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Reconceptualising One’s Understanding of the 'Good Life' Based on a Light or Mid Green Ethic.

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Submitted By sarahpricejones
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Reconceptualising one’s understanding of the 'good life' based on a light or mid green ethic.

Ethics are a broad way of thinking about what constitutes a good life and how to live one. Ethics address questions of right and wrong, making good decisions, and the character or attributes nessasary to live a good life. Ethical praxis addresses these issues with a special focus on how they can be live out in a practical manner. Environmental ethics apply ethical thinking to the non-human world and the relationship between this green space and humans.
In the most general sense, environmental ethics puts forward three basic yet challenging propositions. Firstly, the idea that the Earth and its non-human creatures have a moral status and are subsequantly worthy of our ethical concern. Secondly, that the Earth and its creatures have an intrinsic value. This is to say that they have a moral value purely because they exist above human needs. Thirdly, from the ecosystem perspective, human beings should consider environmnetal wholes as opposed to isolated individualism.
The documentary Earthlings graphically illustrates how human beings use animals as pets, food, clothing, entertainment and for scientific research. Animals constitute part of the natural resources that are used in the production of the modern conception of the plentiful good life and it is very easy for one to overlook the moral considerations behind what it takes to live such a life. Is the good life still good if its worng?
As with most philosophical debates, the debate surrounding environmental ethics can be understood using a green spectrum. On one side are the light-green approachs. This moves to the mid-green approach and on to the dark-green approaches.
The light-green approaches are the anthrocentric approaches. The anthropocentric approaches hold that the non-human world is best understood

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