If ethics is not telling other people how they ought to live, what then is it?

Why is ethics important?

How does ethics relate to other aspects of conservation and management?

What is the role of ethical discourse in decision making?

What is the result of ethical discourse?

What is the basic method by with ethical analysis proceed?

Ethics represents a critical perspective on understanding the reasons why we do what we do.  Most, if not all, of our actions reflect some underlying ethical attitude.  Because life is complicated is it easy to act in ways that are inconsistent with core beliefs.  Ethics is a means a considering complicated life situations and assessing the extent to which our actions match our core beliefs.     If we do not tend to the ethics we risk ...

Ethics is a branch of philosophy that deals with how “we” ought to behave - not about how “they” ought to behave.  Even when “we” represents a heterogeneous group with apparently disparate beliefs, “we” still presume that we all belong to the same community.  There is great advantage in struggling to discover shared, core beliefs that are under-appreciated for their effectiveness in lessening the controversy associated with some natural resource issue.

Ethics is a branch of philosophy that deals with how we ought to behave - not about how others ought to behave, ...

In recent years, we have come to realize that management fails unless it accommodates knowledge from four, seemingly disparate sources: ecology, economic, sociology, and politico-legal.  

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Isn’t ethics just emotional ranting and hyper-subjectivity? Ought we not stick to objective treatments of controversies?