ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

Spurred by growing environmental concern in the 1960s, philosophers paid increasing attention to environmental ethics in the 1970s and 1980s. The field is dominated by dichotomies: anthropocentrism versus nonanthropocentrism, individualism versus holism, environmental ethics versus environmental philosophy, organic versus community metaphors, citizen versus consumer perspectives, scientific versus social scientific justifications, and trade-offs versus synergism.

Anthropocentric Environmentalism

Traditional Western ethics is anthropocentric, as only human beings are considered of moral importance. Because people can help or harm one another indirectly through environmental impact, such as by generating pollution, destroying marshes, and depleting resources, environmental ethics can be pursued as a form of applied ethics in an anthropocentric framework.

Some anthropocentric issues concern the nature and relative importance of values. For example, does the beauty or inspirational quality of a canyon make the canyon intrinsically valuable? If so, is that value an objective feature of the canyon or an aspect of the evaluators' subjective experience or judgment? Finally, how important to people is such intrinsic, noneconomic value compared to economic considerations? Is the canyon's intrinsic value, assuming it has such value, sufficient to forgo its flooding to generate hydroelectricity that can power economic growth? Environmental ethics is a fertile testing ground for competing axiologies.

Environmental ethics also tests competing conceptions of the individual's relationship to society. A strictly economic approach views the individual as a consumer and directs government to regulate environmental matters to maximize the satisfaction of consumer demands. An alternative approach views the individual as a citizen concerned to promote individual excellence and to preserve and improve the community's best traditions and highest moral ideals. This dichotomy parallels that between liberalism and perfectionism in political philosophy. Just as many perfectionists would forgo the economic benefits of legal prostitution to protect the traditional family, many citizen-oriented environmentalists recommend preserving wilderness areas and species diversity to promote ideals of stewardship.

Environmental justice is primarily an anthropocentric ideal concerning the appropriate distribution of benefits and burdens among human beings affected by environmental decisions. Issues of resource depletion, nuclear waste, and population policy, for example, raise questions about intergenerational justice. Do future people have rights? Can a meaningful distinction be made between future people and possible people? Why should we care about future people if they can neither harm nor help us?

Issues of environmental justice arise when governments use cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to evaluate environmental policies. CBAs typically translate all values into monetary terms with the goal of identifying policies that maximize total social wealth. Exclusively monetary evaluations jeopardize future generations through the use of a discount rate that renders impacts 500 years from now insignificant. In addition, CBAs promote decisions that are unjust to poor people because the monetary value of items in a market economy, and therefore the total value of all such items, social wealth, depends on people's willingness to pay for things. Rich people can pay more than poor people, so the preferences of the rich are weighted more heavily in CBA than the preferences of the poor. Government policies guided by CBA therefore contravene the principle of justice that the interests of each individual person be considered equally.

Environmental racism concerns practices, in derogation of environmental justice, that subject people of non-European origin to disproportionate amounts of pollution and other negative side effects of economic development. Within most industrial countries, such people are racial minorities. Internationally, such people reside in Third World countries. In both cases, many economists reject charges of environmental racism. They claim that people of color suffer disproportionate burdens not because of racist intent but because they are too poor to pay for better conditions. This is another area of tension between economic and noneconomic anthropocentric considerations.

Moral Extensionism

Opposed to anthropocentrism are those who consider many nonhuman animals to be worthy of moral consideration in their own right. These views extend some traditional ethical theories, such as utilitarianism and neo-Kantianism, to include nonhuman individuals. Paul Taylor (2005) advocates further extension, according equal moral consideration to every living individual, amoeba included.

Many environmental philosophers consider moral extensionism too human-centered and individualistic. It is too human-centered because it justifies valuing nonhumans on the basis of similarities to human beings, such as sentience, consciousness, or merely life itself. Human traits remain the touchstone of all value. Moral extensionism is too individualistic for environmental ethics because some matters, such as species diversity, concern collectives, not individuals. From an individualist perspective, saving ten members of a common species is better than saving one member of an endangered species, other things being equal. Environmentalists concerned with maintaining species diversity reject individualism for this reason.

They reject individualism also as ecologically unrealistic. Ecology teaches that ecosystems depend on individuals eating and being eaten, killing and being killed. For example, predators must kill enough deer to avoid deer overpopulation, which would threaten flora on which deer feed. Reduced flora threatens soil stability and the land's ability to support life. So protecting individual deer from untimely death, which valuing deer as individuals may suggest, is environmentally harmful. Such harm threatens natural ecosystems, such as wilderness areas, that foster biological evolution, which is the focus of value for some nonanthropocentric environmentalists.

Tom Regan (2005) calls holistic views "environmental fascism." Sacrificing individuals for evolutionary advance or the collective good resembles Adolf Hitler's program, especially when human beings may be among those sacrificed. Human overpopulation threatens species diversity, ecosystemic complexity, and natural evolutionary processes, so consistent, nonanthropocentric environmental holism may be misanthropic.

Holists reply that human individuals, as well as environmental wholes and evolutionary processes, are intrinsically valuable, so individual humans should not be sacrificed to promote the corporate good. However, the casuistry of trade-offs among individuals and corporate entities of various species and kinds is not well developed by the holists. But Regan (2005), for his part, does not show how all individual nonhuman mammals, for example, can be accorded the equivalent of the human right to life without destroying wilderness areas and causing the extinction of carnivorous species.

Because they value not only nonhumans but holistic entities, many environmental philosophers believe their discipline calls for thorough review of the place of human beings in the cosmos. They reject the title "environmental ethics" in favor of "environmental philosophy" or "ecosophy" to emphasize that their views are not applications of traditional ethics to environmental problems but fundamental metaphysical orientations.

Holistic Environmentalism

Holistic views tend to compare the environmental wholes they consider valuable in themselves with either communities or organisms. Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" (2005), for example, leans toward the community metaphor. Just as the benefits people derive from their human communities justify loyalty to the group, benefits derived from complex ecological interdependencies justify loyalty to ecosystemic wholes. J. Baird Callicott (2005) maintains that community loyalty is emotionally natural to humans, as our ancestors' survival during evolution depended on sentiments of solidarity. In this sense, ethics is based on Humean sentimentalism rather than on Kantian rationality or utilitarian calculation.

The Gaia hypothesis and deep ecology stress the similarity of holistic entities to individual organisms, thereby attempting to reconcile individualism with environmentalism. The Gaia hypothesis maintains that life on Earth operates as if it were a single organism reacting to altered conditions so as to preserve itself. This explains, for example, how Earth has maintained a relatively constant temperature over a 3-billion-year period while the energy emitted toward Earth from the Sun had increased 30 percent. Metaphorically, if Earth is alive, it is our mother because Earth's processes produce and sustain us. This metaphor justifies respect for Earth and Earth's processes analogous to respect for human mothers.

Deep ecology reflects the belief of the stoics and Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza that reality is essentially one being. Accordingly, it questions the separateness of any individual from the environmental whole. Deep ecologists point out that the skin and other borders between individuals are really permeable membranes that connect as well as divide. Arne Naess (2005), deep ecology's founder, notes that human beings can possess the entire universe in their minds and suggests identifying one's real self with nature. Degrading nature is therefore unwise because it is a form of self-degradation. Deep ecology reconciles holistic environmental concern not only with individualism but also with individual self-concern. This metaphysical consideration is bolstered by observations about the lack of genuine fulfillment experienced by most people whose lives are dominated by consuming artifacts instead of appreciating nature.

Ecofeminism

Whereas the land ethic and Gaia hypothesis rely primarily on information drawn from science, other environmentalists stress social scientific information. Using the results of anthropological studies, especially of foraging (hunter-gatherer) societies, some environmentalists maintain that human life is better where people do not attempt to master nature in the human interest. Many indigenous societies practice an environmental ethic, similar to the land ethic, of reciprocal exchange with nonhuman environmental constituents such as water, sun, trees, and game animals. This enriches human life and preserves the environment.

Ecofeminists emphasize the relationship between mastering nature in the supposed human interest and the oppression of women, indigenous people, and other subordinated groups. Ecofeminists claim that much Western thinking is dominated by what they call "the master mentality," which is dualistic thinking that values one member of each dyad more than the other and relegates the inferior member to serve the superior. Such dyads include men versus women, heaven versus earth, mind versus body, reason versus emotion, culture versus nature, and progress versus stagnation. White Western men are associated with the superior member of each dyad: heaven, mind, reason, culture, and progress; whereas women, indigenous people, and other subordinated groups are associated with the inferior member: earth, body, emotion, nature, and stagnation. The master mentality thus justifies the continued subordination of women and non-Western, nonindustrialized men, because humanity in general flourishes, the masters claim, when the inferior serves the superior.

The master mentality's association of women with earth and emotion explains traditional exclusions of women from high religious offices and from professions emphasizing the use of abstract reason. The association of progress with economic growth explains Western insensitivity to the disruption of traditional patterns of life in many Third World countries. Traditional agriculture returns little money but produces a large variety of food for local consumption. It suffers in comparison with Western-inspired commercial agriculture that emphasizes remunerative monocultures when progress is associated with economic growth. The master mentality also generally undervalues work traditionally done by women because much of it is done free, whether it is childcare or tending a garden to feed the family.

Ecofeminists claim that the master mentality approach to the environment serves humanity badly. Worldwide, it marginalizes and impoverishes women and other subordinated people. Humanity would fare better if people's interactions with nature were guided more by thinking traditionally associated with women. Women tend to think more relationally, organically, and holistically than (Western) men, who favor individual rights, commercial success, and mechanistic processes. Whereas typical male patterns of thought and action precipitate ecocrises, typical female patterns ameliorate them. Empowering women can save ecosystems and species diversity.

Most anthropocentrists and nonanthropocentrists believe that in general a tension exists between protecting nature and serving humanity. Nonanthropocentric concern for nature as valuable in itself precludes actions that can make human life better, they think. This is the trade-off perspective. The synergistic perspective, by contrast, is that valuing nature for itself most often precludes action that is mistakenly undertaken in pursuit of human welfare but that is actually counterproductive. For example, the Green Revolution attempted to improve human life by mastering nature but it harmed people more than it helped them because it disrupted traditional social systems and more holistically productive agriculture, argues Vandana Shiva (1991). Like the hedonic paradox, which claims that happiness is best achieved by not seeking it directly, synergists claim that human flourishing is best achieved by nonanthropocentrically valuing nature for itself rather than by trying anthropocentrically to maximize returns from nature for human beings. The land ethic, deep ecology, and ecofeminism are compatible with environmental synergism.

Because environmental ethics/philosophy questions basic assumptions in economics, technology, metaphysics, ethical theory, moral epistemology, and gender relations, it approaches religion in its attention to the fundamental concerns of human existence.

See also Animal Rights and Welfare; Applied Ethics; Distant Peoples and Future Generations; Good, The; Intrinsic Value; Rights; Utilitarianism.

Bibliography

Callicott, J. Baird. "The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic." In Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application. 4th ed, edited by Louis P. Pojman, 149–160. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2005.

Dobson, Andrew. Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hargrove, Eugene C., ed. The Animal Rights, Environmental Ethics Debate: The Environmental Perspective. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992.

Leopold, Aldo. "Ecocentrism: The Land Ethic." In Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application. 4th ed, edited by Louis P. Pojman, 139–148. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2005.

Naess, Arne. "Ecosophy T: Deep versus Shallow Ecology." In Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application. 4th ed, edited by Louis P. Pojman, 192–200. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2005.

Partridge, Ernest, ed. Responsibilities to Future Generations: Environmental Ethics. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1981.

Pojman, Louis P., ed. Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application. 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2005. This is an excellent source of information on anthropocentric environmentalism, animal rights, biocentrism, the land ethic, deep ecology, social ecology, and ecofeminism.

Regan, Tom. "The Radical Egalitarian Case for Animal Rights." In Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application. 4th ed, edited by Louis P. Pojman, 65–72. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2005.

Sagoff, Mark. The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law, and the Environment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Critiques economics and CBA.

Shiva, Vandana. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics. London: Zed Books, 1991.

Taylor, Paul. "Biocentric Egalitarianism." In Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application. 4th ed, edited by Louis P. Pojman, 117–131. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2005.

Warren, Karen J. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. A comprehensive introduction to ecofeminism.

Wenz, Peter S. Environmental Ethics Today. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Peter S. Wenz (1996, 2005)