(a) What is meant by 'environmental ethics'? Why is it important to study? Discuss any one environmental issue from the viewpoint of environmental ethics. (10) (b) Differentiate between the following (10 marks) (200 Words) (i) Law and ethics (ii) Ethical management and management of ethics (iii) Discrimination and preferential treatment (iv) Personal Ethics and Professional Ethics.

(a) Environmental ethics: meaning, importance, one issue

• Environmental ethics is the study of right and wrong in how humans treat land, water, air, plants, animals and future generations.
• It asks whether nature has value only as a store for us, or also as a community we belong to.
• Older Indian thought already had this duty in ideas of restraint, shared rivers and sacred groves; the modern name is new, the problem is larger.
• It is important to study because technology can now empty a river or heat a climate faster than custom can stop it.
• Without this study, a project is judged only by this year’s rupees, and the cost is pushed onto a village, a species, or a child not yet born.
• Article 48A and Article 51A(g) of the Constitution of India already treat protection of the environment as a State direction and a citizen’s duty; ethics explains why those lines are not decoration.
• The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 and the requirement of environmental impact assessment are law. Ethics is the habit of not treating the clearance as a purchased stamp.
• One issue: large river dams and inter-linking that drown forests and displace Adivasi hamlets while promising power and irrigation to distant cities.
• From a purely economic view the dam is a national good if megawatts rise. From environmental ethics the questions are: who consents, who loses the river’s fish and silt, what happens to downstream flow, and whether a smaller mix of efficiency, watershed work and solar can meet the need with less harm.
• Intergenerational justice says a storage that silts in forty years and leaves a toxic reservoir is a theft from the next public.
• The ethical answer is not “never build”. It is honest assessment, least harm, rehabilitation that is real, and a no when the forest and the people cannot be made whole.

(b) Four differentiations

• (i) Law is a rule the State can enforce with a penalty. Ethics is a standard of right conduct that may be stricter than the statute and may exist where the statute is silent.
• A man may pay every tax and still humiliate a petitioner. That is legal enough and ethically empty. Civil disobedience against an unjust law is the other mismatch.
• (ii) Ethical management is running an organisation so that daily decisions already follow fairness, honesty and care for stakeholders.
• Management of ethics is the toolkit: codes, training, vigilance cells, ombudsmen and disclosure forms. The toolkit without the habit is a framed pledge. The habit without some toolkit is fragile when the boss changes.
• (iii) Discrimination is unequal treatment that harms a person because of caste, sex, religion, disability or similar status, against equality.
• Preferential treatment is a lawful extra chance given to a historically excluded group so that equality becomes real; reservation under the Constitution is this, not a private bias.
• The test is purpose and limit: a reserved seat for a Scheduled Caste candidate is preference as justice. A clerk who rejects a file because the applicant is Dalit is discrimination.
• (iv) Personal ethics is the conscience a person carries at home: truth to family, no cruelty, keeping a promise.
• Professional ethics is the extra duties of a role: confidentiality of a file, impartiality at a counter, no private practice that milks the posting, duty to the patient or the court.
• They should not fight. When they do, the professional role cannot be used as a licence for a domestic vice, and a personal loyalty cannot rewrite a public tender.