Rolston, “Environmental Ethics: Values in and Duties to the Natural World," translated into Spanish, as “Ética ambiental: Valores y deberes en el mundo natural,” pages 293-317 in Kwiatkowska, Teresa, and Jorge Issa, eds, Los caminos de la ética ambiental (The Ways of Environmental Ethics) (C.P. 06470, Mexico, D.F.: Plaza y Valdés Editores, 1998). Online at: https://hdl.handle.net/10217/234918

Environmental ethics stretches classical ethics to a breaking point. One needs more than a humanist ethic applied to the environment, analogously to applied ethics in other areas. Environmental ethics stands on a frontier, as radically theoretical as it is applied. Alone, it asks whether there can be nonhuman objects of duty. Animals, plants, endangered species, ecosystems, and even Earth are progressively unfamiliar as objects of duty, and puzzles arise both for theory and practice. Answers to such questions are as urgent as any humans face, and intimately related to the four principal issues on the world agenda: peace, population, development, and environment.

Originally published in In F. Herbert Bormann, and Stephen R. Kellert, Ecology, Economics, Ethics: The Broken Circle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).