The conviction underlying environmental ethics is that, just as it is possible to establish the rational foundations of an ethical system through which human beings regulate their relationships with each other, it is also possible to rationally establish an ethical system capable of regulating our relationship with nature. Such a system can also exist without being a subset of traditional morality, without depending on interhuman ethics and without representing a specific case of ethics applied to the environment. That environmental ethics, especially based on the answers it provides to its own metaethical questions, distances itself from some fundamental assumptions of traditional ethics is therefore undeniable.