Conservation work frequently features ethical challenges, but the conservation movement appears to make little use of ethics in decision-making compared to other principle-driven work such as healthcare and historic artefact conservation. With a focus on the place of the natural capital concept in conservation, this thesis aims to understand this problem and investigate solutions through the following three steps.
First, the relationship between conservation and ethics is empirically established through thematic analysis of interviews with staff in UK-based conservation organisations. Perceptions of ethics are examined, ethical challenges present and barriers to addressing them are characterised, and the relative position of natural capital approaches to these topics is established.
Second, new conceptual insights into an ethical challenge, selected from those characterised in the first step, are gained by subjecting it to an analysis based on principles of philosophical value theory and environmental ethics. The chosen ethical challenge is unresolved concern about the ability of natural capital approaches to capture values of nature that conservationists deem important. Participant expressions of such values were identified then assessed and categorised using a value theory framework. The ability of different theories of environmental ethics to defend the resultant categories of value is established.
Third, these insights are made relevant to conservation decision-making by using them as the basis for an ethical critique of the natural capital concept as a conservation tool. An account of the current understanding of the natural capital concept is established through document analysis of systematically selected examples of recent or influential academic literature. The concept is tested by identifying the extent and ways in which it can or cannot support the empirically established and ethically understood values of nature that are important to the conservation movement.
