La protección del medio ambiente como derecho y virtud. La ética kantiana de la responsabilidad con la naturaleza

Abstract

In this work Kant’s ethics are presented as a practical programme of responsibility towards nature founded on the normative demand for the worldly realization of human beings as moral persons. This commitment of ethical responsibility to the environment functions as a limit to any merely instrumental relation with our planet at the service of any empirical interests of human self-affirmation, and is deployed in two directions: on the one hand, as a relation of the right of mankind to the rational use of the environment which is to be translated into global public legislation on the private use of things, and, on the other hand, as a virtuous relationship of the individual with him or herself in which one’s own moral nature is established through the non-destructive treatment of inanimate and living beings in nature.