Environmental ethics – a has-been performer?

1. Environmental ethics – a has-been performer? per.ariansen@filosofi.uio.no feb 2008

2. Environmentalism is a perennial performer • Environmentalism vs. environmental ethics • Environmentalism: Abandoning society for nature • Environmental ethics: inviting nature into civil society. • Environmentalism’s ancient roots: • Creation myths, The garden of Eden, Arcadia. The organic, anti-modern Romantic reaction • Rural serenity against urban industrial society. Aristocratic non-instrumentalism. The conservative green. Hamsun and others. “Religion, when it directs its attention to the horse cropping on the blue-grass on the lawn, is concerned with the whole horse,… and not with the abstract horse in his capacity of horse-power in general, power that he shares with other machines of making objects move. Religion admits the existence of this horse, but says that it is only half the horse … This modern mind sees only half of the horse – that half which may become a dynamo, or an automobile or any horsepowered machine. If this mind had much respect for the full-bodied, grass-eating, horse, it would never have inventetd the engine which represents only half of him. The religious mind, on the other hand, has this respect; it wants the whole horse; and it will be satisfied with nothing less.” Tate, Allen. Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas. New York,London, C. Scribner's Sons, ltd., 1936.(pp 168-9).

3. Expected and unexpected vulnerabilities of nature • ”Conservationism” in frontier country • Conservation became an issue in the USA with the waning of frontier land (ca 1910). The aim was prudent resource efficiency and increase of national economy. Means: eradicate predators to make room for sheep and game animals. • On free lunches: the failing resilience of natural systems • Early ecological collapses (1936: collapse of deer population) did not prepare sufficiently for the public shock of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) • The spectre of the finite resources • The Club of Rome presents civilization as a doomsday machine in Limits to Growth (1972). The World model: pesticides, pollution, population explosion, food shortage, resource depletion

4. The commons and rational behaviour • If disaster is up ahead, why not change the course of Spaceship Earth (aka Titanic II)? • Because 1) alternative courses (simple life with a modest population) incurred huge transition costs. 2) the passengers were fixed in the deadlock of the Tragedy of the commons. • Business as usual paves the road to perdition • Without a mutually trustworthy coordinated distribution of losses and benefits, the tragedy of the commons will consume us all. • Conclusion: one can not appeal to rationality, neither on an individual nor on a collective level.

5. The moral solution: invite nature into civil society. • Moral norms trump motives of individual gain and break the deadlock • Moral norms govern one’s behaviour regardless of the behaviour of others. • Viz. one is not allowed to justify stealing an unlocked bicycle even by a safe prediction that it would be stolen anyway by someone else. • “The only hope of saving nature and ourselves is to endow nature with a noli me tangere (don’t touch me) moral status” • The pioneers: Singer and Leopold/Routley (Sylvan) • Singer and the utilitarian jimmy bar: the breaking out and entering in of animals. • Leopold/Routley endowing nature with inherent value. • The religious corollary: Lynn White and the invitation to care for sister Moon: invite nature into the flock. • Nature as the regrettably degraded Other in Christianity. • The counter-stream: Franz of Assisi. • Stewardship, an ethics of duty: overcoming the tragedy of the commons by individual obedience to divine commands.

6. Life on the commons: Disastrous effects soon coming to a theatre near you!! • Costs and benefits on the same head:The dissolution of the deadlock • The reapers of the benefits of overexploitation know that they, or their living children, will have to pay an unacceptable price. The collapse of the commons is no longer a possible event in a distant future. The immediate ill effects of business as usual are of global political concern. • The result: International agreements coordinate the conservation efforts. • The environmental ethics motive for action is superfluous • Moral status for nature is no longer needed to break the deadlock of the tragedy. Prudence suffices.

7. Exit environmental ethics. Enter inter-human ethics. • The environmental crisis: inter-human moral challenges abound • (1)Obligations to future generations, (2) the moral significance of past wrongs, (3) triage and the distribution of aid to the needy, (4) the relative axiological weight of unspoilt nature and of species: (5) which human preferences should trump in the political debate? • All of this comes under “ordinary” distributional or retributive inter-human justice. It is the ethical dimension of ordinary politics. It is not a subset of environmental ethics. • However: Perhaps natural entities have moral standing independent of whether the environment is in a crisis? • Arguing for a moral standing of non-human entities is, of course, an honourable quest that should not be denied anyone. Are the arguments of the tradition convincing? If not, can an anthropocentric approach account for our intuitions that there are restrictions on our treatment of non-human entities?

8. The inherent/intrinsic complex • Instrumental value: the value underdog • Of sub-prime status seen from the positions of intrinsic value and semi-despicable status seen from the perspective of inherent value. • The top dogs: • Intrinsic value = autotelic value. Morally neutral • Inherent value = value that commands moral obedience • A note on utilitarianism • With utilitarianists the concepts of intrinsic and inherent values fuse as they accept an apotheosis of one particular intrinsic value - pleasure. • A quick (but, alas, dirty) way to non-anthropocentrism • “If humans merely had instrumental value, they would not have moral standing. Humans have moral standing. Some natural phenomena do not merely have instrumental value (flowers, beautiful animals etc.) Therefore some natural phenomena have moral standing.” • The flatus vocis suspicion • Explaining normativity by reference to inherent value seems vacuous: “Inherent value” is not the solution, it is merely a new name for the problem - analogous to Aristotelians’ use of “impetus” to explain the trajectory of a thrown object.

9. Nature’s moral standing: the last man and the teleological arguments • Routley: the last man on earth • The last man pleases himself, the only human, by wrecking nature. Immoral towards nature? Unfortunately the last man is not alone: you as a reader are there too. • Locating worthy teloi in nature. Links to liberalism and paternalism • Morally relevant teloi are claimed for sentient beings (Singer) somewhat smart animals (Regan), living beings (Taylor, Schweitzer), ”living” beings (Næss), species, ecosystems (Leopold, Rolston). • A telos is identified, and seen either (1) as an instantiation of inter-human ultra-liberalism: ”Piss off! Get out of my way!” or (2) as an occasion for nature paternalism (the racoon dog does not have its natural home in Norwegian forests). • Respect for teloi in nature and the inequitable distribution of equity • In situations of conflicting purposes, humans, but not the Alters of nature, are prima facie asked to yield theirs. Equal right of way for human teloi can only be achieved by promoting the animal in man. Traces of this solution is found in EE literature critical of degenerate intellectual city life and hailing the “clean cut” of nature. See: Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. Berkeley: North Point Press, 1990. • Critique of the telos approach • Identification of teloi is a problem sui generis. Sub specie naturalis all events and states of nature are equally natural and so must be deemed equally “worthy”. Singling out some states as worthy teloi means siding with one aspect of nature against another.

10. The all-or-nothing dilemma • The telos approach enters the slippery slope • Limiting the Worthy Telos Quest to some clients will quickly generate a protest of moral parochialism from defenders of other clients. Stopping ”there” will always be arbitrary and discriminatory against the rest of nature (It is high time someone stood up for death and destruction!). One enters a slippery slope. The position at the bottom of the slope is (as we have seen) self-defeating: all states of natural beings equally fulfil nature’s ”purpose”. There is nothing to defend and nothing to attack. • The two horns of the dilemma • Defending all of nature means that there is nothing to oppose. Defending part of nature against another part is discrimination or partisanship. • Selecting clients on a basis of sympathy • Once a “good” ( a telos) is “detected”, one can, of course, cultivate sympathy and identification with the entity, be it some animals, a river, a mountain, an old boat, a building, Elvis or the HIV virus. Such sympathy comes under devotion, love or voluntary submission; not ethics, and it can (as indicated) quite well encompass destructive forces in nature. Adherents already have their black metal hymns.

11. The source of normativity: barking down the wrong alley • Sentientism and normativity • Sentience seems to be in a class of its own: Pain “obviously” must be morally bad and pleasure must be morally good? • Note that singer joins Bentham in stating that normativity cannot be extracted from empirical properties (the os sacrum and other candidates), only from “Can they suffer”? But the state of pain or the ability to feel pain is itself an empirical property. By Bentham’s own view it should notgenerate moral obligation. • The ideas of good and bad - related to suffering in humans - is a necessary, but not sufficient component of morality. • Generally: empirical traits and normativity • Neither do any other empirical traits that the teleologists depend, a conclusion that Singer is eager to assert: The fact that a circulatory system keeps a being alive, the fact that an object has remained undisturbed for thousands of years, the fact that a set of beings are stably adapted to their surroundings do not generate obligations.

12. Constitutive conditions for morality • What are the necessary ingredients of moral obligation? • There must be (1) foresight and anticipation of goods and bads. Further: (2) there must be some free agency to manoeuvre in relation to the goods and bads. But with (1) and (2) we are not beyond being merely wolves to each other (homo hominis lupus). • There must be (3) a willingness to deflect bads away from others, and, if necessary, onto oneself. Depending on the meaning of ”willingness”, we at this point may not have superseded animals that protect their offspring or we may not have advanced beyond practising kindness to friends. • So long as there is not a duty to alleviate the plight of others, one cannot appeal to (4) the general principle of equity, and we are not into morality. At best we are into recommended ideals. The principle of equity is essential. It moves self-sacrifice from arbitrary sympathy to duty, from “likes” to “oughts”. • Morality construed as a rule-based game • Only from this perspective can someone demand ethical consideration for himself or on behalf of others. If one is wrongfully exempted from consideration, then the formal rule of equity has been sabotaged and one has been treated unethically. • The particular ”bad” of being exposed to inequity is exclusive to those beings that understand the point of having rules. Non-human entities cannot be morally offended.

13. Visiting the marginal cases • The standard objection to the ”rationality”-solution • Marginal people (the senile a.o.) do not understand rules and should, by the rationality standard, be exempted from the moral community. Alternatively: let them stay, and you will have to admit Regan’s smart animals as well. • Countering the argument of non-exclusivity • Non-marginal people sleep and occasionally faint. This will not blot out their moral standing. Marginal people can be seen as having a longer moral blackout. Who are we to say they are not or will, possibly in brief flashes, never be able to understand injustice? Perhaps they frequently do so, but are incapable of communicating their understanding? • A benefit of the doubt cannot be conferred on non-humans, since non-damaged specimens of such entities are not capable of understanding rules. The test for this is that they are not held morally accountable.

14. Anthropocentrism’s onus of explanation • Some types of treatment of non-human entities seem definitely wrong • The destructive hobbies of the last man, neglecting pain i animals etc. all seem wrong in a manner that goes beyond people’s likes and dislikes. There is a strong intuition that such acts should be denounced with some reference to morality • Morality’s pre-requisites • Morality emerges, as we have seen, from a set of attitudes that in themselves and as a set are not moral. These are attitudes of sympathy, identification and willingness to self-sacrifice. Morality subjects these attitudes to the requirements of equity, and ethical norms emerge. Inflicting pain in animals does not break principles of equity, but signals adherence to a pre-moral existence. Hurting animals is not immoral, but anti-moral. This is analogous to showing disrespect for the law. It is not illegal (unless you break a law) but it is denounced from a platform of law: disrespect for the law hails lawlessness.

15. Protection of entities on non-slippery grounds • Environmental ethics:”We’re on the slope again” • Once an act of destruction and cruelty towards nature is seen as directly immoral, as a breaking of an ethical norm, the principle of equity will force protection for all similar states of all similar entities of nature. We are on the slick slope again, and ethics dissolves as we slide toward the bottom. • How to save ”some” from ”all”? The liturgical approach • Certain activities can be understood as symbolic offences of the project of morality, while other, quite similar activities do no carry this symbolic significance. For most people meat eating is not anti-moral. For vegetarians it is. Almost any activity (mining holes in mountains?) can - given arduous and clever spokespersons - be given anti-ethical significance in the public consciousness. Vegetarians and the anti-whaling lobby try as hard as they can. • Symbolic representation is not subject to rules of equity • Attempts to fend off those who criticise whaling by pointing to similar or worse practises of land based hunting, usually fail – in line with the “logic” of symbolic representation: It is a lost cause to argue that it is unfair that only making the sign of the Cross and the folding of hands are the significant gestures in Christianity. “Christian significance for all gestures now!”