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Environmental Ethics

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Environmental EthicsFirst published Mon Jun 3, 2002; substantive revision Tue Jul 21, 2015

Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moralrelationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, theenvironment and its non-human contents. This entry covers: (1) thechallenge of environmental ethics to the anthropocentrism (i.e., human-centeredness) embedded in traditional western ethical thinking; (2) theearly development of the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s; (3) theconnection of deep ecology, feminist environmental ethics, animism andsocial ecology to politics; (4) the attempt to apply traditional ethicaltheories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, tosupport contemporary environmental concerns; (5) the preservation ofbiodiversity as an ethical goal; (6) the broader concerns of some thinkerswith wilderness, the built environment and the politics of poverty; (7) theethics of sustainability and climate change, and (8) some directions forpossible future developments of the discipline.

1. Introduction: The Challenge of Environmental Ethics2. The Early Development of Environmental Ethics3. Environmental Ethics and Politics

3.1 Deep Ecology3.2 Feminism and the Environment3.3 Disenchantment and the New Animism3.4 Social Ecology and Bioregionalism

4. Traditional Ethical Theories and Contemporary EnvironmentEthics

Supplementary Document: Biodiversity Preservation5. Wilderness, the Built Environment, Poverty and Politics6. Sustainability and Climate Change

Supplementary Document: Pathologies of Environmental Crisis

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– Theories and Empirical ResearchBibliographyAcademic ToolsOther Internet ResourcesRelated Entries

1. Introduction: The Challenge of EnvironmentalEthics

Suppose putting out natural fires, culling feral animals or destroying someindividual members of overpopulated indigenous species is necessary forthe protection of the integrity of a certain ecosystem. Will these actions bemorally permissible or even required? Is it morally acceptable for farmersin non-industrial countries to practise slash and burn techniques to clearareas for agriculture? Consider a mining company which has performedopen pit mining in some previously unspoiled area. Does the companyhave a moral obligation to restore the landform and surface ecology? Andwhat is the value of a humanly restored environment compared with theoriginally natural environment? It is often said to be morally wrong forhuman beings to pollute and destroy parts of the natural environment andto consume a huge proportion of the planet’s natural resources. If that iswrong, is it simply because a sustainable environment is essential to(present and future) human well-being? Or is such behaviour also wrongbecause the natural environment and/or its various contents have certainvalues in their own right so that these values ought to be respected andprotected in any case? These are among the questions investigated byenvironmental ethics. Some of them are specific questions faced byindividuals in particular circumstances, while others are more globalquestions faced by groups and communities. Yet others are more abstract


2 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

questions concerning the value and moral standing of the naturalenvironment and its non-human components.

In the literature on environmental ethics the distinction betweeninstrumental value and intrinsic value (in the sense of “non-instrumentalvalue”) has been of considerable importance. The former is the value ofthings as means to further some other ends, whereas the latter is the valueof things as ends in themselves regardless of whether they are also usefulas means to other ends. For instance, certain fruits have instrumental valuefor bats who feed on them, since feeding on the fruits is a means tosurvival for the bats. However, it is not widely agreed that fruits havevalue as ends in themselves. We can likewise think of a person whoteaches others as having instrumental value for those who want to acquireknowledge. Yet, in addition to any such value, it is normally said that aperson, as a person, has intrinsic value, i.e., value in his or her own rightindependently of his or her prospects for serving the ends of others. Foranother example, a certain wild plant may have instrumental valuebecause it provides the ingredients for some medicine or as an aestheticobject for human observers. But if the plant also has some value in itselfindependently of its prospects for furthering some other ends such ashuman health, or the pleasure from aesthetic experience, then the plantalso has intrinsic value. Because the intrinsically valuable is that which isgood as an end in itself, it is commonly agreed that something’spossession of intrinsic value generates a prima facie direct moral duty onthe part of moral agents to protect it or at least refrain from damaging it(see O’Neil 1992 and Jamieson 2002 for detailed accounts of intrinsicvalue).

Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, areanthropocentric or human-centered in that either they assign intrinsicvalue to human beings alone (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in astrong sense) or they assign a significantly greater amount of intrinsic


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value to human beings than to any non-human things such that theprotection or promotion of human interests or well-being at the expense ofnon-human things turns out to be nearly always justified (i.e., what wemight call anthropocentric in a weak sense). For example, Aristotle(Politics, Bk. 1, Ch. 8) maintains that “nature has made all thingsspecifically for the sake of man” and that the value of non-human things innature is merely instrumental. Generally, anthropocentric positions find itproblematic to articulate what is wrong with the cruel treatment of non-human animals, except to the extent that such treatment may lead to badconsequences for human beings. Immanuel Kant (“Duties to Animals andSpirits”, in Lectures on Ethics), for instance, suggests that cruelty towardsa dog might encourage a person to develop a character which would bedesensitized to cruelty towards humans. From this standpoint, crueltytowards non-human animals would be instrumentally, rather thanintrinsically, wrong. Likewise, anthropocentrism often recognizes somenon-intrinsic wrongness of anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused)environmental devastation. Such destruction might damage the well-beingof human beings now and in the future, since our well-being is essentiallydependent on a sustainable environment (see Passmore 1974; Bookchin1990; Norton et al. (eds.) 1995).

When environmental ethics emerged as a new sub-discipline ofphilosophy in the early 1970s, it did so by posing a challenge to traditionalanthropocentrism. In the first place, it questioned the assumed moralsuperiority of human beings to members of other species on earth. In thesecond place, it investigated the possibility of rational arguments forassigning intrinsic value to the natural environment and its non-humancontents. It should be noted, however, that some theorists working in thefield see no need to develop new, non-anthropocentric theories. Instead,they advocate what may be called enlightened anthropocentrism (or,perhaps more appropriately called, prudential anthropocentrism). Briefly,this is the view that all the moral duties we have towards the environment



are derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants. The practicalpurpose of environmental ethics, they maintain, is to provide moralgrounds for social policies aimed at protecting the earth’s environment andremedying environmental degradation. Enlightened anthropocentrism,they argue, is sufficient for that practical purpose, and perhaps even moreeffective in delivering pragmatic outcomes, in terms of policy-making,than non-anthropocentric theories given the theoretical burden on the latterto provide sound arguments for its more radical view that the non-humanenvironment has intrinsic value (cf. Norton 1991, de Shalit 1994, Lightand Katz 1996). Furthermore, some prudential anthropocentrists may holdwhat might be called cynical anthropocentrism, which says that we have ahigher-level anthropocentric reason to be non-anthropocentric in our day-to-day thinking. Suppose that a day-to-day non-anthropocentrist tends toact more benignly towards the non-human environment on which humanwell-being depends. This would provide reason for encouraging non-anthropocentric thinking, even to those who find the idea of non-anthropocentric intrinsic value hard to swallow. In order for such astrategy to be effective one may need to hide one’s cynicalanthropocentrism from others and even from oneself. The position can bestructurally compared to some indirect form of consequentialism and mayattract parallel critiques (see Henry Sidgwick on utilitarianism and esotericmorality, and Bernard Williams on indirect utilitarianism).

2. The Early Development of Environmental Ethics

Although nature was the focus of much nineteenth and twentieth centuryphilosophy, contemporary environmental ethics only emerged as anacademic discipline in the 1970s. The questioning and rethinking of therelationship of human beings with the natural environment over the lastthirty years reflected an already widespread perception in the 1960s thatthe late twentieth century faced a human population explosion as well as a



serious environmental crisis. Among the accessible work that drewattention to a sense of crisis was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1963),which consisted of a number of essays earlier published in the New Yorkermagazine detailing how pesticides such as DDT, aldrin and deildrinconcentrated through the food web. Commercial farming practices aimedat maximizing crop yields and profits, Carson speculates, are capable ofimpacting simultaneously on environmental and public health.

In a much cited essay (White 1967) on the historical roots of theenvironmental crisis, historian Lynn White argued that the main strands ofJudeo-Christian thinking had encouraged the overexploitation of nature bymaintaining the superiority of humans over all other forms of life on earth,and by depicting all of nature as created for the use of humans. White’sthesis was widely discussed in theology, history, and has been subject tosome sociological testing as well as being regularly discussed byphilosophers (see Whitney 1993, Attfield 2001). Central to the rationalefor his thesis were the works of the Church Fathers and The Bible itself,supporting the anthropocentric perspective that humans are the only thingsthat matter on Earth. Consequently, they may utilize and consumeeverything else to their advantage without any injustice. For example,Genesis 1: 27–8 states: “God created man in his own image, in the imageof God created he him; male and female created he them. And Godblessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, andreplenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over fish of the sea,and over fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon theearth.” Likewise, Thomas Aquinas (Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. 3, Pt 2,Ch 112) argued that non-human animals are “ordered to man’s use”.According to White, the Judeo-Christian idea that humans are created inthe image of the transcendent supernatural God, who is radically separatefrom nature, also by extension radically separates humans themselvesfrom nature. This ideology further opened the way for untrammeledexploitation of nature. Modern Western science itself, White argued, was



“cast in the matrix of Christian theology” so that it too inherited the“orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature” (White 1967: 1207).Clearly, without technology and science, the environmental extremes towhich we are now exposed would probably not be realized. The point ofWhite’s thesis, however, is that given the modern form of science andtechnology, Judeo-Christianity itself provides the original deep-seateddrive to unlimited exploitation of nature. Nevertheless, White argued thatsome minority traditions within Christianity (e.g., the views of St. Francis)might provide an antidote to the “arrogance” of a mainstream traditionsteeped in anthropocentrism.

Around the same time, the Stanford ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlichwarned in The Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1968) that the growth of humanpopulation threatened the viability of planetary life-support systems. Thesense of environmental crisis stimulated by those and other popular workswas intensified by NASA’s production and wide dissemination of aparticularly potent image of earth from space taken at Christmas 1968 andfeatured in the Scientific American in September 1970. Here, plain to see,was a living, shining planet voyaging through space and shared by all ofhumanity, a precious vessel vulnerable to pollution and to the overuse ofits limited capacities. In 1972 a team of researchers at MIT led by DennisMeadows published the Limits to Growth study, a work that summed up inmany ways the emerging concerns of the previous decade and the sense ofvulnerability triggered by the view of the earth from space. In thecommentary to the study, the researchers wrote:

We affirm finally that any deliberate attempt to reach a rational andenduring state of equilibrium by planned measures, rather than bychance or catastrophe, must ultimately be founded on a basicchange of values and goals at individual, national and world levels.(Meadows et al. 1972: 195)



The call for a “basic change of values” in connection to the environment(a call that could be interpreted in terms of either instrumental or intrinsicvalues) reflected a need for the development of environmental ethics as anew sub-discipline of philosophy.

The new field emerged almost simultaneously in three countries—theUnited States, Australia, and Norway. In the first two of these countries,direction and inspiration largely came from the earlier twentieth centuryAmerican literature of the environment. For instance, the Scottishemigrant John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club and “father of Americanconservation”) and subsequently the forester Aldo Leopold had advocatedan appreciation and conservation of things “natural, wild and free”. Theirconcerns were motivated by a combination of ethical and aestheticresponses to nature as well as a rejection of crudely economic approachesto the value of natural objects (a historical survey of the confrontationbetween Muir’s reverentialism and the human-centred conservationism ofGifford Pinchot (one of the major influences on the development of the USForest Service) is provided in Norton 1991; also see Cohen 1984 and Nash(ed) 1990). Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949), in particular,advocated the adoption of a “land ethic”:

However, Leopold himself provided no systematic ethical theory orframework to support these ethical ideas concerning the environment. Hisviews therefore presented a challenge and opportunity for moral theorists:

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but thatland is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.(Leopold 1949: vii–ix)

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, andbeauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tendsotherwise. (Leopold 1949: 224–5)



could some ethical theory be devised to justify the injunction to preservethe integrity, stability and beauty of the biosphere?

The land ethic sketched by Leopold, attempting to extend our moralconcern to cover the natural environment and its non-human contents, wasdrawn on explicitly by the Australian philosopher Richard Routley (laterSylvan). According to Routley (1973 (cf. Routley and Routley 1980)), theanthropocentrism imbedded in what he called the “dominant westernview”, or “the western superethic”, is in effect “human chauvinism”. Thisview, he argued, is just another form of class chauvinism, which is simplybased on blind class “loyalty” or prejudice, and unjustifiably discriminatesagainst those outside the privileged class. Echoing the plot of a popularmovie some three years earlier (see Lo and Brennan 2013), Routleyspeculates in his “last man” (and “last people”) arguments about ahypothetical situation in which the last person, surviving a worldcatastrophe, acts to ensure the elimination of all other living things and thelast people set about destroying forests and ecosystems after their demise.From the human-chauvinistic (or absolutely anthropocentric) perspective,the last person would do nothing morally wrong, since his or herdestructive act in question would not cause any damage to the interest andwell-being of humans, who would by then have disappeared. Nevertheless,Routley points out that there is a moral intuition that the imagined last actswould be morally wrong. An explanation for this judgment, he argued, isthat those non-human objects in the environment, whose destruction isensured by the last person or last people, have intrinsic value, a kind ofvalue independent of their usefulness for humans. From his critique,Routley concluded that the main approaches in traditional western moralthinking were unable to allow the recognition that natural things haveintrinsic value, and that the tradition required overhaul of a significantkind.



Leopold’s idea that the “land” as a whole is an object of our moral concernalso stimulated writers to argue for certain moral obligations towardecological wholes, such as species, communities, and ecosystems, not justtheir individual constituents. The U.S.-based theologian andenvironmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III, for instance, argued thatspecies protection was a moral duty (Rolston 1975). It would be wrong, hemaintained, to eliminate a rare butterfly species simply to increase themonetary value of specimens already held by collectors. Like Routley’s“last man” arguments, Rolston’s example is meant to draw attention to akind of action that seems morally dubious and yet is not clearly ruled outor condemned by traditional anthropocentric ethical views. Species,Rolston went on to argue, are intrinsically valuable and are usually morevaluable than individual specimens, since the loss of a species is a loss ofgenetic possibilities and the deliberate destruction of a species would showdisrespect for the very biological processes which make possible theemergence of individual living things (also see Rolston 1989, Ch 10).Natural processes deserve respect, according to Rolston’s quasi-religiousperspective, because they constitute a nature (or God) which is itselfintrinsically valuable (or sacred).

Meanwhile, the work of Christopher Stone (a professor of law at theUniversity of Southern California) had become widely discussed. Stone(1972) proposed that trees and other natural objects should have at leastthe same standing in law as corporations. This suggestion was inspired bya particular case in which the Sierra Club had mounted a challenge againstthe permit granted by the U.S. Forest Service to Walt Disney Enterprisesfor surveys preparatory to the development of the Mineral King Valley,which was at the time a relatively remote game refuge, but not designatedas a national park or protected wilderness area. The Disney proposal wasto develop a major resort complex serving 14000 visitors daily to beaccessed by a purpose-built highway through Sequoia National Park. TheSierra Club, as a body with a general concern for wilderness conservation,



challenged the development on the grounds that the valley should be keptin its original state for its own sake.

Stone reasoned that if trees, forests and mountains could be given standingin law then they could be represented in their own right in the courts bygroups such as the Sierra Club. Moreover, like any other legal person,these natural things could become beneficiaries of compensation if it couldbe shown that they had suffered compensatable injury through humanactivity. When the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, it was determinedby a narrow majority that the Sierra Club did not meet the condition forbringing a case to court, for the Club was unable and unwilling to provethe likelihood of injury to the interest of the Club or its members. In adissenting minority judgment, however, justices Douglas, Blackmun andBrennan mentioned Stone’s argument: his proposal to give legal standingto natural things, they said, would allow conservation interests,community needs and business interests to be represented, debated andsettled in court.

Reacting to Stone’s proposal, Joel Feinberg (1974) raised a seriousproblem. Only items that have interests, Feinberg argued, can be regardedas having legal standing and, likewise, moral standing. For it is interestswhich are capable of being represented in legal proceedings and moraldebates. This same point would also seem to apply to political debates. Forinstance, the movement for “animal liberation”, which also emergedstrongly in the 1970s, can be thought of as a political movement aimed atrepresenting the previously neglected interests of some animals (seeRegan and Singer (eds.) 1976, Clark 1977, and also the entry on the moralstatus of animals). Granted that some animals have interests that can berepresented in this way, would it also make sense to speak of trees, forests,rivers, barnacles, or termites as having interests of a morally relevantkind? This issue was hotly contested in the years that followed.Meanwhile, John Passmore (1974) argued, like White, that the Judeo-



Christian tradition of thought about nature, despite being predominantly“despotic”, contained resources for regarding humans as “stewards” or“perfectors” of God’s creation. Skeptical of the prospects for any radicallynew ethic, Passmore cautioned that traditions of thought could not beabruptly overhauled. Any change in attitudes to our natural surroundingswhich stood the chance of widespread acceptance, he argued, would haveto resonate and have some continuities with the very tradition which hadlegitimized our destructive practices. In sum, then, Leopold’s land ethic,the historical analyses of White and Passmore, the pioneering work ofRoutley, Stone and Rolston, and the warnings of scientists, had by the late1970s focused the attention of philosophers and political theorists firmlyon the environment.

The confluence of ethical, political and legal debates about theenvironment, the emergence of philosophies to underpin animal rightsactivism and the puzzles over whether an environmental ethic would besomething new rather than a modification or extension of existing ethicaltheories were reflected in wider social and political movements. The riseof environmental or “green” parties in Europe in the 1980s wasaccompanied by almost immediate schisms between groups known as“realists” versus “fundamentalists” (see Dobson 1990). The “realists”stood for reform environmentalism, working with business andgovernment to soften the impact of pollution and resource depletionespecially on fragile ecosystems or endangered species. The “fundies”argued for radical change, the setting of stringent new priorities, and eventhe overthrow of capitalism and liberal individualism, which were taken asthe major ideological causes of anthropogenic environmental devastation.It is not clear, however, that collectivist or communist countries do anybetter in terms of their environmental record (see Dominick 1998).

Underlying these political disagreements was the distinction between“shallow” and “deep” environmental movements, a distinction introduced



in the early 1970s by another major influence on contemporaryenvironmental ethics, the Norwegian philosopher and climber Arne Næss.Since the work of Næss has been significant in environmental politics, thediscussion of his position is given in a separate section below.

3. Environmental Ethics and Politics

3.1 Deep Ecology

“Deep ecology” was born in Scandinavia, the result of discussionsbetween Næss and his colleagues Sigmund Kvaløy and Nils Faarlund (seeNæss 1973 and 1989; also see Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999 for ahistorical survey and commentary on the development of deep ecology).All three shared a passion for the great mountains. On a visit to theHimalayas, they became impressed with aspects of “Sherpa culture”particularly when they found that their Sherpa guides regarded certainmountains as sacred and accordingly would not venture onto them.Subsequently, Næss formulated a position which extended the reverencethe three Norwegians and the Sherpas felt for mountains to other naturalthings in general.

The “shallow ecology movement”, as Næss (1973) calls it, is the “fightagainst pollution and resource depletion”, the central objective of which is“the health and affluence of people in the developed countries.” The “deepecology movement”, in contrast, endorses “biospheric egalitarianism”, theview that all living things are alike in having value in their own right,independent of their usefulness to others. The deep ecologist respects thisintrinsic value, taking care, for example, when walking on themountainside not to cause unnecessary damage to the plants.

Inspired by Spinoza’s metaphysics, another key feature of Næss’s deepecology is the rejection of atomistic individualism. The idea that a human



being is such an individual possessing a separate essence, Næss argues,radically separates the human self from the rest of the world. To makesuch a separation not only leads to selfishness towards other people, butalso induces human selfishness towards nature. As a counter to egoism atboth the individual and species level, Næss proposes the adoption of analternative relational “total-field image” of the world. According to thisrelationalism, organisms (human or otherwise) are best understood as“knots” in the biospherical net. The identity of a living thing is essentiallyconstituted by its relations to other things in the world, especially itsecological relations to other living things. If people conceptualisethemselves and the world in relational terms, the deep ecologists argue,then people will take better care of nature and the world in general.

As developed by Næss and others, the position also came to focus on thepossibility of the identification of the human ego with nature. The idea is,briefly, that by identifying with nature I can enlarge the boundaries of theself beyond my skin. My larger—ecological—Self (the capital “S”emphasizes that I am something larger than my body and consciousness),deserves respect as well. To respect and to care for my Self is also torespect and to care for the natural environment, which is actually part ofme and with which I should identify. “Self-realization”, in other words, isthe reconnection of the shriveled human individual with the wider naturalenvironment. Næss maintains that the deep satisfaction that we receivefrom identification with nature and close partnership with other forms oflife in nature contributes significantly to our life quality. (One clearhistorical antecedent to this kind of nature spiritualism is the romanticismof Jean-Jacques Rousseau as expressed in his last work, the Reveries of theSolitary Walker)

When Næss’s view crossed the Atlantic, it was sometimes merged withideas emerging from Leopold’s land ethic (see Devall and Sessions 1985;also see Sessions (ed) 1995). But Næss—wary of the apparent totalitarian



political implications of Leopold’s position that individual interests andwell-being should be subordinated to the holistic good of the earth’s bioticcommunity (see section 4 below)—has always taken care to distancehimself from advocating any sort of “land ethic”. (See Anker 1999 forcautions on interpreting Næss’s relationalism as an endorsement of thekind of holism displayed in the land ethic; cf. Grey 1993, Taylor andZimmerman 2005). Some critics have argued that Næss’s deep ecology isno more than an extended social-democratic version of utilitarianism,which counts human interests in the same calculation alongside theinterests of all natural things (e.g., trees, wolves, bears, rivers, forests andmountains) in the natural environment (see Witoszek 1997). However,Næss failed to explain in any detail how to make sense of the idea thatoysters or barnacles, termites or bacteria could have interests of anymorally relevant sort at all. Without an account of this, Næss’s early“biospheric egalitarianism”—that all living things whatsoever had asimilar right to live and flourish—was an indeterminate principle inpractical terms. It also remains unclear in what sense rivers, mountainsand forests can be regarded as possessors of any kind of interests. This isan issue on which Næss always remained elusive.

Biospheric egalitarianism was modified in the 1980s to the weaker claimthat the flourishing of both human and non-human life have value inthemselves. At the same time, Næss declared that his own favouredecological philosophy—“Ecosophy T”, as he called it after his Tvergasteinmountain cabin—was only one of several possible foundations for anenvironmental ethic. Deep ecology ceased to be a specific doctrine, butinstead became a “platform”, of eight simple points, on which Næss hopedall deep green thinkers could agree. The platform was conceived asestablishing a middle ground, between underlying philosophicalorientations, whether Christian, Buddhist, Daoist, process philosophy, orwhatever, and the practical principles for action in specific situations,principles generated from the underlying philosophies. Thus the deep



ecological movement became explicitly pluralist (see Brennan 1999; c.f.Light 1996).

While Næss’s Ecosophy T sees human Self-realization as a solution to theenvironmental crises resulting from human selfishness and exploitation ofnature, some of the followers of the deep ecology platform in the UnitedStates and Australia further argue that the expansion of the human self toinclude non-human nature is supported by the Copenhagen interpretationof quantum theory, which is said to have dissolved the boundaries betweenthe observer and the observed (see Fox 1984, 1990, and Devall andSessions 1985; cf. Callicott 1985). These "relationalist" developments ofdeep ecology are, however, criticized by some feminist theorists. The ideaof nature as part of oneself, one might argue, could justify the continuedexploitation of nature instead. For one is presumably more entitled to treatoneself in whatever ways one likes than to treat another independent agentin whatever ways one likes. According to some feminist critics, the deepecological theory of the “expanded self” is in effect a disguised form ofhuman colonialism, unable to give nature its due as a genuine “other”independent of human interest and purposes (see Plumwood 1993, Ch. 7,1999, and Warren 1999).

Meanwhile, some third-world critics accused deep ecology of being elitistin its attempts to preserve wilderness experiences for only a select groupof economically and socio-politically well-off people. The Indian writerRamachandra Guha (1989, 1999) for instance, depicts the activities ofmany western-based conservation groups as a new form of culturalimperialism, aimed at securing converts to conservationism (cf. Bookchin1987 and Brennan 1998a). “Green missionaries”, as Guha calls them,represent a movement aimed at further dispossessing the world’s poor andindigenous people. “Putting deep ecology in its place,” he writes, “is torecognize that the trends it derides as “shallow” ecology might in fact bevarieties of environmentalism that are more apposite, more representative



and more popular in the countries of the South.” Although Næss himselfrepudiates suggestions that deep ecology is committed to any imperialism(see Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999, Ch. 36–7 and 41), Guha’scriticism raises important questions about the application of deepecological principles in different social, economic and cultural contexts.Finally, in other critiques, deep ecology is portrayed as having aninconsistent utopian vision (see Anker and Witoszek 1998).

3.2 Feminism and the Environment

Broadly speaking, a feminist issue is any that contributes in some way tounderstanding the oppression of women. Feminist theories attempt toanalyze women’s oppression, its causes and consequences, and suggeststrategies and directions for women’s liberation. By the mid 1970s,feminist writers had raised the issue of whether patriarchal modes ofthinking encouraged not only widespread inferiorizing and colonizing ofwomen, but also of people of colour, animals and nature. Sheila Collins(1974), for instance, argued that male-dominated culture or patriarchy issupported by four interlocking pillars: sexism, racism, class exploitation,and ecological destruction.

Emphasizing the importance of feminism to the environmental movementand various other liberation movements, some writers, such as YnestraKing (1989a and 1989b), argue that the domination of women by men ishistorically the original form of domination in human society, from whichall other hierarchies—of rank, class, and political power—flow. Forinstance, human exploitation of nature may be seen as a manifestation andextension of the oppression of women, in that it is the result of associatingnature with the female, which had been already inferiorized and oppressedby the male-dominating culture. But within the plurality of feministpositions, other writers, such as Val Plumwood (1993), understand theoppression of women as only one of the many parallel forms of oppression



sharing and supported by a common ideological structure, in which oneparty (the colonizer, whether male, white or human) uses a number ofconceptual and rhetorical devices to privilege its interests over that of theother party (the colonized: whether female, people of colour, or animals).Facilitated by a common structure, seemingly diverse forms of oppressioncan mutually reinforce each other (Warren 1987, 1990, 1994, Cheney1989, and Plumwood 1993).

Not all feminist theorists would call that common underlying oppressivestructure “androcentric” or “patriarchal”. But it is generally agreed thatcore features of the structure include “dualism”, hierarchical thinking, andthe “logic of domination”, which are typical of, if not essential to, male-chauvinism. These patterns of thinking and conceptualizing the world,many feminist theorists argue, also nourish and sustain other forms ofchauvinism, including, human-chauvinism (i.e., anthropocentrism), whichis responsible for much human exploitation of, and destructivenesstowards, nature. The dualistic way of thinking, for instance, sees the worldin polar opposite terms, such as male/female, masculinity/femininity,reason/emotion, freedom/necessity, active/passive, mind/body, pure/soiled,white/coloured, civilized/primitive, transcendent/immanent,human/animal, culture/nature. Furthermore, under dualism all the firstitems in these contrasting pairs are assimilated with each other, and all thesecond items are likewise linked with each other. For example, the male isseen to be associated with the rational, active, creative, Cartesian humanmind, and civilized, orderly, transcendent culture; whereas the female isregarded as tied to the emotional, passive, determined animal body, andprimitive, disorderly, immanent nature. These interlocking dualisms arenot just descriptive dichotomies, according to the feminists, but involve aprescriptive privileging of one side of the opposed items over the other.Dualism confers superiority to everything on the male side, but inferiorityto everything on the female side. The “logic of domination” then dictatesthat those on the superior side (e.g., men, rational beings, humans) are



morally entitled to dominate and utilize those on the inferior side (e.g.,women, beings lacking in rationality, non-humans) as mere means.

The problem with dualistic and hierarchical modes of thinking, however,is not just that that they are epistemically unreliable. It is not just that thedominating party often falsely sees the dominated party as lacking (orpossessing) the allegedly superior (or inferior) qualities, or that thedominated party often internalizes false stereotypes of itself given by itsoppressors, or that stereotypical thinking often overlooks salient andimportant differences among individuals. More important, according tofeminist analyses, the very premise of prescriptive dualism—the valuingof attributes of one polarized side and the devaluing of those of the other,the idea that domination and oppression can be justified by appealing toattributes like masculinity, rationality, being civilized or developed, etc.—is itself problematic.

Feminism represents a radical challenge for environmental thinking,politics, and traditional social ethical perspectives. It promises to linkenvironmental questions with wider social problems concerning variouskinds of discrimination and exploitation, and fundamental investigationsof human psychology. However, whether there are conceptual, causal ormerely contingent connections among the different forms of oppressionand liberation remains a contested issue (see Green 1994). The term“ecofeminism” (first coined by Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974) or“ecological feminism” was for a time generally applied to any view thatcombines environmental advocacy with feminist analysis. However,because of the varieties of, and disagreements among, feminist theories,the label may be too wide to be informative and has generally fallen fromuse.

3.3 Disenchantment and the New Animism



An often overlooked source of ecological ideas is the work of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School of critical theory founded by Max Horkheimerand Theodore Adorno (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969). While classicalMarxists regard nature as a resource to be transformed by human labourand utilized for human purposes, Horkheimer and Adorno saw Marxhimself as representative of the problem of “human alienation”. At theroot of this alienation, they argue, is a narrow positivist conception ofrationality—which sees rationality as an instrument for pursuing progress,power and technological control, and takes observation, measurement andthe application of purely quantitative methods to be capable of solving allproblems. Such a positivistic view of science combines determinism withoptimism. Natural processes as well as human activities are seen to bepredictable and manipulable. Nature (and, likewise, human nature) is nolonger mysterious, uncontrollable, or fearsome. Instead, it is reduced to anobject strictly governed by natural laws, which therefore can be studied,known, and employed to our benefit. By promising limitless knowledgeand power, the positivism of science and technology not only removes ourfear of nature, the critical theorists argue, but also destroys our sense ofawe and wonder towards it. That is to say, positivism “disenchants” nature—along with everything that can be studied by the sciences, whethernatural, social or human.

The progress in knowledge and material well-being may not be a bad thingin itself, where the consumption and control of nature is a necessary partof human life. However, the critical theorists argue that the positivisticdisenchantment of natural things (and, likewise, of human beings—because they too can be studied and manipulated by science) disrupts ourrelationship with them, encouraging the undesirable attitude that they arenothing more than things to be probed, consumed and dominated.According to the critical theorists, the oppression of “outer nature” (i.e.,the natural environment) through science and technology is bought at avery high price: the project of domination requires the suppression of our



own “inner nature” (i.e., human nature)—e.g., human creativity,autonomy, and the manifold needs, vulnerabilities and longings at thecentre of human life. To remedy such an alienation, the project ofHorkheimer and Adorno is to replace the narrow positivistic andinstrumentalist model of rationality with a more humanistic one, in whichthe values of the aesthetic, moral, sensuous and expressive aspects ofhuman life play a central part. Thus, their aim is not to give up our rationalfaculties or powers of analysis and logic. Rather, the ambition is to arriveat a dialectical synthesis between Romanticism and Enlightenment, toreturn to anti-deterministic values of freedom, spontaneity and creativity.

In his later work, Adorno advocates a re-enchanting aesthetic attitude of“sensuous immediacy” towards nature. Not only do we stop seeing natureas primarily, or simply, an object of consumption, we are also able to bedirectly and spontaneously acquainted with nature without interventionsfrom our rational faculties. According to Adorno, works of art, like naturalthings, always involve an “excess”, something more than their meremateriality and exchange value (see Vogel 1996, ch. 4.4 for a detaileddiscussion of Adorno’s views on art, labour and domination). The re-enchantment of the world through aesthetic experience, he argues, is alsoat the same time a re-enchantment of human lives and purposes. Adorno’swork remains largely unexplored in mainstream environmentalphilosophy, although the idea of applying critical theory (embracingtechniques of deconstruction, psychoanalysis and radical social criticism)to both environmental issues and the writings of various ethical andpolitical theorists has spawned an emerging field of “ecocritique” or “eco-criticism” (Vogel 1996, Luke 1997, van Wyk 1997, Dryzek 1997).

Some students of Adorno’s work have argued that his account of the roleof “sensuous immediacy” can be understood as an attempt to defend a“legitimate anthropomorphism” that comes close to a weak form ofanimism (Bernstein 2001, 196). Others, more radical, have claimed to take



inspiration from his notion of “non-identity”, which, they argue, can beused as the basis for a deconstruction of the notion of nature and perhapseven its elimination from eco-critical writing. For example, TimothyMorton argues that “putting something called Nature on a pedestal andadmiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does forthe figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration”(Morton 2007, 5), and that “in the name of all that we value in the idea of‘nature’, [ecocritique] thoroughly examines how nature is set up as atranscendental, unified, independent category. Ecocritique does not thinkthat it is paradoxical to say, in the name of ecology itself: ‘down withnature!’ ” (ibid., 13).

It remains to be seen, however, whether the radical attempt to purge theconcept of nature from eco-critical work meets with success. Likewise, itis unclear whether the dialectic project on which Horkheimer and Adornoembarked is coherent, and whether Adorno, in particular, has a consistentunderstanding of “nature” and “rationality” (see Eckersley 1992 and Vogel1996, for a review of the Frankfurt School’s thinking about nature).

On the other hand, the new animists have been much inspired by theserious way in which some indigenous peoples placate and interact withanimals, plants and inanimate things through ritual, ceremony and otherpractices. According to the new animists, the replacement of traditionalanimism (the view that personalized souls are found in animals, plants,and other material objects) by a form of disenchanting positivism directlyleads to an anthropocentric perspective, which is accountable for muchhuman destructiveness towards nature. In a disenchanted world, there is nomeaningful order of things or events outside the human domain, and thereis no source of sacredness or dread of the sort felt by those who regard thenatural world as peopled by divinities or demons (Stone 2006). When aforest is no longer sacred, there are no spirits to be placated and nomysterious risks associated with clear-felling it. A disenchanted nature is



no longer alive. It commands no respect, reverence or love. It is nothingbut a giant machine, to be mastered to serve human purposes. The newanimists argue for reconceptualizing the boundary between persons andnon-persons. For them, “living nature” comprises not only humans,animals and plants, but also mountains, forests, rivers, deserts, and evenplanets.

Whether the notion that a mountain or a tree is to be regarded as a personis taken literally or not, the attempt to engage with the surrounding worldas if it consists of other persons might possibly provide the basis for arespectful attitude to nature (see Harvey 2005 for a popular account of thenew animism). If disenchantment is a source of environmental problemsand destruction, then the new animism can be regarded as attempting tore-enchant, and help to save, nature. More poetically, David Abram hasargued that a phenomenological approach of the kind taken by Merleau-Ponty can reveal to us that we are part of the “common flesh” of the world,that we are in a sense the world thinking itself (Abram 1995).

In her work, Freya Mathews has tried to articulate a version of animism orpanpsychism that captures ways in which the world (not just nature)contains many kinds of consciousness and sentience. For her, there is anunderlying unity of mind and matter in that the world is a “self-realizing”system containing a multiplicity of other such systems (cf. Næss).According to Mathews, we are meshed in communication, and potentialcommunication, with the “One” (the greater cosmic self) and its manylesser selves (Mathews 2003, 45–60). Materialism (the monistic theorythat the world consists purely of matter), she argues, is self-defeating byencouraging a form of “collective solipsism” that treats the world either asunknowable or as a social-construction (Mathews 2005, 12). Mathews alsotakes inspiration from her interpretation of the core Daoist idea of wuweias “letting be” and bringing about change through “effortless action”. Thefocus in environmental management, development and commerce should



be on “synergy” with what is already in place rather than on demolition,replacement and disruption. Instead of bulldozing away old suburbs andderelict factories, the synergistic panpsychist sees these artefacts asthemselves part of the living cosmos, hence part of what is to be respected.Likewise, instead of trying to eliminate feral or exotic plants and animals,and restore environments to some imagined pristine state, ways should befound—wherever possible—to promote synergies between the newcomersand the older native populations in ways that maintain ecological flowsand promote the further unfolding and developing of ecological processes(Mathews 2004). Panpsychism, Mathews argues, frees us from the“ideological grid of capitalism”, can reduce our desire for consumernovelties, and can allow us and the world to grow old together with graceand dignity.

In summary, if disenchantment is a source of environmentally destructiveor uncaring attitudes, then both the aesthetic and the animist/panpsychistre-enchantment of the world are intended to offer an antidote to suchattitudes, and perhaps also inspirations for new forms of managing anddesigning for sustainability.

3.4 Social Ecology and Bioregionalism

Apart from feminist-environmentalist theories and Næss’s deep ecology,Murray Bookchin’s “social ecology” has also claimed to be radical,subversive, or countercultural (see Bookchin 1980, 1987, 1990).Bookchin’s version of critical theory takes the “outer” physical world asconstituting what he calls “first nature”, from which culture or “secondnature” has evolved. Environmentalism, on his view, is a socialmovement, and the problems it confronts are social problems. WhileBookchin is prepared, like Horkheimer and Adorno, to regard (first) natureas an aesthetic and sensuous marvel, he regards our intervention in it asnecessary. He suggests that we can choose to put ourselves at the service



of natural evolution, to help maintain complexity and diversity, diminishsuffering and reduce pollution. Bookchin’s social ecology recommendsthat we use our gifts of sociability, communication and intelligence as ifwe were “nature rendered conscious”, instead of turning them against thevery source and origin from which such gifts derive. Exploitation of natureshould be replaced by a richer form of life devoted to nature’spreservation.

John Clark has argued that social ecology is heir to a historical,communitarian tradition of thought that includes not only the anarchistPeter Kropotkin, but also the nineteenth century socialist geographerElisée Reclus, the eccentric Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes and thelatter’s disciple, Lewis Mumford (Clark 1998). Ramachandra Guha hasdescribed Mumford as “the pioneer American social ecologist” (Guha1996, 210). Mumford adopted a regionalist perspective, arguing thatstrong regional centres of culture are the basis of “active and securelygrounded local life” (Mumford 1944, 403). Like the pessimists in criticaltheory, Mumford was worried about the emergence under industrialisedcapitalism of a “megamachine”, one that would oppress and dominatehuman creativity and freedom, and one that—despite being a humanproduct—operates in a way that is out of our control. While Bookchin ismore of a technological optimist than Mumford, both writers have inspireda regional turn in environmental thinking. Bioregionalism givesregionalism an environmental twist. This is the view that natural featuresshould provide the defining conditions for places of community, and thatsecure and satisfying local lives are led by those who know a place, havelearned its lore and who adapt their lifestyle to its affordances bydeveloping its potential within ecological limits. Such a life, thebioregionalists argue, will enable people to enjoy the fruits of self-liberation and self-development (see the essays in List 1993, and the book-length treatment in Thayer 2003, for an introduction to bioregionalthought).



However, critics have asked why natural features should significant indefining the places in which communities are to be built, and have puzzledover exactly which natural features these should be—geological,ecological, climatic, hydrological, and so on (see Brennan 1998b). Ifrelatively small, bioregional communities are to be home to flourishinghuman societies, then a question also arises over the nature of the laws andpunishments that will prevail in them, and also of their integration intolarger regional and global political and economic groupings. Foranarchists and other critics of the predominant social order, a return toself-governing and self-sufficient regional communities is often depictedas liberating and refreshing. But for the skeptics, the worry remains thatthe bioregional vision is politically over-optimistic and is open to theestablishment of illiberal, stifling and undemocratic communities. Further,given its emphasis on local self-sufficiency and the virtue of life in smallcommunities, a question arises over whether bioregionalism is workable inan overcrowded planet.

Deep ecology, feminism, and social ecology have had a considerableimpact on the development of political positions in regard to theenvironment. Feminist analyses have often been welcomed for thepsychological insight they bring to several social, moral and politicalproblems. There is, however, considerable unease about the implicationsof critical theory, social ecology and some varieties of deep ecology andanimism. Some writers have argued, for example, that critical theory isbound to be ethically anthropocentric, with nature as no more than a“social construction” whose value ultimately depends on humandeterminations (see Vogel 1996). Others have argued that the demands of“deep” green theorists and activists cannot be accommodated withincontemporary theories of liberal politics and social justice (see Ferry1998). A further suggestion is that there is a need to reassess traditionaltheories such as virtue ethics, which has its origins in ancient Greekphilosophy (see the following section) within the context of a form of



stewardship similar to that earlier endorsed by Passmore (see Barry 1999).If this last claim is correct, then the radical activist need not, after all, lookfor philosophical support in radical, or countercultural, theories of the sortdeep ecology, feminism, bioregionalism and social ecology claim to be(but see Zimmerman 1994).

4. Traditional Ethical Theories and ContemporaryEnvironment Ethics

Although environmental ethicists often try to distance themselves from theanthropocentrism embedded in traditional ethical views (Passmore 1974,Norton 1991 are exceptions), they also quite often draw their theoreticalresources from traditional ethical systems and theories. Consider thefollowing two basic moral questions: (1) What kinds of thing areintrinsically valuable, good or bad? (2) What makes an action right orwrong?

Consequentialist ethical theories consider intrinsic “value” / “disvalue” or“goodness” / “badness” to be more fundamental moral notions than“rightness” / “wrongness”, and maintain that whether an action isright/wrong is determined by whether its consequences are good/bad.From this perspective, answers to question (2) are informed by answers toquestion (1). For instance, utilitarianism, a paradigm case ofconsequentialism, regards pleasure (or, more broadly construed, thesatisfaction of interest, desire, and/or preference) as the only intrinsicvalue in the world, whereas pain (or the frustration of desire, interest,and/or preference) is the only intrinsic disvalue, and maintains that rightactions are those that would produce the greatest balance of pleasure overpain.

As the utilitarian focus is the balance of pleasure and pain as such, thequestion of to whom a pleasure or pain belongs is irrelevant to the



calculation and assessment of the rightness or wrongness of actions.Hence, the eighteenth century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1789), and nowPeter Singer (1993), have argued that the interests of all the sentientbeings (i.e., beings who are capable of experiencing pleasure or pain)—including non-human ones—affected by an action should be taken equallyinto consideration in assessing the action. Furthermore, rather like Routley(see section 2 above), Singer argues that the anthropocentric privileging ofmembers of the species Homo sapiens is arbitrary, and that it is a kind of“speciesism” as unjustifiable as sexism and racism. Singer regards theanimal liberation movement as comparable to the liberation movements ofwomen and people of colour. Unlike the environmental philosophers whoattribute intrinsic value to the natural environment and its inhabitants,Singer and utilitarians in general attribute intrinsic value to the experienceof pleasure or interest satisfaction as such, not to the beings who have theexperience. Similarly, for the utilitarian, non-sentient objects in theenvironment such as plant species, rivers, mountains, and landscapes, allof which are the objects of moral concern for environmentalists, are of nointrinsic but at most instrumental value to the satisfaction of sentientbeings (see Singer 1993, Ch. 10). Furthermore, because right actions, forthe utilitarian, are those that maximize the overall balance of interestsatisfaction over frustration, practices such as whale-hunting and thekilling of an elephant for ivory, which cause suffering to non-humananimals, might turn out to be right after all: such practices might produceconsiderable amounts of interest-satisfaction for human beings, which, onthe utilitarian calculation, outweigh the non-human interest-frustrationinvolved. As the result of all the above considerations, it is unclear to whatextent a utilitarian ethic can also be an environmental ethic. This pointmay not so readily apply to a wider consequentialist approach, whichattributes intrinsic value not only to pleasure or satisfaction, but also tovarious objects and processes in the natural environment.



Deontological ethical theories, in contrast, maintain that whether an actionis right or wrong is for the most part independent of whether itsconsequences are good or bad. From the deontologist perspective, thereare several distinct moral rules or duties (e.g., “not to kill or otherwiseharm the innocent”, “not to lie”, “to respect the rights of others”, “to keeppromises”), the observance/violation of which is intrinsically right/wrong;i.e., right/wrong in itself regardless of consequences. When asked tojustify an alleged moral rule, duty or its corresponding right, deontologistsmay appeal to the intrinsic value of those beings to whom it applies. Forinstance, “animal rights” advocate Tom Regan (1983) argues that thoseanimals with intrinsic value (or what he calls “inherent value”) have themoral right to respectful treatment, which then generates a general moralduty on our part not to treat them as mere means to other ends. We have,in particular, a prima facie moral duty not to harm them. Regan maintainsthat certain practices (such as sport or commercial hunting, andexperimentation on animals) violate the moral right of intrinsicallyvaluable animals to respectful treatment. Such practices, he argues, areintrinsically wrong regardless of whether or not some better consequencesever flow from them. Exactly which animals have intrinsic value andtherefore the moral right to respectful treatment? Regan’s answer is: thosethat meet the criterion of being the “subject-of-a-life”. To be such asubject is a sufficient (though not necessary) condition for having intrinsicvalue, and to be a subject-of-a-life involves, among other things, havingsense-perceptions, beliefs, desires, motives, memory, a sense of the future,and a psychological identity over time.

Some authors have extended concern for individual well-being further,arguing for the intrinsic value of organisms achieving their own good,whether those organisms are capable of consciousness or not. PaulTaylor’s version of this view (1981 and 1986), which we might callbiocentrism, is a deontological example. He argues that each individualliving thing in nature—whether it is an animal, a plant, or a micro-



organism—is a “teleological-center-of-life” having a good or well-beingof its own which can be enhanced or damaged, and that all individualswho are teleological-centers-of life have equal intrinsic value (or what hecalls “inherent worth”) which entitles them to moral respect. Furthermore,Taylor maintains that the intrinsic value of wild living things generates aprima facie moral duty on our part to preserve or promote their goods asends in themselves, and that any practices which treat those beings asmere means and thus display a lack of respect for them are intrinsicallywrong. A more recent and biologically detailed defence of the idea thatliving things have representations and goals and hence have moral worthis found in Agar 2001. Unlike Taylor’s egalitarian and deontologicalbiocentrism, Robin Attfield (1987) argues for a hierarchical view thatwhile all beings having a good of their own have intrinsic value, some ofthem (e.g., persons) have intrinsic value to a greater extent. Attfield alsoendorses a form of consequentialism which takes into consideration, andattempts to balance, the many and possibly conflicting goods of differentliving things (also see Varner 1998 for a defense of biocentricindividualism with affinities to both consequentialist and deontologicalapproaches). However, some critics have pointed out that the notion ofbiological good or well-being is only descriptive not prescriptive (seeWilliams 1992 and O’Neill 1993, Ch. 2). For instance, even if HIV has agood of its own this does not mean that we ought to assign any positivemoral weight to the realization of that good.

More recently, the distinction between these two traditional approacheshas taken its own specific form of development in environmentalphilosophy. Instead of pitting conceptions of value against conceptions ofrights, it has been suggested that there may be two different conceptions ofintrinsic value in play in discussion about environmental good and evil.One the one side, there is the intrinsic value of states of affairs that are tobe promoted - and this is the focus of the consequentialist thinkers. On theother (deontological) hand there is the intrinsic values of entities to be



respected (see Bradley 2006, McShane 2014). These two different foci forthe notion of intrinsic value still provide room for fundamental argumentbetween deontologists and consequentialist to continue, albeit in asomewhat modified form.

Note that the ethics of animal liberation or animal rights and biocentrismare both individualistic in that their various moral concerns are directedtowards individuals only—not ecological wholes such as species,populations, biotic communities, and ecosystems. None of these issentient, a subject-of-a-life, or a teleological-center-of-life, but thepreservation of these collective entities is a major concern for manyenvironmentalists. Moreover, the goals of animal liberationists, such as thereduction of animal suffering and death, may conflict with the goals ofenvironmentalists. For example, the preservation of the integrity of anecosystem may require the culling of feral animals or of some indigenousanimal populations that threaten to destroy fragile habitats. So there aredisputes about whether the ethics of animal liberation is a proper branch ofenvironmental ethics (see Callicott 1980, 1988, Sagoff 1984, Jamieson1998, Crisp 1998 and Varner 2000).

Criticizing the individualistic approach in general for failing toaccommodate conservation concerns for ecological wholes, J. BairdCallicott (1980) once advocated a version of land-ethical holism whichtakes Leopold’s statement “A thing is right when it tends to preserve theintegrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when ittends otherwise” to be the supreme deontological principle. In this theory,the earth’s biotic community per se is the sole locus of intrinsic value,whereas the value of its individual members is merely instrumental anddependent on their contribution to the “integrity, stability, and beauty” ofthe larger community. A straightforward implication of this version of theland ethic is that an individual member of the biotic community ought tobe sacrificed whenever that is needed for the protection of the holistic



good of the community. For instance, Callicott maintains that if culling awhite-tailed deer is necessary for the protection of the holistic biotic good,then it is a land-ethical requirement to do so. But, to be consistent, thesame point also applies to human individuals because they are alsomembers of the biotic community. Not surprisingly, the misanthropyimplied by Callicott’s land-ethical holism was widely criticized andregarded as a reductio of the position (see Aiken (1984), Kheel (1985),Ferré (1996), and Shrader-Frechette (1996)). Tom Regan (1983, p.362), inparticular, condemned the holistic land ethic’s disregard of the rights ofthe individual as “environmental fascism”.

Under pressure from the charge of ecofascism and misanthropy, Callicott(1989 Ch. 5, and 1999, Ch. 4) later revised his position and now maintainsthat the biotic community (indeed, any community to which we belong) aswell as its individual members (indeed, any individual who shares with usmembership in some common community) all have intrinsic value. Tofurther distance himself from the charge of ecofascism, Callicottintroduced explicit principles which prioritize obligations to humancommunities over those to natural ones. He called these “second-order”principles for specifying the conditions under which the land ethic’sholistic and individualistic obligations were to be ranked. As he put it:

Lo (in Lo 2001) provides an overview and critique of Callicott’s changingposition over two decades, while Ouderkirk and Hill (eds.) 2002 gives anoverview of debates between Callicott and others concerning the

... obligations generated by membership in more venerable andintimate communities take precedence over these generated inmore recently-emerged and impersonal communities... The secondsecond-order principle is that stronger interests (for lack of a betterword) generate duties that take precedence over duties generatedby weaker interests. (Callicott 1999, 76)



metaethical and metaphysical foundations for the land ethic and also itshistorical antecedents. As Lo pointed out, the final modified version of theland ethic needs more than two second-order principles, since a third-orderprinciple is needed to specify Callicott’s implicit view that the secondsecond-order principle generally countermands the first one when theycome into conflict (Lo 2001, 345). In his most recent work, Callicottfollows Lo’s suggestion, while cautioning against aiming for too muchprecision in specifying the demands of the land ethic (Callicott 2013, 66 -7).

The controversy surrounding Callicott’s original position, however, hasinspired efforts in environmental ethics to investigate possibilities ofattributing intrinsic value to ecological wholes, not just their individualconstituent parts. Following in Callicott’s footsteps, and inspired byNæss’s relational account of value, Warwick Fox has championed a theoryof “responsive cohesion” which apparently gives supreme moral priorityto the maintenance of ecosystems and the biophysical world (Fox 2007). Itremains to be seen if this position escapes the charges of misanthropy andtotalitarianism laid against earlier holistic and relational theories of value.

Individual natural entities (whether sentient or not, living or not), AndrewBrennan (1984, 2014) argues, are not designed by anyone to fulfill anypurpose and therefore lack “intrinsic function” (i.e., the function of a thingthat constitutes part of its essence or identity conditions). This, heproposes, is a reason for thinking that individual natural entities should notbe treated as mere instruments, and thus a reason for assigning themintrinsic value. Furthermore, he argues that the same moral point appliesto the case of natural ecosystems, to the extent that they lack intrinsicfunction. In the light of Brennan’s proposal, Eric Katz (1991 and 1997)argues that all natural entities, whether individuals or wholes, haveintrinsic value in virtue of their ontological independence from humanpurpose, activity, and interest, and maintains the deontological principle



that nature as a whole is an “autonomous subject” which deserves moralrespect and must not be treated as a mere means to human ends. Carryingthe project of attributing intrinsic value to nature to its ultimate form,Robert Elliot (1997) argues that naturalness itself is a property in virtue ofpossessing which all natural things, events, and states of affairs, attainintrinsic value. Furthermore, Elliot argues that even a consequentialist,who in principle allows the possibility of trading off intrinsic value fromnaturalness for intrinsic value from other sources, could no longer justifysuch kind of trade-off in reality. This is because the reduction of intrinsicvalue due to the depletion of naturalness on earth, according to him, hasreached such a level that any further reduction of it could not becompensated by any amount of intrinsic value generated in other ways, nomatter how great it is.

As the notion of “natural” is understood in terms of the lack of humancontrivance and is often opposed to the notion of “artifactual”, one muchcontested issue is about the value of those parts of nature that have beeninterfered with by human artifice—for instance, previously degradednatural environments which have been humanly restored. Based on thepremise that the properties of being naturally evolved and having a naturalcontinuity with the remote past are “value adding” (i.e., adding intrinsicvalue to those things which possess those two properties), Elliot arguesthat even a perfectly restored environment would necessarily lack thosetwo value-adding properties and therefore be less valuable than theoriginally undegraded natural environment. Katz, on the other hand,argues that a restored nature is really just an artifact designed and createdfor the satisfaction of human ends, and that the value of restoredenvironments is merely instrumental. However, some critics have pointedout that advocates of moral dualism between the natural and the artifactualrun the risk of diminishing the value of human life and culture, and fail torecognize that the natural environments interfered with by humans maystill have morally relevant qualities other than pure naturalness (see Lo



1999). Two other issues central to this debate are that the key concept“natural” seems ambiguous in many different ways (see Hume 1751, App.3; Mill 1874; Brennan [1988] 2014; Ch. 6; Elliot 1997, Ch. 4), and thatthose who argue that human interference reduces the intrinsic value ofnature seem to have simply assumed the crucial premise that naturalness isa source of intrinsic value. Some thinkers maintain that the natural, or the“wild” construed as that which “is not humanized” (Hettinger and Throop1999, p. 12) or to some degree “not under human control” (ibid., p. 13) isintrinsically valuable. Yet, as Bernard Williams points out (Williams1992), we may, paradoxically, need to use our technological powers toretain a sense of something not being in our power. The retention of wildareas may thus involve planetary and ecological management to maintain,or even “imprison” such areas (Birch 1990), raising a question over theextent to which national parks and wilderness areas are free from ourcontrol. An important message underlying the debate, perhaps, is that evenif ecological restoration is achievable, it might have been better to haveleft nature intact in the first place.

Given the significance of the concept of naturalness in these debates, it isperhaps surprising that there has been relatively little analysis of thatconcept itself in environmental thought. In his pioneering work on theethics of the environment, Holmes Rolston has worked with a number ofdifferent conceptions of the natural (see Brennan and Lo 2010, pp.116–23,for an analysis three senses of the term "natural" that may be found inRolston’s work). An explicit attempt to provide a conceptual analysis of adifferent sort is found in Siipi 2008, while an account of naturalnesslinking this to historical narratives of place is given in O’Neill, Hollandand Light 2008, ch. 8 (compare the response to this in Siipi 2011).

As an alternative to consequentialism and deontology both of whichconsider “thin” concepts such as “goodness” and “rightness” as essentialto morality, virtue ethics proposes to understand morality—and assess the



ethical quality of actions—in terms of “thick” concepts such as“kindness”, “honesty”, “sincerity” and “justice”. As virtue ethics speaksquite a different language from the other two kinds of ethical theory, itstheoretical focus is not so much on what kinds of things are good/bad, orwhat makes an action right/wrong. Indeed, the richness of the language ofvirtues, and the emphasis on moral character, is sometimes cited as areason for exploring a virtues-based approach to the complex and always-changing questions of sustainability and environmental care (Hill 1983,Wensveen 2000, Sandler 2007). One question central to virtue ethics iswhat the moral reasons are for acting one way or another. For instance,from the perspective of virtue ethics, kindness and loyalty would be moralreasons for helping a friend in hardship. These are quite different from thedeontologist’s reason (that the action is demanded by a moral rule) or theconsequentialist reason (that the action will lead to a better over-allbalance of good over evil in the world). From the perspective of virtueethics, the motivation and justification of actions are both inseparable fromthe character traits of the acting agent. Furthermore, unlike deontology orconsequentialism the moral focus of which is other people or states of theworld, one central issue for virtue ethics is how to live a flourishing humanlife, this being a central concern of the moral agent himself or herself.“Living virtuously” is Aristotle’s recipe for flourishing. Versions of virtueethics advocating virtues such as “benevolence”, “piety”, “filiality”, and“courage”, have also been held by thinkers in the Chinese Confuciantradition. The connection between morality and psychology is another coresubject of investigation for virtue ethics. It is sometimes suggested thathuman virtues, which constitute an important aspect of a flourishinghuman life, must be compatible with human needs and desires, andperhaps also sensitive to individual affection and temperaments. As itscentral focus is human flourishing as such, virtue ethics may seemunavoidably anthropocentric and unable to support a genuine moralconcern for the non-human environment. But just as Aristotle has argued



that a flourishing human life requires friendships and one can havegenuine friendships only if one genuinely values, loves, respects, andcares for one’s friends for their own sake, not merely for the benefits thatthey may bring to oneself, some have argued that a flourishing human liferequires the moral capacities to value, love, respect, and care for the non-human natural world as an end in itself (see O’Neill 1992, O’Neill 1993,Barry 1999).

5. Wilderness, the Built Environment, Poverty andPolitics

Despite the variety of positions in environmental ethics developed over thelast thirty years, they have focused mainly on issues concerned withwilderness and the reasons for its preservation (see Callicott and Nelson1998 for a collection of essays on the ideas and moral significance ofwilderness). The importance of wilderness experience to the humanpsyche has been emphasized by many environmental philosophers. Næss,for instance, urges us to ensure we spend time dwelling in situations ofintrinsic value, whereas Rolston seeks “re-creation” of the human soul bymeditating in the wilderness. Likewise, the critical theorists believe thataesthetic appreciation of nature has the power to re-enchant human life. Aswilderness becomes increasingly rare, people’s exposure to wild things intheir natural state has become reduced, and according to some authors thismay reduce the chance of our lives and other values being transformed asa result of interactions with nature. An argument by Bryan Norton drawsattention to an analogy with music. Someone exposed for the first time to anew musical genre may undergo a transformation in musical preferences,tastes and values as a result of the experience (Norton 1987. Such atransformation can affect their other preferences and desires too, in both

Supplementary Document:Biodiversity Preservation



direct and indirect ways (see Sarkar 2005, ch. 4, esp. pp. 82–7). In theattempt to preserve opportunities for experiences that can change orenhance people’s valuations of nature, there has been a move since theearly 2000s to find ways of rewilding degraded environments, and evenparts of cities (Fraser 2009, Monbiot 2013).(

By contrast to the focus on wild places, relatively little attention has beenpaid to the built environment, although this is the one in which mostpeople spend most of their time. In post-war Britain, for example, cheaplyconstructed new housing developments were often poor replacements fortraditional communities. They have been associated with lower amounts ofsocial interaction and increased crime compared with the earlier situation.The destruction of highly functional high-density traditional housing,indeed, might be compared with the destruction of highly diverseecosystems and biotic communities. Likewise, the loss of the world’s hugediversity of natural languages has been mourned by many, not justprofessionals with an interest in linguistics. Urban and linguisticenvironments are just two of the many “places” inhabited by humans.Some philosophical theories about natural environments and objects havepotential to be extended to cover built environments and non-naturalobjects of several sorts (see King 2000, Light 2001, Palmer 2003, whileFox 2007 aims to include both built and natural environments in the scopeof a single ethical theory). Certainly there are many parallels betweennatural and artificial domains: for example, many of the conceptualproblems involved in discussing the restoration of natural objects alsoappear in the parallel context of restoring human-made objects.

The focus on the value of wilderness and the importance of itspreservation has overlooked another important problem—namely thatlifestyles in which enthusiasms for nature rambles, woodland meditationsor mountaineering can be indulged demand a standard of living that is farbeyond the dreams of most of the world’s population. Moreover, mass



access to wild places would likely destroy the very values held in highesteem by the “natural aristocrats”, a term used by Hugh Stretton (1976) tocharacterize the environmentalists “driven chiefly by love of thewilderness”. Thus, a new range of moral and political problems open up,including the environmental cost of tourist access to wilderness areas, andways in which limited access could be arranged to areas of natural beautyand diversity, while maintaining the individual freedoms central to liberaldemocracies.

Lovers of wilderness sometimes consider the high human populations insome developing countries as a key problem underlying the environmentalcrisis. Rolston (1996), for instance, claims that (some) humans are a kindof planetary “cancer”. He maintains that while “feeding people alwaysseems humane, ... when we face up to what is really going on, by justfeeding people, without attention to the larger social results, we could befeeding a kind of cancer.” This remark is meant to justify the view thatsaving nature should, in some circumstances, have a higher priority thanfeeding people. But such a view has been criticized for seeming to reveal adegree of misanthropy, directed at those human beings least able to protectand defend themselves (see Attfield 1998, Brennan 1998a). The empiricalbasis of Rolston’s claims has been queried by work showing that poorpeople are often extremely good environmental managers (Martinez-Alier2002). Guha’s worries about the elitist and “missionary” tendencies ofsome kinds of deep green environmentalism in certain rich westerncountries can be quite readily extended to theorists such as Rolston (Guha1999). Can such an apparently elitist sort of wilderness ethics ever bedemocratised? How can the psychically-reviving power of the wildbecome available to those living in the slums of Calcutta or São Paolo?These questions so far lack convincing answers.

Furthermore, the economic conditions which support the kind ofenjoyment of wilderness by Stretton’s “natural aristocrats”, and more



generally the lifestyles of many people in the affluent countries, seemimplicated in the destruction and pollution which has provoked theenvironmental turn in the first place. For those in the richer countries, forinstance, engaging in outdoor recreations usually involves the motor car.Car dependency, however, is at the heart of many environmental problems,a key factor in urban pollution, while at the same time central to theeconomic and military activities of many nations and corporations, forexample securing and exploiting oil reserves. In an increasingly crowdedindustrialised world, the answers to such problems are pressing. Anyadequate study of this intertwined set of problems must involveinterdisciplinary collaboration among philosophers and theorists in thesocial as well as the natural sciences.

Connections between environmental destruction, unequal resourceconsumption, poverty and the global economic order have been discussedby political scientists, development theorists, geographers and economistsas well as by philosophers. Links between economics and environmentalethics are particularly well established. Work by Mark Sagoff (1988), forinstance, has played a major part in bringing the two fields together. Heargues that “as citizens rather than consumers” people are concerned aboutvalues, which cannot plausibly be reduced to mere ordered preferences orquantified in monetary terms. Sagoff’s distinction between people asconsumers and people as citizens was intended to blunt the use of cost-benefit analysis as the final arbiter in discussions about nature’s value. Ofcourse, spouses take out insurance on each others’ lives. We pay extra fortravel insurance to cover the cost of cancellation, illness, or lost baggage.Such actions are economically rational. They provide us with somecompensation in case of loss. No-one, however, would regard insurancepayments as replacing lost limbs, a loved one or even the joys of acancelled vacation. So it is for nature, according to Sagoff. We can putdollar values on a stand of timber, a reef, a beach, a national park. We canmeasure the travel costs, the money spent by visitors, the real estate



values, the park fees and all the rest. But these dollar measures do not tellus the value of nature any more than my insurance premiums tell you thevalue of a human life (also see Shrader-Frechette 1987, O’Neill 1993, andBrennan 1995). If Sagoff is right, cost-benefit analysis of the kindmentioned in section 5 above cannot be a basis for an ethic ofsustainability any more than for an ethic of biodiversity. The potentiallymisleading appeal to economic reason used to justify the expansion of thecorporate sector has also come under critical scrutiny by globalisationtheorists (see Korten 1999). These critiques do not aim to eliminateeconomics from environmental thinking; rather, they resist any reductive,and strongly anthropocentric, tendency to believe that all social andenvironmental problems are fundamentally or essentially economic.

Other interdisciplinary approaches link environmental ethics with biology,policy studies, public administration, political theory, cultural history,post-colonial theory, literature, geography, and human ecology (for someexamples, see Norton, Hutchins, Stevens, Maple 1995, Shrader-Frechette1984, Gruen and Jamieson (eds.) 1994, Karliner 1997, Diesendorf andHamilton 1997, Schmidtz and Willott 2002). Many assessments of issuesconcerned with biodiversity, ecosystem health, poverty, environmentaljustice and sustainability look at both human and environmental issues,eschewing in the process commitment either to a purely anthropocentric orpurely ecocentric perspective (see Hayward and O’Neill 1997, andDobson 1999 for collections of essays looking at the links betweensustainability, justice, welfare and the distribution of environmentalgoods). The future development of environmental ethics depend on these,and other interdisciplinary synergies, as much as on its anchorage withinphilosophy.

6. Sustainability and Climate Change



The Convention on Biological Diversity discussed in section 5 wasinfluenced by Our Common Future, an earlier United Nations documenton sustainability produced by the World Commission on Environment andDevelopment (WCED 1987). The commission was chaired by Gro HarlemBrundtland, Prime Minister of Norway at the time, and the report issometimes known as the Brundtland Report. This report noted theincreasing tide of evidence that planetary systems vital to supporting lifeon earth were under strain. The key question it raised is whether it isequitable to sacrifice options for future well-being in favour of supportingcurrent lifestyles, especially the comfortable, and sometimes lavish, formsof life enjoyed in the rich countries. As Bryan Norton puts it, the worldfaces a global challenge to see whether different human groups, withwidely varying perspectives, can perhaps “accept responsibility tomaintain a non-declining set of opportunities based on possible uses of theenvironment”. The preservation of options for the future can be readilylinked to notions of equity if it is agreed that “the future ought not to face,as a result of our actions today, a seriously reduced range of options andchoices, as they try to adapt to the environment that they face” (Norton2001: 419). Note that references to “the future” need not be limited to thefuture of human beings only. In keeping with the non-anthropocentricfocus of much environmental philosophy, a care for sustainability andbiodiversity can embrace a care for opportunities available to non-humanliving things.

However, when the concept “sustainable development” was firstarticulated in the Brundtland Report, the emphasis was clearlyanthropocentric. In face of increasing evidence that planetary systems vitalto life-support were under strain, the concept of sustainable developmentis constructed in the report to encourage certain globally coordinateddirections and types of economic and social development. The reportdefines “sustainable development” in the following way:



The report goes on to argue that “the industrial world has already usedmuch of the planet’s ecological capital. This inequality is the planet’s main‘environmental’ problem; it is also its main ‘development’ problem”(WCED 1987, Overview, paragraph 17). In the concept of sustainabledevelopment the report combines the resource economist’s notion of“sustainable yield” with the recognition that developing countries of theworld are entitled to economic growth and prosperity. The notion ofsustainable yield involves thinking of forests, rivers, oceans and otherecosystems, including the natural species living in them, as a stock of“ecological capital” from which all kinds of goods and services flow.Provided the flow of such goods and services does not reduce the capacityof the capital itself to maintain its productivity, the use of the systems inquestion is regarded as sustainable. Thus, the report argues that

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs ofthe present without compromising the ability of future generationsto meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

the concept of “needs”, in particular the essential needs of theworld’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given;andthe idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology andsocial organization on the environment’s ability to meetpresent and future needs.

Thus the goals of economic and social development must bedefined in terms of sustainability in all countries—developed ordeveloping, market-oriented or centrally planned. Interpretationswill vary, but must share certain general features and must flowfrom a consensus on the basic concept of sustainable developmentand on a broad strategic framework for achieving it. (WCED 1987,Ch. 2, paragraphs 1–2)



“maximum sustainable yield must be defined after taking into accountsystem-wide effects of exploitation” of ecological capital (WCED 1987,Ch. 2, paragraph 11).

There are clear philosophical, political and economic precursors to theBrundtland concept of sustainability. For example, John Stuart Mill (1848,IV. 6. 1) distinguished between the “stationary state” and the “progressivestate” and argued that at the end of the progressive state lies the stationarystate, since “the increase of wealth is not boundless”. Mill also recognizeda debt to the gloomy prognostications of Thomas Malthus (see thediscussion of Malthus in the Political Economny section of the entry onMill), who had conjectured that population tends to increase geometricallywhile food resources at best increase only arithmetically, so that demandfor food will inevitably outstrip the supply (see Milgate and Stimson 2009,Ch. 7). Reflection on Malthus led Mill to argue for restraining humanpopulation growth:

Such warnings resonate with more recent pessimism about increasinghuman population and its impact on the poorest people, as well as on lossof biodiversity, fresh water scarcity, overconsumption and climate change.In their controversial work The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne Ehrlich,argue that without restrictions on population growth, including theimposition of mandatory birth control, the world faced “mass starvation”in the short term (Ehrlich 1968). In a subsequent defence of their earlywork, the Ehrlichs declared that the most serious flaw in their originalanalysis “was that it was much too optimistic about the future”, and

Even in a progressive state of capital, in old countries, aconscientious or prudential restraint on population is indispensable,to prevent the increase of numbers from outstripping the increaseof capital, and the condition of the classes who are at the bottom ofsociety from being deteriorated (Mill 1848, IV. 6. 1).



comment that “Since The Bomb was written, increases in greenhouse gasflows into the atmosphere, a consequence of the near doubling of thehuman population and the near tripling of global consumption, indicatethat the results will likely be catastrophic climate disruption caused bygreenhouse heating” (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2009, 66). It was also in 1968that Garrett Hardin published his much cited article on the “tragedy of thecommons” showing that common resources are always subject todegradation and extinction in the face of the rational pursuit of selfinterest. For Hardin, the increasing pressure on shared resources, andincreasing pollution, are inevitable results of the fact that “there is notechnical solution to the population problem” (Hardin 1968). The problemmay be analysed from the perspective of the so-called prisoner’s dilemma(also see the free rider problem). Despite the pessimism of writers at thetime, and the advocacy of setting limits to population growth, there wasalso an optimism that echoes Mill’s own view that a “stationary state”would not be one of misery and decline, but rather one in which humanscould aspire to more equitable distribution of available and limitedresources. This is clear not only among those who recognize limits toeconomic growth (Meadows et al. 1972) but also among those whochampion the move to a steady state economy (Daly 1991) or at least wantto see more account taken of ecology in economics (Norgaard 1994).

The Brundtland report puts less emphasis on limits than do Mill, Malthusand these more recent writers. It depicts sustainability as a challenge andopportunity for the world to become more socially, politically andenvironmentally fair. In pursuit of intergenerational justice, it suggests thatthere should be new human rights added to the standard list, for example,that “All human beings have the fundamental right to an environmentadequate for their health and well being” (WCED 1987, Annexe 1,paragraph 1). The report also argues that “The enjoyment of any rightrequires respect for the similar rights of others, and recognition ofreciprocal and even joint responsibilities. States have a responsibility



towards their own citizens and other states” (ibid., chapter 12, paragraph83). Since the report’s publication, many writers have supported anddefended the view that global and economic justice require that nationswhich had become wealthy through earlier industrialization andenvironmental exploitation should allow less developed nations similar orequivalent opportunities for development especially in term of access toenvironmental resources (Redclift 2005). As intended by the report theidea of sustainable development has become strongly integrated into thenotion of environmental conservation. The report has also set the scene fora range of subsequent international conferences, declarations, andprotocols many of them maintaining the emphasis on the prospects for thefuture of humanity, rather than considering sustainability in any widersense.

Some early commentators on the notion of sustainable development havebeen critical of the way the notion mixes together moral ideas of justiceand fairness with technical ideas in economics. The objection is thatsustainability as, in part, an economic and scientific notion, should not befused with evaluative ideals (Beckerman 1994). This objection has notgenerally been widely taken up. Mark Sagoff has observed thatenvironmental policy “is most characterized by the opposition betweeninstrumental values and aesthetic and moral judgments and convictions”(Sagoff 2004: 20). Some non-anthropocentric environmental thinkers havefound the language of economics unsatisfactory in its implications since italready appears to assume a largely instrumental view of nature. The useof notions such as “asset”, “capital” and even the word “resources” inconnection with natural objects and systems has been identified by somewriters as instrumentalizing natural things which are in essence wild andfree. The objection is that such language promotes the tendency to think ofnatural things as mere resources for humans or as raw materials withwhich human labour could be mixed, not only to produce consumablegoods, but also to generate human ownership (Plumwood 1993, Sagoff



2004). If natural objects and systems have intrinsic value independent oftheir possible use for humans, as many environmental philosophers haveargued, then a policy approach to sustainability needs to consider theenvironment and natural things not only in instrumental and but also inintrinsic terms to do justice to the moral standing that many people believesuch items possess. Despite its acknowledgment of there being “moral,ethical, cultural, aesthetic, and purely scientific reasons for conservingwild beings” (WCED 1987, Overview, paragraph 53), the stronglyanthropocentric and instrumental language used throughout theBrundtland report in articulating the notion of sustainable developmentcan be criticised for defining the notion too narrowly, leaving little roomfor addressing sustainability questions directly concerning the Earth’senvironment and its non-human inhabitants: should, and if so, how should,human beings reorganise their ways of life and the social-politicalstructures of their communities to allow sustainability and equity not onlyfor all humans but also for the other species on the planet?

The preservation concern for nature and non-human species is addressedto some extent by making a distinction between weaker and strongerconceptions of sustainability (Beckerman 1995). The distinction emergedfrom considering the question: what exactly does sustainable developmentseek to sustain? Is the flow of goods and services from world markets thatis to be maintained, or is it the current—or some future—level ofconsumption? In answering such questions, proponents of weaksustainability argue that it is acceptable to replace natural capital withhuman-made capital provided that the latter has equivalent functions. If,for example, plastic trees could produce oxygen, absorb carbon andsupport animal and insect communities, then they could replace the realthing, and a world with functionally equivalent artificial trees would seemjust as good as one with real or natural trees in it. For weak sustainabilitytheorists, the aim of future development should be to maintain aconsistently productive stock of capital on which to draw, while not



insisting that some portion of that capital be natural. Strong sustainabilitytheorists, by contrast, generally resist the substitution of human for naturalcapital, insisting that a critical stock of natural things and processes bepreserved. By so doing, they argue, we maintain stocks of rivers, forestsand biodiverse systems, hence providing maximum options—options interms of experience, appreciation, values, and ways of life—for the futurehuman inhabitants of the planet (Norton 2005). The Brundtland report canalso be seen as advocating a form of strong sustainability in so far as itrecommends that a “first priority is to establish the problem ofdisappearing species and threatened ecosystems on political agendas as amajor resource issue” (ibid., chapter 6, paragraph 57). Furthermore,despite its instrumental and economic language, the report in fact endorsesa wider moral perspective on the status of and our relation to nature andnon-human species, evidenced by its statement that “the case for theconservation of nature should not rest only with development goals. It ispart of our moral obligation to other living beings and future generations”(WCED 1987, chapter 2, paragraph 55). Implicit in the statement is notonly a strong conception of sustainability but also a non-anthropocentricconception of the notion. Over time, strong sustainability has come to befocused not only on the needs of human and other living things but also ontheir rights (Redclift 2004, 218). In a further development, the discourseson forms of sustainability have generally given way in the last decade to amore ambiguous usage, in which the term “sustainability” functions tobring people into a debate rather than setting out a clear definition of theterms of the debate itself. As globalization leads to greater integration ofworld economies, the world after the Brundtland report has seen greaterfragmentation among viewpoints, where critics of globalization havegenerally used the concept of sustainability in a plurality of different ways(Sneddon, Howarth and Norgaard 2006). Some have argued that“sustainability”, just like the word “nature” itself, has come to mean verydifferent things, carrying different symbolic meaning for different groups,



and reflecting very different interests (Redclift 2004, 220). For better orfor worse, such ambiguity can on occasion allow different parties innegotiations to claim a measure of agreement.

The preservation of opportunities to live well, or at least to have aminimally acceptable level of well being, is at the heart of populationethics and many contemporary conceptions of sustainability. Many peoplebelieve such opportunities for the existing younger generations, and alsofor the yet to arrive future generations, to be under threat from continuingenvironmental destruction, including loss of fresh water resources,continued clearing of wild areas and a changing climate. Of these, climatechange has come to prominence as an area of intense policy and politicaldebate, to which applied philosophers and ethicists have much tocontribute. An early exploration of the topic by John Broome shows howthe economics of climate change could not be divorced fromconsiderations of intergenerational justice and ethics (Broome 1992), andthis has set the scene for subsequent discussions and analyses. More than adecade later, when Stephen Gardiner analyses the state of affairssurrounding climate change in an article entitled “A Perfect Moral Storm”(Gardiner 2006), his starting point is also that ethics plays a fundamentalrole in all discussions of climate policy. But he argues that even if difficultethical and conceptual questions facing climate change (such as the so-called “non-identity problem” along with the notion of historic injustices)could be answered, it would still be close to politically and sociallyimpossible to formulate, let alone to enforce, policies and action plans todeal effectively with climate change. This is due to the multi-facetednature of a problem that involves vast numbers of agents and players. At aglobal level, there is first of all the practical problem of motivating sharedresponsibilities (see the entry on moral motivation) in part due to thedispersed nature of greenhouse gas emissions which makes the effects ofincreasing levels of atmospheric carbon and methane not always felt moststrongly in the regions where they originate. Add to this the fact that there



is an un-coordinated and also dispersed network of agents—bothindividual and corporate—responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, andthat there are no effective institutions that can control and limit them. Butthis tangle of issues constitutes, Gardiner argues, only one strand in theskein of quandaries that confronts us. There is also the fact that by andlarge only future generations will carry the brunt of the impacts of climatechange, explaining why current generations have no strong incentive toact. Finally, it is evident that our current mainstream political, economic,and ethical models are not up to the task of reaching global consensus, andin many cases not even national consensus, on how best to design andimplement fair climate policies.

These considerations lead Gardiner to take a pessimistic view of theprospects for progress on climate issues. His view includes pessimismabout technical solutions, such as geoengineering as the antidote toclimate problems, echoing the concerns of others that further dominationof and large scale interventions in nature may turn out to be a greater evilthan enduring a climate catastrophe (Gardiner 2011, ch 11, Jamieson1996). A key point in Gardiner’s analysis is that the problem of climatechange involves a tangle of issues, the complexity of which conspires toencourage buck-passing, weakness of will, distraction and procrastination, “mak[ing] us extremely vulnerable to moral corruption” (ibid., 397; cf.Gardiner 2011; also see the concept of “wicked problem” in Brennan2004). Because of the grave risk of serious harms to future generations,our failure to take timely mitigating actions on climate isseus can be seenas a serious moral failing, especially in the light of our current knowledgeand understanding of the problem. Summarizing widespread frustrationover the issue, Rolston writes: “All this inability to act effectively in thepolitical arena casts a long shadow of doubt on whether, politically ortechnologically, much less ethically, we humans are anywhere near beingsmart enough to manage the planet” (Rolston 2012, 216). In the face ofsuch pessimism about the prospects for securing any action to combat



climate change other writers have cautioned against giving in to defeatismand making self-fulfilling prophecies. These latter behaviours are always atemptation when we confront worrying truths and insufficient answers.Whatever the future holds, many thinkers now believe that solving theproblems of climate change is an essential ingredient in any credible formof sustainable development and that the alternative to decisive action mayresult in the diminution not only of nature and natural systems, but also ofhuman dignity itself (see Nanda 2011, especially chapters by Heyd,Balafrej, Gutrich and Brennan and Lo).

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Acknowledgments

The authors are deeply grateful to the following people who gavegenerously of their time and advice to help shape the final structure of thisentry: Clare Palmer, Mauro Grün, Lori Gruen, Gary Varner, WilliamThroop, Patrick O’Donnell, Thomas Heyd, and Edward N. Zalta. Also,thanks to Dale Jamieson for comments on the version revised and updatedin January 2008.

Biodiversity Preservation

The diversity of life on earth has long been thought to deserve attention,and respect. John Muir used a version of Christianity in his attempt toargue that species deserve our respect: “Again and again, in season or outof season, the question comes up, ‘what are rattlesnakes good for?’ as ifnothing that does not rightly make for the benefit of man had any right toexist; as if our ways were God’s ways” (Muir 1916: 98–99). Despite this,and similar remarks from other early writers, it was only in the 1980s thatsustainability came to the fore as a focus of environmental policy, and theconcept of sustainable development is the topic of a later section. In thissection, we look at the notion of biodiversity, one that was hardly a centralconcern of biologists or ecosystems theorists in the 1980s (Tilman 2000).Nonetheless, a significant number of books and papers by biologists andphilosophers had sounded a warning about the loss of species, the possibleimpact of such losses on ecosystem functions and the reduction in value –both moral and economic – that was likely as a consequence of thereduction in natural variety (Norton 1986 and 1987; Wilson 1992).



The work of scientists and philosophers fed into the publication in 1992 ofthe United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UN 1992). Thepreamble to the document refers explicitly both to the utility of nature, andalso to its intrinsic value, echoing themes from both economics andphilosophy. The contracting parties, it explains, are conscious “of theintrinsic value of biological diversity and of the ecological, genetic, social,economic, scientific, educational, cultural, recreational and aestheticvalues of biological diversity and its components”. They are also“conscious of the importance of biological diversity for evolution and formaintaining life sustaining systems of the biosphere” (UN 1992: 1).

A question that arises in discussions of how best to preserve the diversityof life concerns how biodiversity is to be measured. Related to this is thepuzzle of whether the biodiversity of an area – however it is calculated –reveals something about its “natural” value? Debates over these questionsgo to the heart of contemporary discussions on biodiversity. A furtherquestion is whether the ethics of conservation has a specific focus onpreservation of wilderness as such, or at least a focus on landscapes andpopulations that are natural. In fact, high biodiversity, by some measures,can be associated with human use and occupation, as when adding afarming system to a desert raises local diversity. Hence, not all naturalsystems maximize biodiversity when left undisturbed (see Brennan and Lo2010: 113–37 for discussion on what is meant by “natural”). In sometemperate forest systems, it is disturbance to the forest – including humanland clearing activities – that provokes an increase in diversity in treespecies (Brennan 2014: 92–108). On the other hand, many highly prizedwild places are not particularly rich in natural variety (Sarkar 2005: 21–44). In some places, wilderness and biodiversity are indeed closely related,as in those set-aside wild areas that are also hot spots of biodiversity.There is no doubt that management and preservation of natural variety iseasier in the presence of low human population density (Mittermeier et al.



2003). Nonetheless the protection of biodiversity is quite a different issuefrom the preservation of wilderness.

A persistent complication is that there continues to be no single agreedmeasure of biodiversity (Maier 2012: 115–20). For example, the conceptof species itself is capable of being defined in a variety of different ways.This is a complicating factor in any discussion about policies dealing withspecies numbers and diversity. The everyday understanding of the conceptis the biological species concept, that for sexually reproducing plants andanimals, a species is a population of organisms that closely resemble eachother genetically and are capable of interbreeding so as to produce fertileoffspring. But there are other accounts. For example, according to certaingenealogical or phylogenetic species concepts, two individuals aremembers of the same species if they both belong to the smallest group ofindividuals that share a common ancestor. A problem now arises: thosewho adopt the phylogenetic species concept will count species numbersdifferently from those who adopt the biological species concept. Forexample, one study claims that adopting the phylogenetic concept ratherthan one of the others would lead to large increases in the numbers ofspecies to be found in various places. Looking at eighty-nine publishedstudies on species populations, the study found that adopting thephylogenetic concept led to nearly a 50 per cent increase in the number ofspecies identified in the various studies. Using the same concept resultedin a nearly 260 per cent increase in the number of lichen species identifiedand an 87 per cent increase in the number of mammal species (Agapow etal. 2004). If species are the fundamental units both of evolution and ofbiodiversity, then it is important to get the species concept sorted out. Asone author puts it, “If our species counts are problematic, so will be ourassessments of biodiversity” (Richards 2010: 10).

Alongside biodiversity, field research has concentrated on two otherfeatures: ecosystem stability and biological productivity. The problem of



measuring biodiversity is compounded by ones involved in measuringboth stability and productivity, leading to extended controversy amongtheorists in the 1990s (described in Sarkar 2005: 106–44). While someauthorities once regarded high levels of biodiversity as correlated withhigh systemic productivity and high stability, this view was at odds withthe observation that many of the world’s most highly productive systemsare not very species-rich. Within the last decade, however, some consensushas emerged that moderately diverse systems have high productivity andthat extra diversity within such systems may yield insurance againstexternal perturbations that might lead to a reduction in productivity. Thearguments here are highly technical (for summary, see deLaplante andPicasso 2011). They point to the conclusion that conservation andrehabilitation efforts are best focused on whole systems, not individualpopulations. What matters is not so much defending or restoringindividual species, but rather maintaining clusters of species making uplandscape, forest or river systems.

For the most part, the ecosystem services which satisfy a large number ofhuman preferences are supplied by relatively simple, non-diverse systems,such as salt marshes (useful for water filtration), and the low-diversityagricultural systems in which food is produced. These facts are consistentwith the argument that the strongest arguments for the preservation ofbiodiversity may actually not be based on its utility for human beings. Infact, Norton’s observation (Norton 1988) that cost-benefit analysis interms of human interests alone does not support biodiversity has a strikingparallel in arguments about human value. Consider, for example, the viewthat the strongest reason for governments to protect the welfare of theircitizens should come from the moral notion of human dignity – aninherent worth possessed by each person which is to be respectedregardless of the person’s circumstances and relations, including theperson’s cost-and benefit-relations to others (cf. Brennan and Lo 2007). Ifthe government of a state has no intrinsic moral concern for the dignity



and well-being of its citizens and its reason for raising or enforcingstandards of health and security, for example, is merely that a healthierpopulation and safer streets will generate a higher gross domestic product,more revenues for the state and more money and power for those runningit, then it is unlikely that such a government will be motivated to protectthose citizens who are considered too weak, too aged, or otherwise unfit tobe productive in economic or other instrumental terms. In a parallelfashion, many endangered species have already become functionallymarginal to the ecosystem in which they are found. Someone who takes apurely cost-benefit perspective could argue that the negative impacts of thedemise of those species on the system’s productivity might well benegligible or otherwise acceptable in anthropocentric terms, since theresources that would be required to preserve or restore populations ofthose species could be used to promote human benefits in other ways. Justas in the human case, cost-benefit perspectives on nature do not seem toprovide a compelling reason for protecting many endangered species.

So, is biodiversity an intrinsic good worth protecting as an end-in-itselfregardless of the instrumental values that it may or may not have forhumans? The answer seems to depend on answers to at least two furtherquestions: first, whether all living things – irrespective of species – areintrinsically valuable; and second, whether a world with diversity inintrinsic values is better than a world homogenous in intrinsic values. Takethe second question first. In terms of mere preference or liking, peopleoften prefer having a variety of things they like to just having more of thesame thing they like. The same pattern of appraisal may actually be true ofvalues as well. Suppose people generally prefer an assembly of goodthings of different kinds to a bigger collection of good things of the samekind, and suppose this preference for diversity in good things can survivesustained reflection and scrutiny by people across time and culture, then,diversity in good things is of itself also a good thing. Thus, if one startswith the moral biocentric outlook that each and every life form is



intrinsically valuable, then it will be natural as well as correct for one toaccept the further proposition that biodiversity – that is, the diversity inbiological forms of life - is also something intrinsically valuable. In short,if life is a good thing, and if a world containing good things of moredifferent kinds is better than a world containing good things of fewerkinds, then higher biodiversity is better than lower biodiversity.

So what appears to be critical to the ethics of biodiversity is the firstquestion: Is each and every living thing – irrespective of species – reallyvaluable in itself? Taylor’s argument for the core thesis of biocentrism hasalready been reviewed: every living organism is intrinsically valuablebecause each has interests and goods of its own and each is capable offlourishing. The underlying idea is that if a being is able to fare better orworse, it is prima facie morally better if it fares better rather than worse.Still, there is a sceptical challenge which calls into question the moralrelevance of biological interests. What reasons could there be for us torespect or give moral weight to the biological interests (if any) of atapeworm (cf. O’Neill 1992: 131–132) or, to take a more fancifulexample, of the lethal creatures in sci-fi movies like the Aliens series? Tothis request for reasons, the biocentrist’s best reply may be a furtherquestion: what good reasons do we have for thinking that members of thehuman species are more worthy than members of other species on Earth?

Many traditional arguments for attributing intrinsic value in a significantlyhigher degree, if not exclusively, to human beings have a commonstructure: they appeal to the fact humans have certain traits, such as self-consciousness, rationality, the capacities for language, for moral decision,for aesthetic creation and appreciation, and many other abilities and skillsthat are considered as meritorious or otherwise worthy, traits which noother life form on Earth has, or has to nearly such a great extent thathumans have them. The underlying idea is that since these traits are themost valuable and morally relevant, creatures who possess them to a



greater extent are more worthy than creatures who possess them to a lesserextent or lack them altogether. As critics have pointed out, however, thesearguments setting out to compare the moral worth of different species donot actually start off from neutral ground. Instead, the set of traitsidentified, and assumed by the arguments to be the most morally relevantand worthy, are none other than exactly those traits characteristically andtypically possessed by members of our own species (Taylor 1986,Plumwood 1993).

If we are not to beg the question in favour of human superiority, it can benoted that objective comparisons can be made of different individuals ofthe same species regarding their species specific merits (that is, thosecapacities and skills required for living a good life relative to the species)– for example, over whether a certain antelope is better in detecting andescaping from dangers than another antelope, or whether a certain bear hasbetter skills in catching fish than another bear. But if there is no one singlestandard of the good life that is applicable across all species, then wemight argue – going further than Taylor – that it would not even beconceptually coherent or sensible to compare the merits of individualsbelonging to different species. For example, it would not make sense toask whether an antelope who has the capacities and skills to live a goodantelope life is ‘better’ than a bear who has the capacities and skills to livea good bear life. If this is right, then the same logic should apparentlyapply when evaluating those arguments that seek to attribute superiority tohumans over other living things: it would likewise not make sense to saythat a human being who has the capacities and skills (e.g., self-consciousness, rationality, language, moral freedom, aesthetic creativity)to live a good human life is ‘better’ than a living thing of another specieswho has the capacities and skills to live a good life relative to its species.

Showing that there are problems with – and even failures in arguments for– human superiority does not amount to positively establishing the general



biocentric thesis that all living things are intrinsically valuable, let alonethe more specific egalitarian biocentric proposition that all living thingsare equal in intrinsic value. Nevertheless, on the supposition that theappeal to human superiority is the only line of defence that humans havein attempting morally to justify their exploitation of the Earth’senvironment and its other inhabitants, then, given that humans havealready benefited disproportionately at the great expense of members ofmany other species, the onus appears to be on the humans to demonstratethat they are indeed ‘greater’ than the rest. There is a paradox in such aconclusion. If the greatness of humanity is not mere human self-aggrandisement, then such greatness may consist at its core in a moralcapacity to look beyond the interests of oneself and one’s close associates,and to show a willingness to care for and share with those who are lessable to fend for themselves.

Pathologies of Environmental Crisis – Theories andEmpirical Research

Part of environmental philosophy’s project since its inception is thediagnosis of the origins of our present-day environmental extremities. Thebest known of these is probably Lynn White’s theory. As seen in section 2above, White argues that Judæo-Christian monotheism, because of itsessentially anthropocentric attitude towards nature, is the ideologicalsource of the modern environmental crisis. At the heart of hisphilosophical cum cultural-historical analysis seems to be a simplestructure:

W1. Christianity leads to anthropocentrism.W2. Anthropocentrism leads to environmentally damagingbehaviours.W3. So, Christianity is the origin of environmental crisis.



The second premise of White’s argument also seems to have a centralplace in a number of rival diagnoses. In fact, the structure of the majortheories in the field is regularly of this sort: (1) X leads toanthropocentrism, (2) anthropocentrism leads to environmentallydamaging behaviours; therefore (3) X is the origin of environmental crisis.Three other well-known cases have already been discussed (section 3above), namely: ecofeminism (which identifies X with those patterns ofthought that are characteristically patriarchal), deep ecology (which takesX to be atomistic individualism), and the new animism (which regards thedisenchantment of nature as the X-factor).

The four theories all seem to have one view in common: thatanthropocentrism is at the heart of the problem of environmentaldestructiveness. If anthropocentrism is the problem, then perhaps non-anthropocentrism is the solution. At this point, it may be helpful toseparate two theses of non-anthropocentrism, ones that are not normallydistinguished in the literature:

Much of the last three decades of environmental ethics has been spentanalysing, clarifying and examining the evaluative thesis of non-anthropocentrism, which has now achieved a nearly canonical statuswithin the discipline. By contrast, the psycho-behavioural thesis is seldom

The evaluative thesis (of non-anthropocentrism) is the claim thatnatural non-human things have intrinsic value, i.e., value in theirown right independent of any use they have for others.

The psycho-behavioural thesis (of non-anthropocentrism) is theclaim that people who believe in the evaluative thesis of non-anthropocentrism are more likely to behave environmentally (i.e.,behave in beneficial ways, or at least not in harmful ways, towardsthe environment) than those who do not.



discussed, but is part of the tacit background of environmental ethics.When it does get explicit mention this is often in the introductions orprefaces of books, or in reference works – for example, when it is said thatdeep ecology’s “greatest influence … may be through the diverse forms ofenvironmental activism that it inspires” (Taylor and Zimmerman 2005,compare Rolston 1988, xii, Sessions 1995, xx-xxi, and Sylvan and Bennett1994, 4–5). If the psycho-behavioural thesis is true, then it is important intwo ways: (1) it provides a rationale for both the diagnosis and solution ofenvironmental problems, and (2) it gives practical justification to thediscipline of environmental ethics itself (conceived as the mission tosecure converts to the evaluative thesis of non-anthropocentrism).Conversely, if the psycho-behavioural thesis turns out to be false, then—since the thesis is the common tacit assumption of all four theories—notonly the discipline itself, but also the four major diagnostic theories of theorigin of the environmental predicament will be seriously undermined .

Central to the psycho-behavioural thesis is a problematic assumption: thatif people believe they have a moral duty to respect nature or believe thatnatural things are intrinsically valuable, then they really will act in moreenvironmental-friendly ways. This empirical question cannot be answeredby purely a priori philosophical reasoning. In fact, the other core premisesin the four major philosophical theories on the origin of environmentalcrisis are also empirical claims about social and cultural reality. To becredible, they must be able to stand up to empirical testing. For example,are people who think in dualistic and hierarchical ways (as described byfeminists) in fact more likely to have anthropocentric attitudes and morelikely to act harmfully towards the environment? Are people who believein animism (as panpsychists argue) in fact less likely to haveanthropocentric attitudes and also less likely to harm the environment?What about people who adopt some relational or holistic view of theworld, as advocated by deep ecologists? How do they act toward naturecompared to those who adopt a more individualistic and atomistic



worldview? These questions about the relations among various beliefsystems and behaviours look no different in kind from the sorts ofquestions that social scientists regularly ask.

Of the major philosophical theories on the origin of environmental crisis,Lynn White’s is the only one to have been empirically tested by socialscientists. The net result of these studies so far has been “inconclusive”,especially when education, sex, age and social class are also factored in(Shaiko 1987, Greeley 1993, Woodrum and Hoban 1994, Eckberg andBlocker 1996, Boyd 1999). Moreover, like their philosophicalcounterparts, environmental sociologists often take the psycho-behavioural thesis of non-anthropocentrism for granted. Some of the best-known and most widely used survey instruments in the field are alsoproblematic. Riley Dunlap and collaborators developed many years agothe “New Environmental Paradigm” (NEP) scale, to measure pro-environmental attitudes (Dunlap and van Liere 1978). That scale, and itslater revisions (see Dunlap et al. 2000), is problematic precisely because itexplicitly uses indicators of beliefs in anthropocentrism to measure thepresence of un-environmental attitudes, thus assuming in advance thatanthropocentric beliefs are harmful to the environment. But whether that isso should be settled by empirical investigation rather than by an act of apriori stipulation in survey design.

Despite the fact that there is a striking common underlying structurebetween White’s theory and the other major theories discussed above, nosociological studies so far have been done on the other theories, nor on thecommon underlying psycho-behavioural thesis of non-anthropocentrismand its effects. This presents an opportunity for interdisciplinarycollaborations among philosophers and social scientists. Many tools andmethods well established in the social sciences can justifiably be adaptedfor use in research on environmental philosophy, giving the subject anempirical or even experimental turn. Such work may stimulate new ideas



about the origins of our environmental pathologies, and for testing theextent to which belief systems and worldviews actually drive attitudes andbehaviours. As long as empirical facts are relevant to philosophical andethical thought, adoption of social science methods will be a means ofkeeping our theorising in touch with the motivations and behaviours of thepeople we are trying to describe and influence.

Similar points about the role of empirical investigations can also be madeabout theorizing over a range of other problems, including drought, thepreservation of biodiversity, and climate change. While it has becomecommonplace to refer to the present era as “the age of terror”, there isincreasing agreement across the entire globe that the world is facingchronic and unprecedented environmental problems, many of them ofhuman origin. Indeed, the United States military, responding to an albeitspeculative report on abrupt climate change prepared for the Pentagon bythe Global Business Network (see Schwartz and Randall 2003, in theOther Internet Resources section below), have declared that the problemsof adjustment to climate change constitute a far more severe threat tonational and international security than does terrorism itself. Drought,changing weather patterns, the expected burden of caring forenvironmental refugees, the effects of consumerism, and the health declineassociated with various forms of pollution are continuing and majorproblems for human beings themselves (see Shue 2001, Sagoff 2001,Thompson 2001), and raise crucial issues about environmental justice (seeShrader-Frechette 2002). At the same time, the continuing destruction ofnatural environments and the widespread loss of both plant and animalspecies poses increasing problems for other forms of life on the planet. Infacing these problems, there will likely be great opportunities for co-operation and synergy between philosophers and both natural and socialscientists.



Like many other important and interesting questions, no single disciplinecould claim sole ownership of those just raised about the origins ofmodern environmental crisis and the quandaries we now face, the relationbetween environmental problems and social injustice, and the vexedquestion of how human beings should relate to the natural environment intheir pursuit of happiness and well-being. The move away from armchairspeculation to link up with a wider community of inquiry may beinevitable not only in environmental ethics but in all areas of practicalphilosophy.

Copyright © 2015 by the authors Andrew Brennan and Yeuk-Sze Lo



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Winter 2015 Edition First published Mon Jun 3, 2002; substantive …willsull.net/la370/resources/Equity/Ethics-environmental... · 2017. 1. 19. · Environmental Ethics and Politics