Fisheries ethics : an extension of environmental ethics to fisheries

Fisheries governance faces persistent ecological crises and ethical tensions arising from competing human uses of marine resources. Dominant approaches grounded in centralized regulation, the Maximum Sustainable Yield paradigm, and market-based instruments have improved efficiency in some contexts, but they often obscure moral assumptions embedded in governance decisions. While social justice and human rights approaches have expanded the scope of fisheries governance, environmental ethical analysis remains fragmented and insufficiently developed. This dissertation engages with environmental ethics and moral theory to examine the ethical relationship between fisheries resource users and fisheries as components of broader social–ecological systems. It advances fisheries ethics as an applied and independent field of inquiry, distinct from, though complementary to social justice, human rights and environmental justice approaches. Rather than focusing primarily on distributive or procedural justice among human actors, fisheries ethics, as developed here, centers on moral responsibility, ecological integrity, and the ethical positioning of human use within living marine environments. Building on this foundation, the dissertation develops and applies a Fisheries Ethical Analytical Framework (FEAF) as a pluralistic diagnostic tool for integrating ethical reasoning into fisheries governance analysis. The framework operationalizes ethical analysis across four dimensions; diversity, complexity, dynamics, and scale to identify ethical tensions and normative blind spots within governance systems. The FEAF is applied to Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs), illustrating how privatized fisheries governance generates enduring ethical conflicts related to ecological responsibility, commodification of living systems, intergenerational obligations, and the moral limits of market-based management. For each deficit identified, the analysis proposes a corresponding governance modification, demonstrating that the framework's contribution extends beyond diagnosis to targeted governance response. The dissertation demonstrates that ethically legitimate and sustainable fisheries governance requires explicit engagement with moral pluralism and ecological responsibility within complex social–ecological system.