Ethical Virus

Ethical environment

What responsibilities do we have to wild species and ecosystems — and to present and future generations of humans dependent on critical ecological services? How does the recognition of rapid, global environmental change challenge our traditional understandings of these obligations? What does it mean to be "sustainable" and why do many believe that achieving sustainability is an ethical imperative for science and society in this century?
These questions, and others like them, are explored in this series. Environmental ethics is a branch of applied philosophy that studies the conceptual foundations of environmental values as well as more concrete issues surrounding societal attitudes, actions, and policies to protect and sustain biodiversity and ecological systems. As we will see, there are many different environmental ethics one could hold, running the gamut from human-centered (or "anthropocentric") views to more nature-centered (or "non-anthropocentric") perspectives. Non-anthropocentrists argue for the promotion of nature's intrinsic, rather than instrumental or use value to humans. For some ethicists and scientists, this attitude of respecting species and ecosystems for their own sakes is a consequence of embracing an ecological worldview; it flows out of an understanding of the structure and function of ecological and evolutionary systems and processes. We will consider how newer scientific fields devoted to environmental protection such as conservation biology and sustainability science are thus often described as "normative" sciences that carry a commitment to the protection of species and ecosystems; again, either because of their intrinsic value or for their contribution to human wellbeing over the long run.

Sarkar banner.
In the wake of massive destruction of forests and other natural habitats, particularly in the tropics following World War II, conservation biology emerged in the 1980s as a multi-disciplinary, goal-directed enterprise dedicated to the conservation of biodiversity (Soulé 1985, Sarkar 2005). The justification of this goal (and why it should guide social policy) became a central question for the growing discipline of environmental ethics (Norton 1987). The question was important because biodiversity conservation requires the preferential allocation of limited social resources towards that end (Margules & Pressey 2000, Margules & Sarkar 2007). For instance, there are many legitimate uses of a landscape or seascape besides conservation, including human habitation, resource extraction, and recreation. A decision to use an area for conservation is a decision that these other uses are ethically less valuable than conservation in a given context. Thus, conservation biology makes the fundamental ethical supposition that biodiversity should be conserved, and this requires a philosophical justification.

Environmental ethicists have debated three types of justification. Some environmental ethicists, and many conservation biologists, have claimed that biodiversity has "intrinsic value" (Soulé 1985, Callicott 1986, Naess 1986). According to one interpretation of this claim, biodiversity is a property of systems that is intrinsically valuable and should therefore be conserved. The trouble with this interpretation is that the relevant property has never been practically specified (that is, operationalized) in a form to make it relevant to the practice of conservation biology. According to another — more plausible — interpretation, the claim is taken to mean that all biological entities (and not just human individuals), including higher taxonomic categories such as species and ecological communities, have value independent of all human interests. Consequently, all such entities are supposed to merit conservation even if it means that it will require the non-satisfaction of human interests. Such a view is typically motivated by the belief that it exhibits a suitably respectful attitude to nature that will prevent its destruction (McShane 2007).

The problem is that of showing why non-human entities, especially higher taxa, have intrinsic value. The typical move is to presume that it is non-problematic that human individuals have intrinsic value, and to suggest that there is a relevant similarity between these individuals and the other entities to which intrinsic value should be assigned. For instance, just like human beings, other biological entities are supposed to have a will to live or an interest in flourishing (Schweitzer 1976). The trouble is that these analogies at best lead to other individual organisms having intrinsic value but not to intrinsic value for composite entities such the higher taxa, which are more often the target of conservation efforts. For example, does it really make non-metaphorical sense to say that a species has a will to live? Problems such as this have led many environmental ethicists to abandon the project of basing conservation biology on intrinsic value attributions, though this near-consensus is not universal (McShane 2007).