Environmental Ethics and Behavioural Change

Benjamin Franks, Stuart Hanscomb, Sean Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317409687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Sviluppo sostenibile

Environmental Ethics and Behavioural Change takes a practical approach to environmental ethics with a focus on its transformative potential for students, professionals, policy makers, activists, and concerned citizens. Proposed solutions to issues such as climate change, resource depletion and accelerating extinctions have included technological fixes, national and international regulation and social marketing. This volume examines the ethical features of a range of communication strategies and technological, political and economic methods for promoting ecologically responsible practice in the face of these crises.

The central concern of the book is environmental behaviour change: inspiring, informing and catalysing reflective change in the reader, and in their ability to influence others. By making clear the forms of environmental ethics that exist, and what each implies in terms of individual and social change, the reader will be better able to formulate, commit to, articulate and promote a coherent position on how to understand and engage with environmental issues.

This is an essential companion to environmental ethics and philosophy courses as well as a great resource for professionals interested in practical approaches to environmental ethics. It is also excellent supplementary reading for environmental studies, environmental politics and sustainable consumption courses.

p.1

1

RATIONALE

Ethics for guiding evironmental behaviours and practices

This chapter introduces the scope and principal topics of the book by posing big questions for readers, individually and collectively. What are the major environmental problems we face? What are our fundamental values and how do they affect our attitudes concerning the environment? What makes ethics particularly relevant to questions of how we humans inhabit and manage our environments? What should be done – and by whom? What behaviours and practices have to change and how should this be accomplished? What ethical issues are raised by the proposed solutions? How can these insights be combined and applied successfully, and where do they lead?

1.1 Reasoning through ethics

At the heart of this book is the grounding of environmental actions in defensible ethical principles. Chapter 2 introduces ways of identifying and analysing dilemmas about judging notions of right and wrong and deciding our priorities of concern.

Reasoning about ethics has developed into consistent frameworks from the ancient Greeks. Complementary approaches have been constructed over the past 250 years during the periods known as the ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Industrial Revolution’ and ‘modernity’. The oldest of these theories embeds moral thinking and behaviour in virtues or qualities of character. By contrast, Humanists – including some of the supporters of the French and American revolutions – developed an ethical system founded on rights and duties (so-called deontology). Also, suiting a period of burgeoning commerce, a third system of ethical principles became popular from the nineteenth century. The best-known version, utilitarianism, judges morality by a kind of accounting procedure: the best action is one that provides the maximum return of happiness.

p.2

The jostling values introduced in subsequent chapters can be fitted to one or another of these frameworks. These rigorous systems provide guidance. They identify constraints on certain actions and motivate others. As will become evident through our coverage, the authors find virtue ethics to be the most compelling basis for environmentally-sound practices.

Our aim in this book is to demonstrate how these approaches to ethical reasoning can be applied consistently to a range of activities relevant to understanding and changing environmental behaviours. These frameworks place challenging constraints on acceptable human activities and encourage new practices that have been relatively uncommon in modern societies. Our intent is to critically discuss the broad variety of methods available to change behaviours and to produce sustainable practices. The book consequently addresses readers ranging from professionals to managers to concerned citizens, and from working contexts stretching from companies to governments to environmental organisations.

1.2 Environmental values

The moral judgements we make are based on values, but there are other kinds of values as well. We value a very wide range of things, sometimes based on a moral evaluation, but also based on their practical use, their aesthetic qualities, or because we like them for other varied and unspecified reasons.

‘Value’ is such a basic idea that it is hard to define without being circular: we value X because X is valuable; and X is valuable because we value X. However, it is possible to offer some indication of what makes something valuable, even if it is in a rather abstract way. For instance, what we consider valuable has some connection with needs, wants and, broadly speaking, what matters to us. Other things being equal, we desire what we find valuable, and the desiring of something is conceptually related to having emotional responses towards it; e.g., happiness when in its presence, anger if someone unjustifiably harms or interferes with it.

It can also be said that the worlds we as individuals and communities inhabit are defined by values as much as they are by their physical features. Natural science aims to discover truths about the material world – truths that exist whether we know about them or not – but we first have to be motivated to find out about the world in order for the practice of science to exist or flourish. In other words, we have to first find valuable the sorts of truths that science can provide. This need to care applies to the generation and continuation of all human activities, whether it is playing Scrabble or voting in a democratic election. We do not primarily live in a physical world, but in a world shaped by values.

It is possible for only one person to find a particular thing valuable, but more typically, because of common instincts or social norms, values tend to be shared. In order for societies to function, however, various moral (and other) values must be shared – either because they are held to have inherent value, or because of a recognition of their practical necessity. For example, for many it is simply seen as a good thing to be honest with other people under most circumstances; honesty is valued for its own sake. For some though there may be no such regard for the fundamental value of honesty, but nevertheless a recognition that for valuable goals to be achieved (such as successful teamwork) being generally an honest person is a requirement and, in this instrumental sense, valuable.

p.3

This distinction between inherent (or intrinsic) values and instrumental values is a vital one for both ethics in general and for environmental ethics. For example, is species extinction and biodiversity loss wrong just because of its negative consequences for human well-being, or also because these things are valuable in their own right?

This book is primarily about moral (or ethical) values, and the nature of these will be explained in Chapter 2. However, other kinds of value become important as well, not least because one approach to understanding ethical value (known as consequentialism) is in terms of the effects our actions have on what people care about. For this reason, an accurate appreciation of what matters, and to how many, is essential for making moral decisions. Moreover, moral values will often come into conflict with other types of values; for example, those associated with economics, political power and lifestyles that are environmentally unsustainable. In order to fully appreciate the importance of environmental ethics and how it can analyse and influence approaches to behaviour change, we must also understand the challenge it faces from other important types of value.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore and assess distinct moral worldviews: different ways of perceiving and valuing environments. Their bottom line is that people in Western cultures have traditionally expressed (and often still do) only passing concerns beyond their own interests, and base this orientation on a variety of arguments. In fact, the term ‘environment’ itself, coined in the mid-nineteenth century, did not then have its current focus on nature and other forms of life, but instead on the differing local contexts affecting human lives.

The two chapters sketch how ethical sensibilities have adapted to new knowledge and to growing human powers and insights. Over the most recent five centuries, human activities have been characterised by expansion: new territories (such as European conquest of the Americas), larger groupings (creation of expanding urban environments, nation-states and empires) and exploitation of new resources (such as the transatlantic slave economy, iron production, gold fever and hydroelectric power). This growth brought experiences of fresh geographical contexts and active efforts to manage them to suit human needs. How have these expanding activities relied on a shared ethical vision? What consequences have they entailed for other human cultures, species and ecosystems?

By the twentieth century, two environmental contexts had risen to prominence. On the one hand, modern cities became increasingly artificial environments. Working animals were replaced by machines, and for some urban residents the opportunities to experience non-human life were minimal. On the other hand, nations increasingly defined ‘wilderness areas’ to be regions that are reserved or conserved (in other words, either protected intact or managed wisely as a resource). In distinctive ways, these contrasting environments embodied human values alone: modern cities became island enclaves dedicated to a single species, while conservation areas managed those aspects of the non-human world that were particularly valued by people, such as hunting, fishing and scenic beauty. Today, more than half the world’s population lives in urban areas. Few genuine wildernesses remain, although some regions (such as the deep oceans) remain relatively free of human activity. To what extent does such segregation of interests succeed in ensuring sustainable environments?

p.4

While these novel human experiences largely consolidated ethical sensibilities that focused on human interests (so-called ‘anthropocentric’ or human-centred ethics), there has been a gradual broadening of sensitivities from opposing voices regarding the varieties and contexts of life that are worthy of moral concern. These historical roots are just as pertinent today as members of modern societies continue to grapple with distinct systems of value. What do these past episodes reveal about human behaviours and how they can change?

As discussed in Chapter 3, changing attitudes concerning ethical principles such as compassion, justice and freedom have extended notions of kinship and community. Through the nineteenth century there were social movements to dismantle the European and American slave economies, to extend voting rights to non-land-owning residents and to reduce legal barriers to women’s participation in society (such efforts continue in numerous contexts today, particularly in combatting wider ethnic and gender inequalities). Although the ‘correct’ moral judgement and actions may appear obvious today, these issues have provoked intense disagreement along political, religious and economic lines for individuals, groups and entire nations. These topics were ‘wicked problems’ (see Chapter 5) in the sense of requiring multiple forms of intervention. In that respect, they are analogies of our present quandaries about sustainable environments.

These transitions of attitude gradually extended the ethical landscape to considerations of humans in general. A handful of voices suggested that other species might be considered worthy of similar moral attention. At the centre of such claims were reassessments of value: should non-humans be understood as mere resources for human benefit, or do they have worth in themselves? Certain non-Western theological traditions recognise other life forms as having intrinsic rather than instrumental value.

Into the twentieth century, these concerns were most often expressed by actions to prevent specific cases of suffering (more recently dubbed life-centred or ‘biocentric’ ethical concerns). Humane organisations increasingly opposed the physical mistreatment of animals, particularly in urban settings. Questions of inclusiveness remain: which animals should be our focus and which qualities (of them or us) justify this protection? Are all forms of life worthy of human concern, and how should this realisation affect our activities? Also, in what ways should humans be altering their behaviours in order to respect these values?

The science of ecology reveals more abstract qualities of life to be considered. Interactions between forms of life suggest interdependence; harming one component of an ecosystem may have effects elsewhere in the system (an insight inspiring what is now known as an ‘ecocentric’ ethical perspective). If such symbiosis is delicate or fragile, it may place constraints on acceptable human actions. Since these new ethical sensitivities emerged during the mid-twentieth century they have become important components of environmentalism. Even so, this growing abstraction – from people, to certain animals, and then to complex ecosystems – can be disorienting and baffling. Where should human attentions be focused and what should we do to wisely manage our actions?

p.5

These questions remain as vital now as they were a half-century ago, and they continue to produce new thoughtful perspectives. These are attentive to larger scales of place and time. Environmental ethics today – as hinted in widespread concern about anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change – considers the global scale and the many ways that our biosphere may be harmed or potentially helped by human activities. An historical perspective on the environment has been important, revealing the effects of past human activities on our shared present. The changes to ecosystems around the world have been profound, and in some regions disastrous for the loss of once-common species, habitats and ways of life. Given this human aptitude to transform environments, what effects are current activities setting up for our descendants (often referred to today as ‘future generations’, and sometimes consciously including other species and ecosystems)? What can or should we do to avoid predicted dangers?

Modern environmental ethics has inherited these multiple concerns, and is expressed along a spectrum of value systems. Each of them considers the ethical dimensions sketched above, but in contrasting ways. Chapter 4 explores more recent environmental values, which demand considerable reorientation of human activities. So-called ‘deep ecologies’ call for longer-term analysis of human activities and individual responsibilities; so-called ‘social ecologies’ focus on reconfiguring human and social relations in ways that assure a sustainable existence for all forms of life and the planet as a whole. These are demanding stances that identify extensions to our sense of duties, and may identify broader virtues to guide our behaviours.

1.3 Reframing contemporary environmental issues

This book is motivated by the proliferation of environmental quandaries. Awareness has grown over just the past few generations of the widespread environmental harms caused by humans. Accumulating concerns have been triggered by specific events. Cases of toxic waste dumps, oil spills, species extinctions and agricultural mismanagement have become more frequent in modern societies and more frequently reported by mass media.

These concerns extend not just to accidents, but also to potential harms caused by human innovation. New policies, technologies and modes of life periodically raise concerns from publics that have become mistrustful of the unplanned consequences that seem to accompany modern practices. For instance, wind turbines, an alternative to the burning of fossil fuels for energy production, have been criticised for potential harms to birds, nearby residents, tourist enjoyment of natural landscapes and national economic competitiveness; legislation to curb industrial pollution may be challenged because of its negative effects on company profits and employment.

p.6

This focus on the here-and-now and on first-hand implications is a common feature of human problem-solving, and arguably has proven to be a highly effective technique for rapidly advancing science and engineering. Direct experience and experimentation can often reveal precise cause-and-effect relationships. This knowledge can identify immediate problems, and its reapplication often can solve those problems speedily and efficiently. Indeed, this approach is at the centre of ‘modernity’, the beliefs, attitudes and ways of life that now describe most human societies.

This mind-set nevertheless has drawbacks: it may limit our vision about complex and unfamiliar situations. Human activities and human powers have scaled up dramatically in recent times. The pace of change has obscured important features: the range of unanticipated consequences and the nature of their implications for pre-existing systems and future options can be difficult to assess. Human-made systems have grown dramatically in complexity over the past century, particularly socio-technical systems such as transport (rail, road and aviation networks and their corresponding leisure and commerce offshoots), communications (from telegraphy and the telephone to radio, television and the internet), food production (from mega-farms to refrigerated distribution to microwave meals) and a global scale for economics. Each has...