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Environmental Ethics: Driving Factors Beneath Behavior, Discourse and Decision-Making

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Abstract

This paper tries to characterize the factors determining human relations with its environment and to identify the drives of those behavioral patterns and “praxis”. One scrutinizes the physiological and psychological factors that influence those drives , and tries to determine ways of overriding instinctive drives in favor of rational, sustainable ones. It focuses its attention on the way the different ecosystemic, economic and socio-cultural systems work, and pin-points the critical issues in view of the development of sustainable behavioral patterns. Also the values that must build the new behavioral paradigm, as well as the ways to ensure the evolutionary quantum-leap necessary to ensure this sustainable condition, and the fulfilment, at every level, the different needs of humans and human societies, are analyzed. In conclusion, it stresses the fact that any reliable and long lasting change towards a sustainable behavior must start at the individual and the close social groups levels, and of the development of new factors of self-fulfillment and gratification, able to support and foster that change. The proposed epistemological approach is particularly innovative, precisely because of this emphasis on the individual drives and the way they determine the global patterns of environmental use, as well as the way they can evolve into a more rational (human) character. In short, the paper focuses itself in the way man can evolve from its natural animal instincts and drives toward more rational ones, humanizing its behavior and turning, therefore, into an able actor of the process of sustainability building.

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Acknowledgments

This study was partially funded by FEDER as part of the Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors—COMPETE and also received National Funding from the FCT—Foundation for Science and Technology as part of the PEst-C/AGR/UI0115/2011 strategic project. We also would like to thank Dr. Ana Isabel Silva and Dr. David Campbell for careful reading of the manuscript and for the English revision, and the reviewer for the constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICAAM – Institute for Mediterranean Agrarian and Environmental Sciences, University of Évora, Ap. 94, 7002-554, Évora, Portugal

    João P. A. Fernandes & N. Guiomar

  2. Department of Landscape, Environment and Planning, University of Évora, Colégio Luís Verney, Rua Romão Ramalho 59, 7000-671, Évora, Portugal

    João P. A. Fernandes

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  1. João P. A. Fernandes
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  2. N. Guiomar
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Correspondence to N. Guiomar.

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Fernandes, J.P.A., Guiomar, N. Environmental Ethics: Driving Factors Beneath Behavior, Discourse and Decision-Making. J Agric Environ Ethics 29, 507–540 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-016-9607-x

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