Environmental Ethics

Volume 16, Issue 4, Winter 1994

Body and Environment

My thesis is the biconditional that it is morally wrong to pollute human bodies if and only if it is morally wrong to pollute the environment. The argument for each conditional is by analogy: pollution of one type is analogous to pollution of the other type in morally relevant respects. I argue that the truth of the biconditional makes it difficult to maintain that it is morally wrong to pollute human bodies without maintaining that it is morally wrong to pollute the environment and conversely.