Winning and losing in environmental ethics

Abstract

Will humans lose when they do the right by way of care for nature--animals, endangered species, old-growth forests? Humans ought to forgo certain opportunities for the sake of nature, but when humans do so, we have been corrected from a misperception about where the good lies and how to value it. No one loses who ends with more wisdom gained and more value conserved in the world in which he or she resides. The losers become winners, a classical ethical paradox now rediscovered in environmental ethics.