The move from good to ought in environmental ethics

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 28, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 355-374

  Nolt, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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ANIMALIA;

EID: 33846118905     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics20062843     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 230-31.
2. This summary is culled from Rolston. Ibid., pp. 98-100: "The genetic set is thus really a propositional set - to choose a deliberately provocative term - recalling how the Latin propositum is an assertion, a set task, a theme, a plan, a proposal, a project, as well as a cognitive statement. . . . Even stronger still, the genetic set is a normative set; it distinguishes between what is and what ought to be. This does not mean that the organism is a moral system, for there are no moral agents in nature apart from persons, but that the organism is an axiological system, an evaluative system. . . . We can say that the physical state the organism seeks, idealized in its programmatic form, is a valued state. Value is present in this achievement. . . . a moral agent in deciding his or her behavior ought to take account of the consequences for other evaluative systems."
3. A species for Rolston is "a living historical form . . . propagated in individual organisms, that flows dynamically over generations" (ibid., p. 135). "Genetically, though not neurally, a species over generations 'learns' (discovers) pathways previously unknown. . . . There is a specific groping for a valued ought-to-be beyond what now is in any individual. Though species are not moral agents, a biological identity - a kind of value - is here defended" (ibid., p. 143). "[Processes of value found first in an organic individual reappear at the specific level: defending a particular form of life, pursuing a pathway through the world, resisting death (extinction), regeneration maintaining a normative identity over time, storied achievements, creative resilience learning survival skills. If, at the specific level, these processes are just as evident or even more so, what prevents duties from arising at that level? The appropriate survival unit is the appropriate level of moral concern" (ibid., p. 151).
4. "[S]ystemic nature is valuable intrinsically for its capacity to throw forward (pro-ject) all the storied natural history" (ibid., p. 198). "There is value wherever there is positive creativity" (ibid., p. 199). "[O]ne ought to protect values - life, creativity, community - wherever these are found" (ibid., p. 231).
5. We may ignore the deontic elements, for it is in essence a categorical syllogism of the form: All F has G, All G is such that we ought to V it, So all F is such that we ought to V it - Or, more simply still: All S is M, all M is P, so all S is P.
6. "I am life which wills to live, and I exist in the midst of life which wills to live. . . . Just as in my own will-to-live there is a yearning for more life . . . so the same obtains in all the will-to-live around me. . . . Ethics consists . . . in this, that I experience the necessity of practicing the same reverence for life toward all will-to-live as toward my own. . . . A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all the life which he is able to succor, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring any living thing.. . . . Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life." From Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics (1923),
7. excerpted in Louis P. Pojman, Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application (London: Jones and Bartlett, 1994), p. 66.
8. Taylor articulates and defends the first premise of this argument in Paul Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), chap. 2, sec. 2, pp. 60-71. The second premise of my summary combines Taylor's claims that what has a good of its own has inherent worth and that what has inherent worth is worthy of respect (ibid., p. 72). I discuss this second premise and its justification in more detail below.
9. "The capacity for suffering and enjoyment [i.e., sentience] is . . . sufficient for us to say that a being has interests-at an absolute minimum, an interest in not suffering." Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation, rev. ed. (New York: Avon Books, 1990), p. 8. "[T]he interests of every being affected by an action are to be taken into account and given the same weight as like interests of any other being" (ibid., p. 5). The conclusion is implicit, but Singer plainly endorses it.
10. See, for example, Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 6. "Fact and Value," and chap. 9, "Values, Facts and Cognition."
11. Ibid., p. 231.
12. Ibid., pp. 216-30.
13. John O'Neill, "The Varieties of Intrinsic Value," Monist 75 (1992): 110-37;
14. reprinted in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston, III, eds., Environmental Ethics: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 131-42. This quotation is from p. 131.
15. On some plausible forms of deontic logic this is false, but not interestingly false. A typical and wholly trivial exception is the form Ga, a=b |- Oa=b (where G is a one-place predicate meaning "is good," O is the deontic operator "it ought to be the case that") in systems where variables are rigid designators. Here the premise Ga is superfluous; the conclusion follows from a=b alone. See Gerhard Schurz, The Is-Ought Problem: An Investigation in Philosophical Logic (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 185-92.
16. This sort of extrapolation is the central theme of Nash, Roderick Frazier, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). (Nash calls it "ethical extension.")
17. Ibid., p. 61.
18. It may be formalized as: Hmg & Oamg, ∀x∀y((Hxg & Hyg) → ∀z(Ozxg ↔ Ozyg)) |-∀x(Hxg → Oaxg), where Hxz is a two-place predicate meaning "x has good z," Oxyz is a three-place predicate meaning "Agents ought to do action x to y (solely) on account of y's possession of good z," the name a stands for an action, and the name m stands for me or us, and the name g stands for some particular good.
19. Of course, one still owes this organism respect as something significant to those who cared about the person of whom it is the remains, but that is to respect it for what it means to others, not for what it is in and of itself. Similarly, one might owe it respect for what it once was, but again that is not to respect it for any characteristic that it possesses now.
20. Many thinkers whose primary concern is animal ethics hold this view. See, for example, Bernard Rollin, "Environmental Ethics and International Justice," in Steven Luper-Foy, ed., Problems of International Justice (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), pp. 124-43 (the title is a bit misleading)
21. or Peter Singer, "Not for Humans Only: The Place of Nonhumans in Environmental Issues" in K. E. Goodpaster and K. M. Sayre, eds., Ethics and Problems of the Twenty-First Century (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), pp. 191-206.
22. Taylor, Respect for Nature, p. 72.
23. Thus, Taylor writes: "The assertion that a living thing has inherent worth is here to be understood as entailing two moral judgments: (1) that the entity is deserving of moral concern and consideration . . . and (2) that all moral agents have a prima facie duty to promote or preserve the entity's good as an end in itself . . . . Suppose, now, that we do conceive of a wild animal or plant as having inherent worth. Then . . . we acknowledge the claim-to-be-respected which its existence makes upon us" (ibid., pp. 75-76).
24. Ibid., chap. 3, esp. pp. 167-68.
25. Juxtaposing O'Neill's and Taylor's technical vocabularies risks some confusion. O'Neill, as I noted above, concedes that "natural entities have intrinsic value in the strongest sense of the term," but what he means by this claim is closer to what Taylor means by asserting that they have a good of their own. In contrast to Taylor's notion of inherent worth, O'Neill's notion of intrinsic value implies no obligation on the part of agents to respect them - indeed, nothing about obligations at all.
26. Perhaps the most notable statement of this goal of identification occurs in M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. Mahadev Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1948), "Farewell," pp. 267-69.1 am using the term identification here as a success verb; that is, I understand it in such a way that when one identifies with X, X's goods do in fact become one's own, in the way I explain below. It is possible, of course, to mistakenly believe that one has achieved identification, but that is not identification.
27. At about the time that deep ecology's founder, Arne Naess, was making his first forays into deep ecology, he was also completing a scholarly study of Gandhi's thought. Arne Naess, Gandhi and Group Conflict (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1974).
28. His interpretation of Gandhi's views on identification and its justification parallels very closely the view he advocates in his work on deep ecology. See especially Arne Naess, "Identification as a Source of Deep Ecological Attitudes," in Deep Ecology, ed. Michael Tobias (San Diego: Avant Books, 1985).
29. Henry David Thoreau. Walden and Other Writings (New York: Bantam Books, 1962), p. 202.
30. O'Neill's view is of this type: "For a large number of, although not all, individual living things and biological collectives, we should recognize and promote their flourishing as an end in itself. Such care for the natural world is constitutive of a flourishing human life. The best human life is one that includes an awareness of and practical concern with the goods of entities in the non-human world" (O'Neill, "Varieties of Intrinsic Value," p. 139).
31. There are many variants of this view. An early instance can be gleaned from the section entitled "The Psychic and Socio-Psychic Aspects" of Christopher Stone's essay "Should Trees Have Standing?" Southern California Law Review 45, no. 2 (1072): 450-501.