Ethic of Care and Environmental Ethic

An ethic of care can be defined in various ways depending on the person of whom you ask. In my personal opinion, an ethic of care can be defined by relationships (how personal it is), responsibility, and a motive to do good by someone or something. Without these factors I don’t believe it would be possible to have an ethic of care towards a cause or person. If there were to be a lack of connection or responsibility tied between the person and the matter at hand, there would be no passion in making a change and the host would feel there is an obligation to even assess the problem. In order to create an ethic of care, one must be able to evaluate their own morals and determine an appropriate and applicable rule of thumb to their cause or scenario in which they would want to see an outcome from. In order for mass amounts of people to invest their time and possibly money into the environment, or rather the destruction of our environment, there would need to be a common relationship of ideas/ thoughts on the topic of environment. This can be applicable to how personal it is; I find that people/ consumers will rarely invest much of their own time into side-problems such as climate change. When climate change is brought to surface, the facts and statistics will not make a person go out of their way to go vegan or buy an electric car, only because it is more convenient for oneself, in that we are selfish and will only be motivated/ feel obligated to make a change when climate change or the environment begin to show obvious signs stating that it will directly affect us as a population. Through mass media and propaganda will we see this influx of news about the environment; only then will people begin to care and start taking action. I believe if humans cared about the environment, we would all act more conscientious about the causes and effects of climate change that continuously damage the environment. Our environment has provided us with many resources and some of which we may never get back, which is why we must consider the consequences of developing new sites, burning fossil fuels, mining unrenewable sources and deforesting mass amounts of land. If we cared about the environment, I genuinely believe that life in itself would be much different; There may be regulations on car use in relation to bigger countries such as China, where there are alternative days for driving in order to reduce car emissions. Another big change in the economy may be the reduction of large shipment boats and industrial sites which would create a serious decline in the amount of imported goods, and the amount of jobs working in lumber, oil, mining, etc. However, with the reduction of shipments and alternative car usage, the emission from the cars would significantly lower down and with the reduction of large boats in the ocean, the oil levels in the large bodies of water would greatly decrease over time, helping the environment remarkably. In a sense, I believe we as a population should adopt a greater ethic of care towards the environment, however I don’t know how realistic this may be in terms of where the world is at currently with the environment. Like I said before, it will take a common relationship with the cause and a motive for people to genuinely want to adopt an ethic of care towards the environment. That being said, I do think that we should be reducing our car usage as a whole and we should all be more mindful of what we are throwing away and how we plan on saving our planet through little actions everyday. In conclusion, an ethic of care towards the environment would have to be forced upon the population as it is too ‘far’ a problem for the everyday people to understand the bigger picture of the problem. If people were to have an ethic of care in regards to the environment, I believe the way our current economy functions would be completely transformed into a ‘less’ convenient way of life but it would save the environment from any detrimental occurrences by nature.