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?