A preliminary epistemological ″human ecology″ framework for understanding the limits of bioethics.

This article tries to set up the epistemological bases of the science of ″human ecology″. This term has started to be used as a synonymous of morality, especially in the Catholic moral social doctrine that used for the first time to justify its marriage prospectives. We look at both terms together (human plus ecology) and we propose that human ecology should be a discipline that in the first time study human behavior and population (objective) using the postulates of the science of ecology (method) and then, once a conceptual framework for social sciences disciplines such as bioethics can be settle, could be used as a way to support or not moral postulates in the name of ecology. We conclude by defining which should be the methods of knowledge acquisition, the limits and the validity of what should be considered ″Human ecology″, that is to say, the ecology of the humans.

Environmental economic, political and ethical integration in a common decision-making framework.

This article develops a decision-making framework for environmental management that integrates technical, economic, political and legal, and ethical decision levels. It attempts to show how these decision levels can be ordained, integrated and interconnected and postulates a hierarchic concentric sphere system that proposes an environmental management model for long-term solutions. This model can be used as a check list for environmental management decision-making and also as a guide for environmental conflict resolution where environmental problems necessitate several levels of decision making. It integrates various environmental ethical positions and evaluates political decisions into a comprehensive, broadly applicable multidisciplinary approach. The objective of this decision-making model is to interconnect into a simplified sequence different levels of environmental management processes in order to account for sustainability, efficacy, efficiency and the acceptability of environmental management processes in the long term. This is done by observing when an environmental problem needs to be solved within a certain sphere of solutions and when it requires wider frameworks, how these can be established and how this process proves that solidarity is the widest and most reasonable sphere.