Environmental Ethics

An Introduction with Readings

John Benson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317972556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Presupposing no prior knowledge of philosophy, John Benson introduces the fundamentals of environmental ethics by asking whether a concern with human well-being is an adequate basis for environmental ethics. He encourages the reader to explore this question, considering techniques used to value the environment and critically examining 'light green' to 'deep green' environmentalism. Each chapter is linked to a reading from a key thinker such as J.S. Mill and E.O. Wilson.
Key features include activities and exercises, enabling readers to monitor their progress throughout the book, chapter summaries and guides to further reading.

Chapter 1

Environments and environmental ethics

Objectives

After reading this chapter you should:

Appreciate some different aspects of the meaning of ‘environment’.

Have a grasp of what it means to ascribe independent moral status to a being.

Understand the division between ‘lighter’ and ‘deeper’ green approaches to environmental ethics.

Environments

There is no such thing as the environment. As its derivation suggests (see any standard dictionary) the term is a relative one, meaning ‘surroundings’. There is always to be understood some thing that is surrounded. An environment is always the environment of … Consider the environment of a domestic cat. Its immediate environment is the household in which it spends most of its time, awake or asleep (when vets recommend environmental flea control they mean spray the house, not just the cat), but its environment is, more accurately, the area over which it ranges and the features of that area that affect the cat in some way, providing sources of food, opportunities for mating, challenges (rival cats, cars), safe places to sleep, and exciting places to prowl, skip and generally brisk about the life.¹ Strictly speaking, two cats in the same area do not have identical environments because each is part of the other’s. Less strictly they can be said to share an environment because most of the features of the area affect each of them in the same way.

To speak of an environment in this way is to speak of it as a set of resources. That is to emphasise one side of a two-way relationship. The other side is the impact that individuals or populations have on their environment, and unavoidably – since that environment contains other living things – on the environments of those living things. When we speak of the environment we need to have in mind whose environment we mean. This is important because what improves a locality as the environment of one kind of organism, may spoil the environment of another. Draining a pond may be good for human beings but bad for mosquitoes.

The distinction between a creature’s effect on its environment and the environment’s effect on the creature is not the only one we can make. Two aspects of an organism’s relation to its environment are adaptation and familiarity. By ‘adaptation’, I mean the greater or lesser extent to which its surroundings are ones in which it is equipped, as a biological entity with a particular evolutionary pedigree, to flourish. This emphasises the environment as a set of resources; an organism depends on its environment for the provision of its needs – a cat needs an environment in which there are small rodents and/or dollops of cat food – and any place with these resources will do as well as any other. But familiarity is importantly different. Animals that move around and whose movements are guided by their perception of their surroundings need to know their way around. A cat’s environment, in an important sense, is not just the area in which its needs are met, but the area that it knows its way around. This relationship is a very particular one: it is to this place, not just to a place with these features.

How are the boundaries of an environment to be fixed? Where do environments end? Where does my environment end? The answer depends on which aspect one has in mind. The area in which I feel at home, move around with ease, knowing its landmarks, may be quite small, say a few square miles. At the other extreme the area on which I depend for continued existence is very large, extending to the earth, with its atmosphere, soils, waters and living things – the biosphere – and beyond. This comes close to saying that there is such a thing as the environment, but not quite. For one thing, this all-inclusive sense does not supersede the restricted local environments which remain important for the lives of particular individuals and groups. For another, we are still using ‘environment’ as a relative term, relative to particular individuals or groups. The biosphere is many environments, for the relation in which any individual, population or species stands to the biosphere is particular to it.

Throughout this book I shall try to keep in mind the relative nature of the term by avoiding the expression ‘the environment’ except in contexts where it refers to the global system which all living things share.

Environmental Ethics

What is environmental ethics? Ethics is concerned with individuals and groups as subjects and objects of actions, that is as doers and as things to which things are done. Traditionally, it has been most concerned with human beings as subjects and objects of doings. Many accounts present recent developments as extending this concern in stages, first to non-human animals, next to living things generally, and on to wholes such as populations, plant communities, ecosystems, lakes, streams and mountains; the move to each stage being more radical and problematic than the last. On this account environmental ethics begins where the ethics of concern for animals leaves off. But that is somewhat arbitrary: are not animals part of one’s environment? Is it not more sensible to say that environmental ethics incorporates the ethics of animal concern?

Having accepted that, one might be struck by the thought that other human beings are also part of one’s environment. Does that mean that environmental ethics incorporates the ethics of human concern? If so, environmental ethics becomes indistinguishable from ethics. But in practice it is convenient to recognise a sub-division of the field of ethics that is concerned with the rights and wrongs of our treatment of the non-human.

There is, however, another point that is worth bearing in mind. We have become in the recent past increasingly aware of the way in which living things form intricate relationships of interdependence within their shared environment. The saying, ‘it is impossible to do only one thing’, draws attention to the often unpredictable ramifications of the effects of our actions. The implication for ethics that I want to point out is this: an environmentally informed ethics is one that takes full account of the fact that an individual organism, of whatever kind, is embedded in its environment, and gives full weight to this in deliberating about actions that are likely to affect the organism.

Thus environmental ethics considers not only natural but also urban environments: how human beings are affected physically, mentally and spiritually by the design and materials of the buildings in which they live and work, the layout of cities, provision of public services, and so on. Cities, it should be remembered, are not only human environments, so a more comprehensive environmental view considers their effect on foxes and plane trees.

Environmental Problems

The variety of environments is matched by the variety of problems that can be termed ‘environmental’. Someone playing loud music near by can be an environmental problem if it is heard as an unwelcome intrusion. It is a problem because it causes distress and prompts the question, ‘what is to be done about it?’ For there to be a problem there needs to be some feature of an environment that is seen as undesirable, and someone for whom it raises the practical question, ‘how can it be removed?’ The spread of bracken on the Cumbrian fells is a problem (at least in part) because it reduces the area that can be grazed, and because it raises the question, ‘how can it be halted or reversed?’

Environmental problems can be quite local, like that one; indeed, even more local, like a loose slate that allows unwanted rainwater to spoil the fabric of my house. They can also be far-reaching, like the smog produced by large-scale forest fires. And, at the extreme, they can be global in extent like the effects on the earth’s atmosphere of the emission of carbon dioxide. Such far-reaching problems constitute problems because of the harmful effects on human beings, though not only on human beings. Other species may be, and almost certainly will be in most cases, adversely affected, and that may be seen as part of the problem. Many of the most threatening environmental changes are brought about, intentionally or otherwise, by human agency. Intentional changes include such things as the rerouting or damming of rivers, the drainage of marshes, forest clearance for agricultural purposes, and so on. Unintentional changes include the pollution of air, soil and water by industrial emissions (where the act of emitting certain substances into the atmosphere or into a river is intentional, but its consequences not intended, or even foreseen), and the destruction of animal and plant populations (by forest clearance, for example). But changes not brought about by human activity at all can be seen as undesirable from some point of view. Whatever brought about the destruction of the dinosaurs – some cataclysmic change in their environment – was certainly a bad thing from the dinosaur point of view. It is debatable how much effect human activities have on climate changes, but certainly there are large-scale environmental changes, of which climate changes are one kind, which are independent of human activity. Such change may none the less raise problems for human beings. The causal origin of a change – whether or not it was brought about by human action – is irrelevant.² The relevant considerations are whether a change has harmful effects on human (or non-human) beings, and whether human beings can do something about these effects. It is important to note here that the problem consists of three questions: (a) are the effects really harmful? (b) can we do anything about them, either by controlling the changes or by remedying their effects? (c) if we can is it morally incumbent on us to do so?

I think it is fair to say that environmental ethics has been unduly crisis-oriented. Its growth in recent years has certainly accompanied rising consciousness of, and anxiety about, the serious threats to human well-being and, on the part of many, to the well-being of other species, posed by pollution and the destructive exploitation of natural resources. At least in the public consciousness, there has been a tendency to concentrate on supposedly imminent catastrophes. (But not only global catastrophes; there is also gloom at the degradation of the countryside, the encroachment of concrete, as expressed in Philip Larkin’s despairing poem ‘Going, Going’ (see Reading 17).) It is certainly good that people should become more aware of the ways in which humans and other beings can be harmed by actions which in themselves may be beneficial, but which disturb the unobvious mechanisms by which living things are supported. It may be a good thing that people should be scared into changing their behaviour by the threat of catastrophe (though there are dangers in crying wolf). But environmental ethics, though stimulated by crises, is not fundamentally concerned with what ought to be done in critical situations. What then is it concerned with?

The Range of Environmental Concern

So far I have characterised environmental ethics as concerned with the relationship between morally aware subjects and the objects in their environments; with the latter considered as themselves having environments, that is, as beings-in-environments. But it will not do to leave it there. There is a significant narrower conception that needs to be recognised. So far I have said nothing to delimit the objects with which environmental ethics is concerned. Human beings, yes, other animals, yes, living things generally, yes – but nothing so far has been excluded. But for some of its practitioners, environmental ethics is conceived of as concerned with the natural world, with what is of value in nature, and with how the recognition of value in nature should regulate human behaviour. This is a narrower conception of environmental ethics, and one which raises some difficult questions. ‘What should we understand by “nature”?’ is one. This is a question that will be discussed at some length later in the book (especially in Chapter 6). For the present we can say that nature or the natural world is often understood to be the world of living things other than human, and their non-living setting.

Thus conceived, environmental ethics has to do with working out the principles that should govern human dealings with the natural world – what duties we have to refrain from harming or to protect from harm or to actively promote the good of … – of what? I am going to borrow from Mary Midgley a convenient list of kinds of things, besides other normal adult human beings, concerning whi...