Climate Change Ethics and the Non-Human World

Brian G. Henning, Zack Walsh, Brian G. Henning, Zack Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000026597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science

This book examines from different perspectives the moral significance of non-human members of the biotic community and their omission from climate ethics literature.

The complexity of life in an age of rapid climate change demands the development of moral frameworks that recognize and respect the dignity and agency of both human and non-human organisms. Despite decades of careful work in non-anthropocentric approaches to environmental ethics, recent anthologies on climate ethics have largely omitted non-anthropocentric approaches. This multidisciplinary volume of international scholars tackles this lacuna by presenting novel work on non-anthropocentric approaches to climate ethics. Written in an accessible style, the text incorporates sentiocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric perspectives on climate change.

With diverse perspectives from both leading and emerging scholars of environmental ethics, geography, religious studies, conservation ecology, and environmental studies, this book will offer a valuable reading for students and scholars of these fields.

1 Climate change and the loss of non-human welfare

John Nolt

What would it mean to conceive the harms of climate change and related environmental degradation to non-human life not only as biodiversity losses or threats to species, but, more fundamentally, as losses of welfare—losses, in other words, of non-anthropocentric (and non-anthropogenic) goodness? To begin to see, take a long look back.

Good times and bad

There have been times when Earth was richly inhabited and times when it was barren, times when it was molten hot, and times when it was bitterly cold, times when life was ascendant for tens of millions of years, and times of mass extinction. To everything, it is said, there is a season.¹ But some seasons have been better than others.

I don’t mean better for us. Humans weren’t around for most of this. Nor am I thinking of what was good for us in that it set the stage for our existence or in that it was the sort of world we would have preferred—for its grandeur, say, or hospitableness—if we were there. Leave us and our preferences and predilections out of it. That is what it means to think non-anthropocentrically. I mean times when there was much that was good or much that was bad independently of us.

The period following the Chicxulub asteroid strike about 66 million years ago, for example, was a bad time. That impact and its consequences—a monstrous tsunami, worldwide wildfires, and climatic disruptions—eliminated three-quarters of all species. All non-avian dinosaurs died. Suffering, starvation, injury, and death were terrible beyond comprehension.

Times since then, however, have been comparatively beneficent. Biodiversity has blossomed. Innumerable beings in fantastic variety have arisen and flourished—and, even though (as evolution demands) most have perished prematurely, many have reproduced. The sentient ones have felt pain or joy or something analogous to them.

Think, too, of times when nothing was either good or bad because there was nothing for which things could be good or bad—the billion or half-billion years, for example, between the Earth’s formation and the advent of microscopic life. During that entire period, nothing—on this planet, at least—was good or bad for anything. It is still that way in some places—on the planet Mercury, for example. There are mountains, craters, rocks, and dust particles on Mercury, but nothing is good or bad for them. So far as we know, nothing good or bad has ever happened on Mercury—though, of course, much has happened. But on Earth there have been good times and bad and times that were neither.

Biologists now worry that by refashioning the world to suit ourselves in the short term, we may be bringing on another bad time of long duration. They don’t put it that way, of course, at least not usually. They speak instead of biodiversity loss, threats to species, diminishment of ecosystem services, habitat destruction—and, lately, of a threatened sixth mass extinction.² (The Chicxulub event was the fifth.) There are those—as Holmes Rolston III notes in his contribution to this volume—who celebrate the escalating human power that is inflicting these losses. But understood non-anthropocentrically, without the blinders of short-term and exclusively human values, they are overwhelmingly harmful. Unchecked, they will add up to a very bad time.

Harm is welfare reduction. Benefit, correlatively, is welfare maintenance or increase. Welfare, harm, and benefit can be understood either individually or collectively. Harm, for instance, is individual when a living creature is sickened or wounded or killed. It is collective when the total welfare of a population declines—either through degradation of its members’ welfare or loss in their numbers, or both. A “good time” is a period when the collective or aggregate welfare of the living beings on Earth is relatively high and steady or increasing. A bad time is a period when it is relatively low or plummeting.

Three types of welfare

Etymologically, welfare is simply faring well. But the concept is complicated. There are at least three main types of welfare: biotic, hedonic, and a third type that is much rarer.

Biotic welfare is, roughly, physical health. Every living organism—indeed, every living cell—has some degree of it. It can be characterized as autopoietic functioning (Nolt 2009). The basic autopoietic functions are encoded in the organism’s genetic script. Among them, for all organisms, are obtaining and metabolizing nutrients, eliminating wastes, regulating hydration, and so on. But the biotic welfare of an organism is not merely the totality of its autopoietic functions; it is also their mutual integration into the organism’s self-sustaining goal-directed behavior. The quantity of an organism’s biotic welfare is the quantity of its biological life.

That quantity is always positive or zero, never negative. Zero biotic welfare is death.³ When an organism is ill or injured, its biotic welfare is still positive but lower than normal. When it is healthy, its biotic welfare is relatively high. Complex organisms are capable of more biotic welfare—more life—than simple ones, because they have more living subsystems and higher levels of functional integration.

Non-sentient organisms have only biotic welfare. They fare well just to the extent that they function well as integrated living systems. Thus, they can be harmed only by diminishment of their physical health—reduction, we may say, of their quantity of life. They do not consciously experience harm.

But biotic welfare is not the only kind. The nervous systems of many complex, mobile animals have evolved so that some essential functions (e.g., eating, drinking, rest, nurturance, sex) produce pleasure, and certain kinds of damage or potentially damaging conditions (e.g., injury, illness, hunger, thirst, the appearance of enemies) produce anguish or pain. Pleasant experiences evoke repetition; painful ones, avoidance. Thus, there arises associatively learned behavior that is conducive to survival and reproduction.⁴ The ability to experience pain and pleasure is sentience.

Sentience evolved, no doubt, because it promotes biotic welfare, hence survival and reproduction. But positive and negative feelings have in the process acquired some degree of independence from those original functions. Positive feelings are intrinsically rewarding; negative ones, intrinsically disagreeable. In many sentient animals, these valences have come to constitute a distinct kind of welfare: a welfare of feeling. Call it hedonic welfare. Hedonic welfare may be either positive or negative.

Welfare in sentient animals is therefore complex, having both a positive biotic component that may be low or high and a hedonic component that ranges from negative to positive. Hedonic welfare overlays, but does not replace, biotic welfare. Sentient animals, like all living beings, have a degree of biotic welfare—typically a relatively high degree, because of their complexity and high levels of functional integration. But they also have a degree (positive, negative, or mixed) of hedonic welfare. They fare well to the extent that they have high levels of both—to the extent, in other words, that they are physically fit and feeling fine.

The two types of welfare may clash. Sometimes, for example, the misery of a sentient individual is so intense, prolonged, and unrelievable that the individual’s overall welfare is no longer positive (though it may not be negative either; see the following section on welfare comparison). That may justify euthanasia.

In addition to biotic and hedonic welfare, there is a third kind: a welfare of meaning that is apparently available only to social animals. This is the kind of well-being enacted, for example, in love or friendship, or in the pursuit and achievement of a career, knowledge, or creative expression. Because it is a social or cultural phenomenon, the welfare of meaning transcends mere feelings. It is prominent for, though not limited to, humans. (Think, for example, of friendships between humans and animals or among animals.) But it is absent from most living things. Since this chapter’s topic is non-human welfare, I focus here mainly on biotic and hedonic welfare.⁵

One final—and crucial—preliminary point: biotic and hedonic welfare are objective conditions. When a non-human animal suffers from a wound or feels pleasure in the presence of its offspring or mate, that is a fact independent of us, not something we project anthropomorphically into the situation. Such things occurred for many millions of years before we arrived on the scene.

The feeling-lives of animals are, of course, very different from ours, and there is much about them that we can’t understand. Still, they can to some extent be investigated empirically, often these days neurophysiologically. Biotic welfare is even more obviously objective. Whether a tree is healthy or diseased, for example, is a fact that we can determine by empirical examination. It is healthy to the extent that it does well and resiliently what trees of its type do (e.g., grow, photosynthesize, draw water and nutrients from the soil). Often, we can tell just by looking.

Welfare and ethics

Cards on the table: I am an ethical biocentrist. I hold that the welfare of living beings of any kind, whether sentient or not, ought to have some moral significance—though for very simple individual organisms that significance is often negligible in practice. That biocentrism motivates this chapter, but having argued for it elsewhere, I won’t do so here.⁶ Nor will I assume it. What I do assume is that all living beings have some degree of objective welfare and that having positive welfare is good for the living being that has it. This section explains those assumptions.

Philosophers have usually conceptualized welfare in one of three ways: hedonically, as described in the previous section; epithumetically, as satisfaction of desires; and, finally and most recently, as a set (or “list”) of objective properties.

Welfare conceived epithumetically has, like hedonic welfare, both positive and negative valences: desire-satisfaction is positive and desire-frustration negative. And like hedonic welfare, the epithumetic conception of welfare is generally thought to be limited to sentient or conscious beings—though at least one attempt (not very successful in my opinion) has been made to generalize the idea to non-sentient life (Agar 2001; Nolt 2015a, 177–78).

Straightforward epithumetic conceptions miss the mark, however, because desire- or preference-satisfaction is poorly correlated with anything that could reasonably be called welfare. This is clearly true for contemporary humans, both because of the poor fit of our instinctive preferences with twenty-first century life and because our cultivated preferences are much manipulated by propaganda and advertising. Getting what we want is often objectively bad for us (consider junk food or addictive substances), or it may leave us bored and vaguely dissatisfied (many consumer products have this effect). Getting what we do not want (the end of a toxic relationship, for example) may be good for us. Sometimes we want too much; our welfare can in that case be improved by reducing rather than satisfying desires. Satisfaction of preferences (or what Agar calls biopreferences) is likewise poorly correlated with welfare for non-human animals in non-natural habitats. Red wolves that were reintroduced into the Great Smoky Mountains in the 1990s had preferences for the taste of antifreeze that they found puddled in parking lots. Some of them died in misery as ethylene glycol crystallized in their kidneys.⁷

There are, of course, attempts to modify epithumetic conceptions of welfare, usually by some sort of idealization, but these add interminable complications. It is best not to go down that rabbit hole.⁸

That leaves us with hedonic and objective-list conceptions. Exclusively hedonic conceptions have absurd consequences. Noszick’s experience machine is the best-known illustration (Nozick 1974, 42–45). This is a thought experiment in which we can maximize pleasure (hedonic welfare) only by remaining always wired to a machine that produces unsurpassably pleasurable illusions. Simple ethical hedonism implies that we should stay wired. That, however, is ethically absurd.

Still, those who would refuse the experience m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Climate change and the loss of non-human welfare
• 2 Anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene: restoration and geoengineering as negative paradigms of epistemological domination
• 3 Climate ethics bridging animal ethics to overcome climate inaction: an approach from strategic visual communication
• 4 Suffering, sentientism, and sustainability: an analysis of a non-anthropocentric moral framework for climate ethics
• 5 Biocentrism, climate change, and the spatial and temporal scope of ethics
• 6 Evaluating climate change with the language of the forms of life
• 7 Thinking through the Anthropocene: educating for a planetary community
• 8 Conflicting advice: resolving conflicting moral recommendations in climate and environmental ethics
• 9 An eco-centric proposal for setting a price on greenhouse gas emissions
• 10 Being human: an ecocentric approach to climate ethics
• 11 Atmospheres of object-oriented ontology
• 12 Monsters, metamorphoses, and the horror of ethics in the “Pelagioscene”
• 13 Gut check: imagining a posthuman “Climate”
• 14 Wonderland Earth in the Anthropocene epoch
• Index