An empirical study on measuring the effects of different factors on environmental ethics

Article history: Received January 8, 2012 Received in Revised form April, 25, 2012 Accepted 1 May 2012 Available online May 3 2012 Environment plays an important role on human being's present and future life. A clean and healthy environment can contribute to all societies and help people reach prosperity and success. Environmental ethics is the investigation of ethical relationships between human beings and the natural environment, which includes the nonhuman creatures. In environmental ethics, we normally look for the proper way to understand the relationship between humans and the natural environment, detect the values emerging from the relationship, the principles and rules of action and characteristics do those goods and values justify. In this study, we investigate the effects of different variables including responsibility, social ethics, education and traditional and religious values on environment and environmental behavior. The study is executed in two regions of city of Zanjan, Iran based on a questionnaire consists of 400 people. A Pearson correlation test is performed among different components and the results indicated that all mentioned variables influence environmental ethics, significantly. However, normalization variable does not have any impact on environment. The preliminary results indicate culture plays an important role on people's behavior in society. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Environment is an important component of human life created purposely to help all existing creatures live in this planet.Unfortunately, we have seen some damaging changes on environment such as pollutions created by industries, which have increased green gas effects.As a result, we see some irreversible damaging effects such as an increase on weather temperature.If such circumstances continue, within 30 years, the coldest days during the wintertime would be warmer than present summer times.Therefore, there will be a big shortage of clean water for drinking, food and many people die of poverty.This event is not desirable for many since it could impact human life and reduces the populations, substantially.
These days, many governmental agencies try to reach some agreements on reducing green gas effects but they normally do not actively stay faithful with what they promise in their meetings.Human life style has been one of the main factors for blaming global warming.People use cow meat as part of their food and this creates significant amount of Co 2 , they use non-recyclable materials, which contributes to global warming, many industries use fissile based fuels, which substantially add to whether temperature.Human nature seems to have sort of selfish attitude for paying less attention to environment.In fact, during the past few years, there has been a growing concern that a significant portion of deterioration of the environment is not so much an environmental problem as a human one, and the actual problem goes back to distorted and unbalanced perception of existence.Anderberg (1998) studied industrial metabolism and the linkages between economics, ethics and the environment.He explained that there had been an increasing emphasis on the international and global environmental problems and the materials flow perspective is a major breakthrough.Waste minimization, recycling, life-cycle analysis and environmental auditing have become major problem in the world.Anderberg investigated the relative importance of the consumer and his/her attitudes and actions, and the relationship between trade and environment.
Ethical behavior has been one of the most important issues among researchers and it is globally accepted that ethical people may harm less on environment.Fox and Ward (2008) performed a qualitative study on motivations of vegetarians.They used discussions on the board on a website, gathered replies to questions from 33 participants, and conducted follow-up e-mail interviews with 18 them.Respondents were predominantly from the US, Canada and the UK and 70% were females, and ages ranged from 14 to 53, with a median of 26 years.While this research found that health and the ethical treatment of animals were the primary motivators for participants' vegetarianism, participants reported a range of commitments to environmental concerns.Brans (2002) explained that many realworld problems can be faced by qualitative as well as quantitative issues, or by measurements and by perceptions, etc. and compared the management of Natural Real World issues and the management of Human Real World issues.He explained that despite the fact that there are similarities among various issues, there are some differences as well.Any decision-making for Human processes needs to consider three concepts including the rational, the subjective and the ethical one.Brans explained that some mathematical techniques could be used to provide well-balanced solutions between Rationality, Subjectivity and Ethics, where both the Mind of the Decision-maker and the "Ethical Conscience" of Mankind can be considered.Macbeth (2005) discussed ethical issues on tourism industries.Wareham and Elefsiniotis (1996) discussed some missing issues in environmental ethics in engineering education.They reviewed the way in which engineers interact with the environment and argued that future engineering should be part of a paradigm shift in which engineers were seen as responsible stewards rather than negligent trustees of the environment.They also argued that training in environmental ethics should be considered as a fundamental skill taught in all engineering programs.Schug (2008) investigated on the institutional implications of environmental ethics for fishery management in the US exclusive economic zone.He argued that the capacity of regional fishery management councils to be adequately responsive to different ethical values and reported that legislative efforts to broaden council membership were unsuccessful and there must be a pressure for institutional reform to increase with the adoption of an ecosystem approach to fishery management.
According to Sandler (2012) environmental ethics is the investigation of ethical relationships between human beings and the natural environment, which includes the nonhuman creatures.In environmental ethics, we normally look for the proper way to understand the relationship between humans and the natural environment, detect the values emerging from the relationship, the principles and rules of action and characteristics do those goods and values justify.We also look for principles and regulations involved in humans interaction with and treat the natural environment.
Islam, as a religion has its own ethical rules and regulations for taking care of environmental issues.Kamla et al.(2006)The third hyp etails of our

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