Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic?

Abstract

This paper presents the first translation into Spanish of one of the founding articles of the field of professional environmental ethics. The article is preceded by a discussion of its intellectual, political and biographical context, which aims to scope and interpret its insertion and functioning in the philosophical discussion 50 years after its original publication. Indeed, this act of foundation is deliberate and the author contributes to it in the form of a global argument, which needs to be understood within its intimate motivations and its public plot, that remain current in many ways. Because the intention behind this act is not the inauguration of a sub-specialty, understood as the opening of new branches of specialized treatment within a conceptually structured field, but the global reformulation of the field itself, based on a perceived inability to give adequate treatment to the environmental transformations and challenges of the 20th and 21st centuries. The article contains an influential critical analysis of the edifice of anthropocentric ethics, and by extension of one of the matrices of Western thought in which it has developed, and offers path-breaking support for the development of bio- or eco-centric ethics. As a hinge between the two, there is a famous element of argument, the mental experiment of the "last person".