Environmental Ethics Lesson Plan Three
A Decision-Making Model
By Keith Warner, OFM, Director of the Faith, Ethics, and Vocation
Project of the Environmental Studies Institute at Santa Clara
University
and David DeCosse, Director of Campus Ethics Programs at the
Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

Background: The first two lesson plans were meant to
clarify your own convictions about environmental ethics and
to provide a basic acquaintance with the kinds of reasoning
and the sorts of principles used in environmental ethics. This
final lesson plan is meant to incorporate the outcomes of the
first two lessons into the process of making a decision involving
environmental ethics. To make this decision, we will follow
the excellent model proposed by James Martin-Schramm and Robert
L. Stivers in Christian Environmental Ethics: A Case Method
Approach (see the footnote below). Their model is meant to aid
a decision involving a case in environmental ethics. We highly
encourage you to consult the extensive cases in their book.
Other environmental ethics cases can be found by searching on
the Web (for instance, a case on global warming can be found
at http://ethics.sandiego.edu/resources/cases/Detail.asp?ID=70).
We also highly encourage you to use their decision-making model
on a real-life case that you may be confronting in your neighborhood
or city. The decision-making model has three general steps:
Analysis, Assessment, and Action. You should go through each
step of the model, take notes as you go, draw on the first two
lesson plans, and then write a 5-page paper that argues for
how the case should be decided.
Step One: Analysis
- Personal factors: Is there anything in your personal experience
that affects how you view the case?
- Power dynamics: Among all the stakeholders in the case,
do all have relatively equal power in terms of making a decision?
- Factual information: What are the key facts in the case?
Is there any dispute about what those facts are? What is the
most plausible account of the facts?
- Complicating factors: Is there anything particularly unusual
or complicated about the case? In terms of science? Or of
law?
- Relationships: Do any of the key stakeholders have crucial
issues of personal relationships that may affect how they
view the case?
- Ethical issues: What is the primary ethical issue in the
case? What are one or two secondary ethical issues?
- Alternatives and consequences: What are the key alternatives
to address the primary ethical issue in the case? What are
the likely positive and negative consequences of these alternatives?
Step Two: Assessment
- Ethical vision: What would be a just resolution to these
issues? Remember: Ethics is not only about what we shouldn't
do; it's also about how we imagine things should be.
- Moral principles: What is the relevance to the case of the
principles articulated in Lesson Plan Two - justice, sufficiency,
sustainability, solidarity, and participation
- Moral reasoning: How do the categories of command, consequences,
and character play a role in the decision?
Step Three: Action
- Justification: Which alternative is morally preferable and
how do you justify it in terms of the relevant moral principles
and in terms of the moral reasoning common to environmental
ethics?
- Reflection: Looking back on the case, are there any aspects
of it that were especially enlightening or troubling? Are
there any lessons to be gained for the future?
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