Do the right thing 2.0

When did ‘ethical’ change its meaning from ‘morally right’ to ‘environmentally friendly’?

Newsnight for a year had a regular feature Ethical Man, about a journalist trying to live the ‘ethical’ life. This didn’t involve any thought about the morality of any particular action beyond its potential to benefit or harm the environment.

OK, now I admit I believe there’s no objective way of telling what’s morally right or wrong. (Since you ask, utilitarianism is probably the best system out there, but it’s impossible to appeal to its objective truth – or the objective truth of any such structure for making moral decisions.) But I definitely don’t think any behaviour can be described as ethical if you’re not at least thinking about what is or isn’t the most positive course of action in the broadest sense. Just doing what Greenpeace tells you is about as far from a decent definition of ‘ethical’ as I can imagine.

Talking of environmentalism, can someone explain to me why we don't have a carbon tax? Using carbon has external negative effects that aren’t priced into how much carbon costs. So price those negative effects in using a tax. People can then easily decide for themselves how much carbon to use, knowing that they are paying the true cost of their actions. And we’ll all use less of it while avoiding costly and ineffective product regulations, insane cap-and-trade schemes which give existing energy-intensive industries massive freebies, ridiculous ideas about individual carbon allowances, etc.

A fuller (and better, though US-focused) explanation is here.