Ecological Ethics: Constructing a Professional Ethic for Ecologists and Biodiversity Managers

生态研究和生物多样性管理经常在包括对科学界、公共福利、个体研究动物、物种甚至生态系统的责任和义务等领域提出伦理问题。从传统的（人类）伦理理论和研究伦理，到动物和环境伦理，充满价值的问题跨越了多个伦理领域。回答这些伦理问题是具有挑战性的，因为生态学家和生物多样性管理者没有与生物伦理学等量的东西来指导他们做出决定。生物伦理学是一个建立起来的领域，有一个主要集中在生物医学上的支持网络。环境伦理学提供了一些关于环境价值的见解，以及这些价值和义务可能强加给人类代理人。但在很大程度上，这个领域并没有承担生态学家和管理者对科学职业或公共福利的许多共同责任和义务。我们建议将伦理学家、科学家和生物多样性管理者聚集在一起，共同努力研究和告知生态研究和生物多样性管理中的伦理分析和问题解决方法。这个项目的结果将是一个新的案例文献、初步的伦理框架和研究议程，这是一个新的领域，致力于探索生态研究者和生物多样性管理者所面临的伦理问题，我们称之为“生态伦理学”。理论伦理学和应用伦理学的各个领域经常作为研究领域分开。我们的项目整合了这些领域，以确定将在伦理框架中分类的原则，以便生态学家和生物多样性管理者能够确定他们的研究和管理活动中提出的相关道德考虑。伦理学理论并没有以一种重要的方式渗透到生态学研究中，生态学研究者提出的往往是独特的、实际的问题，到目前为止，还没有充分发挥伦理学学术的作用。我们的项目将从分析生态研究者和生物多样性管理者所面临的具体伦理挑战开始。我们转向伦理理论和应用伦理学的传统，以澄清和洞察在生态研究和生物多样性管理的五个一般问题领域中的八个案例中提出的具体道德问题。然后，这些案例将在我们项目的第二阶段进行分析，以开始创建一个综合伦理框架，该框架将帮助管理人员和科学家识别和澄清生物多样性管理以及生态学领域和实验室实验中遇到的各种各样的、多层次的伦理问题和问题。该项目将开始为生态学家和生物多样性管理者提供材料，他们可以在这些材料上反思他们工作的伦理层面，目标是创建一个解决伦理问题的结构。

Ecological research and biodiversity management often raise ethical questions in areas that include responsibilities and duties to the scientific community, public welfare, individual research animals, species, and even ecosystems. Value-laden questions cross multiple ethical domains from traditional (human) ethical theory and research ethics, to animal and environmental ethics. Answering these ethical questions is challenging because ecologists and biodiversity managers do not have the equivalent of bioethics, which is an established field with a support network focused mainly on biomedicine, to guide them in making decisions. Environmental ethics provides some insight into environmental values and the duties these may impose upon human agents. But for the most part the field does not engage many of the common responsibilities and obligations ecologists and managers have to the scientific profession or to public welfare. We propose to bring ethicists, scientists, and biodiversity managers together in a collaborative effort to study and inform the methods of ethical analysis and problem solving in ecological research and biodiversity management. The results of this project will be a new case literature, preliminary ethical framework, and research agenda for a novel field within professional ethics devoted to exploring the ethical problems and questions faced by ecological researchers and biodiversity managers, what we call "ecological ethics." The various domains of theoretical and applied ethics are frequently separated as fields of study. Our project integrates these areas to identify principles that will be grouped in an ethical framework so that ecologists and biodiversity managers can identify relevant moral considerations raised by their research and management activities. Ethical theory has not penetrated ecological research in a significant manner, and the often distinctive, practical issues raised by ecological researchers have, up to now, not informed ethical scholarship as well as they might. Our project will begin with analysis of concrete ethical challenges faced by ecological researchers and biodiversity managers. We turn to ethical theory and traditions of applied ethics for clarification and insight into the specific moral problems presented in eight cases in five general issue areas of ecological research and biodiversity management. These cases will then be analyzed in stage two of our project to begin the creation of an integrative ethical framework which will help managers and scientists identify and clarify the diverse, multi-level ethical questions and issues encountered in biodiversity management and in field and laboratory experiments in ecology. The project will begin to provide ecologists and biodiversity managers with materials upon which they can reflect on the ethical dimensions of their work with the goal of creating a structure for addressing ethical problems.