Ethics, economics, and environmental stewardship: Religious moral frameworks as constraints for rational policy choice

Environmental policy often embeds ethical judgments implicitly in discount rates, welfare weights, prices, or informal constraints. This paper develops a constraint-based framework that makes major ethical commitments explicit before economic optimization begins. Drawing on convergent principles in Jewish, Islamic, Christian, Indigenous, Buddhist, and secular traditions, it identifies stewardship, restraint of waste, intergenerational responsibility, ecological limits, and institutional responsibility as candidate non-compensatory constraints. Economic analysis then compares costs, trade-offs, and institutional feasibility only among policies that satisfy the adopted constraints. Applied water-policy illustrations show how this approach can clarify minimum access, pricing, desalination, and wastewater-reuse choices without claiming that these policies were historically caused by the ethical framework. The contribution to ecological economics is methodological: moral commitments define the admissible policy space, while economics identifies efficient pathways within it. This division of labor improves transparency under moral pluralism and environmental scarcity.