Attempts to come to grip with what appears to be the autonomy of nature have developed into several schools of thought. Among the most influential of these schools is the ecosystem integrity approach to environmental ethics, management and policy. The philosophical arm of the approach has been spearheaded by Laura Westra and her work in An Environmental Proposal for Ethics. The emphasis that this school places on pristine wilderness to model ecosystem integrity and the arguments Westra devises to justify the application of what she calls the “principle of integrity,” although clear in its goal and object of inquiry, could very well retrench dualistic thinking of the sort that environmental thinkers have been trying to undermine. More importantly, I argue that Westra misses an important implication for the way in which ecosystem integrity could be used to help develop an ethic not so confined by problems of justification in attaching values to facts and descriptions to prescriptions.

In his article “Deep Ecology and the Irrelevance of Morality,” Eric H. Reitan contends that, contrary to the disavowals of Fox and Naess, the “ecosophy T” concept of “Self-realization” constitutes a precondition of morality according to a “robust” Kantian moral framework. I suggest that there is a significant problem involved in rendering Self-realization compatible with a Kantian moral framework. This problem of ontological priority demonstrates that Naess and Fox are in fact correct in their assertion that Self-realization is a nonmoral phenomenon.

It is widely held that environmental risks which are distributed unequally along racial or socioeconomic lines are necessarily distributed unjustly. While disproportionality may result from the perpetration of procedural injustices—what might be termed environmental racism, the question I am concerned with is whether disproportionality, in and of itself, constitutes injustice. I examine this question from the perspective of three prominent theories of justice that largely capture the range of our intuitions about fairness and justice—utilitarianism, natural rights theory, and (Rawlsian) contractarianism. While each of these theories provides clear grounds for objecting to the imposition of risk on individuals without their consent, none provides grounds for thinking that eliminating disproportionalities along racial or socioeconomic lines, in and of itself, is called for as a matter of justice. As a result, I suggest that the concern of environmental justice should lie with identifying (and protecting) those at greatest risk, rather than identifying correlations between average risk levels and morally arbitrary characteristics possessed by individuals, such as race or socioeconomic status.