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

生态学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。承载价值的问题跨越多个伦理领域，从传统（人类）伦理理论和研究伦理，到动物和环境伦理。提出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人员没有生物伦理学的等价物，这是一个建立的领域，主要集中在生物医学的支持网络，以指导他们做出决策。 环境伦理学提供了对环境价值观和这些价值观可能强加给人类行为者的责任的一些见解。但在大多数情况下，该领域并不涉及生态学家和管理人员对科学专业或公共福利所承担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人员聚集在一起，共同努力研究和通报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，和研究议程的一个新的领域内的专业伦理，致力于探索伦理问题和生态研究人员和生物多样性管理者所面临的问题，我们称之为“生态伦理。“理论伦理学和应用伦理学的各个领域经常被分离为研究领域。我们的项目整合了这些领域，以确定将在伦理框架中分组的原则，使生态学家和生物多样性管理人员可以确定他们的研究和管理活动提出的相关道德考虑。伦理学理论还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经常是独特的、实际的问题，到目前为止，还没有像他们可能的那样为伦理学研究提供信息。我们的项目将开始与生态研究人员和生物多样性管理者所面临的具体的道德挑战的分析。 我们转向应用伦理学的伦理理论和传统，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的八个案例中提出的具体道德问题。 这些案例将在我们项目的第二阶段进行分析，开始创建一个综合的伦理框架，这将有助于管理人员和科学家识别和澄清在生物多样性管理和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。 该项目将开始向生态学家和生物多样性管理人员提供材料，使他们能够反思其工作的伦理层面，目标是建立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.