Abstract

Constantly confirming that global environmental destruction has resulted from an economic production based on capitalist accumulation logic has motivated growing social mobilization focused on environmental protection per se. Therefore, critical environmental approaches ultimately attack the symptoms of the environmental crisis rather than the causes, which lie precisely on the assumption and the demand of an infinite growth of economic exploitation of both human beings and natural resources. This contradiction is possible because these ecological approaches do not surpass ethics compatible with a capitalist society based on an abstract and unhistorical "common good", as presented by authors such as Adam Smith. Smith, a bourgeois liberal thinker, believed the behavior of the homo economicus does not contradict social ethics, which is based on sympathy for others and self-interest and where individual behavior is conditioned by how we are seen and judged by others.

Keywords: capitalism; environmental crisis; ethics; Adam Smith; environmentalism