promote, justify and suggest moral concepts and to answer questions of morality" (Newall). These questions can include: How should people live together and treat each other; what is right and what is wrong; how do we decide between right and wrong; when is coercion morally justifiable; what is meant by justice, and duty, and responsibility? (Newall). Perhaps the most memorable and succinct ethical system ever put forward was Jesus Christ's famous homily: do unto others and you would have them do unto you. Thus, we have seen that ethics is the attempt to formulate a guide for determining what actions are morally acceptable and what actions are not.
Having determined what ethics are, we now turn our attention to the environment. The environment means different things to different people; where man fits into the environment is a prhme bone of contdntion. We can see this phenomenon clearly in the manner in which some governments have chosen to define the term. For example, Australian law defines includes "all aspects of the surroundings of man whether affecting him as an individual or in his social groupings" in its definition of the environment (Rowe1). In Canada, the province of Ontario defines the environment as:
plant and animal life, including people,
the social, economic and cultural conditions that influence the life of people or a community,
any building, structure, machine or other device or thing made by people,
any solid, liquid, gas, odour, heat, sound, vibration or radiation resulting directly or indirectly from the activities of people, or
any part or combination of the foregoing and tile interrelationships between any two or more of them, in or of Ontario (Rowe1).
The central tension in any definition of the environment involves where mankind fits in. The government definitions we have just seen are notable in the primacy they place on mankind. In Ontario, for example, man-made objects s...