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Using case studies focusing on how developed nations impose environmental risks on developing countries, the chapter reveals how the U.S. and other nations ship banned pesticides or hazardous waste to developing nations. The chapter analyzes the concepts of equal protection and moral heroism or supererogation. It argues that most indigenous people do not give genuine informed consent to such risks and that it is not paternalistic to protect native people. Extending and developing arguments of Peter Singer, the chapter also argues that ordinary citizens have duties (that are not heroic) to help protect innocent victims from first‐world exploitation, even though there are many economic incentives that lead nations to exploit the poor of the world.

Discussions of closely associated notions of practical necessity, volitional necessity, and moral incapacity have profited from a focus on cases of agential crisis to further our understanding of how features of an agent’s character might bind her. This paper turns to agents in crises in order to connect this way of being bound to the phenomenon of moral heroism. The connection is fruitful in both directions. Importing practical necessity into examinations of moral heroism can explain the special sense of bindingness moral heroes frequently express while preserving the status of heroic acts as supererogatory. It also helps explain how heroes persevere and act as so few others do. On the other hand, the context of moral heroism allows a fuller development of some features of the concept of practical necessity, shedding more illuminating light on the roots of practical necessity in character through recent findings in the psychology of moral exemplars.

Using case studies focusing on biased scientific research that helps promote environmental injustice, the chapter argues that there are both deontological and utilitarian ethical reasons for citizens to behave as public‐interest and environmental advocates. These duties are to protect victims of environmental injustice. The chapter also argues that such duties are not a matter of moral heroism or supererogation, but rather normal duties of citizenship in a democracy. Analyzing constraints on public‐interest advocacy, the chapter closes by suggesting a number of ways that citizens might exercise their duties of public‐interest advocacy, particularly through work with nongovernmental organizations or N.G.O.s.

In ordinary language, the words ethics and morals are used interchangeably to refer to standards of conduct or social norms that guide proper behavior. The English ethics derives from the Greek ethika, meaning character or custom, and is related to the Latin mores, also meaning custom, which gave us the word moral. Some philosophers, however, distinguish between the two. Morals is often taken to refer to universal norms of human behavior—the distinction between good and evil—whereas ethics is used as a generic term for all the different ways scholars use to understand and examine our moral lives (Beauchamp and Childress 2001). Some approaches to ethics are normative while others are nonnormative. Normative approaches seek to discover and justify the general standards of be­havior we should accept, and to apply them to specific situations. Nonnormative approaches can be descriptive—that is, factual investigations of moral con­duct and belief—or what is called meta-ethics, the analysis of ethical language, concepts, and methods of reasoning. Morality generally refers to norms for right and wrong human conduct that are so widely shared they form a stable social consensus. Here it is important to distinguish between what many philosophers call the common morality, the norms that all serious persons share, and communal norms that are shared only by a specific community. Common morality, although it cannot be specified precisely, is universal. Communal norms are similar to the common morality but are specific to a particular group, like a religious or cultural community. Common morality also includes moral ideals and extraordinary virtues, which call us to exhibit morally exemplary behavior. Common morality seems to spring from human nature as shaped by living together in community. Successful communal life requires that people adhere to certain standards of behavior. For example, a principle of promise keeping seems essential to any society, whatever its specific organization. Similarly, the arbitrary harming or killing of other people cannot be tolerated in a civilized society. A principle of truth telling seems essential to all human relationships.