April 1992, pp. 2-3.