Just Environments

Intergenerational, International and Inter-Species Issues

David Cooper, Joy Palmer, David Cooper, Joy Palmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134961061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Can we do what we want with other species? How do conflicting international interests affect global issues? What do we owe the next generation? Just Environments investigates these questions and the ethics which lie at their core.

Part I
The framework

1
Rights and justice in the environment debate

Brenda Almond

‘Environment’ is a term that may be as specific or as general as we care to make it. A city street in a teeming capital city in the northern hemisphere, a no-go area for police, ruled by mobsters and drug syndicates, is an environment of sorts—for some individual human beings the only environment they have experienced.

Even so, there is a sense in which this is a chosen or contingent environment, an environment under human control. For if, socially and economically, it is hard to escape, it is not physically so. A resident of this community, given the means, may step into an aeroplane—a sealed micro-environment, itself situated some distance from the surface of the earth—and thus be transferred to some other region, polar or tropical, urban or rural, at some other point on the face of the planet.

Modern technology, in facilitating travel in this way, has given human beings, perhaps for only a moment in history, the illusion that environment is essentially a matter of choice. So far, however, our ventures beyond the confines of the earth, our exploration of space, have merely confirmed that environmental choice is in a broader sense confined and constrained. This planet represents the only realistic locus for human existence. In a more general sense, then, ‘environment’ is the context which provides the conditions for the existence of the human species, together with other living creatures and the vegetation on which they depend for sustenance. The science of ecology has brought understanding of the intimate web of connections of humans, animals, plants, earth, water. It has increasingly led us tosee ourselves as neither independent nor self-sufficient, but as systems within systems. Knowledge of the extent of these systems in either direction seems to be limited only by the present scope of our microscopes and telescopes.

There is, too, a developing historical perspective. Wesee our species, the various human groups, as having until a very recent point in the planet’s history lived in balance with other species and with planetary conditions. It is true that there were issues of conservation and preservation in the past—recognition of the threat of species loss through uncontrolled exploitation such as led to the virtual wiping out of the bison population in North America, concern about over-cultivation of the land even in ancient and medieval times, pessimistic assessments of the polluting potential of large cities from the seventeenth century on, and the Malthusian perception around the beginning of the nineteenth century that population and food-supply need to be kept in balance (Malthus 1970). Nevertheless, nature has in the past been extremely resilient in coping with the worst that human beings could do. Today, in contrast, wesee that natural balance as having been dramatically distorted in the last few micro-seconds of planetary time by scientific and technological advance which has led to an unprecedented explosion of populations in some parts of the world, to the rapid depletion of irreplaceable resources including important species, and to a threat to the outer environment of the earth itself, its protective ozone layer. Moreover, the attempts to harness powers which are intrinsically beyond the control of humans within their limited life-span has generated toxic (particularly nuclear) wastes which will remain with this generation and its successors further into the future than the records of humanity’s past (see Meadows et al. 1972).

To apply a term like ‘justice’ to these multiple contexts may not always seem appropriate, for many ethical issues are embedded here. There is a sense, how-ever, in which the concept of justice plays a distinctively useful role in relation to certain key environmental issues, for it provides something firmer and more tangible than broader ethical concepts such as value or goodness—although admittedly these are terms which play a part in the wider picture (Almond 1987). However, justice, unlike some broader terms, brings with it implicit reference to rights, needs, desert—concepts underlying discussion of environmental issues. It would be a mistake, then, tosee justice as narrowly confined to issues of punishment and reward, and, more broadly conceived, it provides an alternative to other ethical theories often invoked here, for example, utilitarianism—the idea that the morally right course of action is that which produces the most satisfactory outcome, whether in terms of pleasure, happiness or preference-satisfaction—or virtue ethics, which links what is morally right to the promotion of flourishing. But before turning to the question of the role of justice, it would be useful to consider very briefly the relevance of these other approaches to the environmental debate.

THE UTILITARIAN ALTERNATIVE

Utilitarianism is prominent in philosophical discussion of environmental issues as the ethical position of a number of influential environmental philosophers. Of these, Peter Singer (1993) is typical in applying the theory both to relations between human beings (contemporary issues of poverty and inequality, the impending problem of the heritage we leave for future generations) and to relations between humans and animals (for example, conservation of species, vegetarianism, animal experimentation). As far as the latter area is concerned, Singer’s utilitarianism had led him to argue for care, concern and a general raising of standards in the treatment of animals by human beings. However, when we turn away from the world of theory to the world of practice, it seems that a very different kind of utilitarianism holds sway. This is an essentially shallow approach which takes a much narrower view of what interests are to be taken into account, and, because it tends to adopt a short-term perspective, it has very different consequences for policy. It is this unfettered and unqualified form of utilitarianism—perhaps better described as narrow cost-benefit calculation, since it is hardly a philosophical view—that lies behind the uncontrolled exploitation of some of the opportunities provided by technological development. Examples of the practical outcome of this unreflective approach include:

1 factory farming—in the drive to produce better and cheaper bacon or veal, or higher egg-producing hens, animals (now classified as ‘agricultural products’) have been subjected to production-line techniques which ignore their natural condition and instincts. It is this kind of uncritical cost-saving that has led to the introduction through the food-chain of new threats of disease or the transmission of harmful chemicals, as every animal residue is utilized and refed to animals tricked into cannibalism in a distorted imitation of the closed cycles of ecology;

2 genetic experiments, including the breeding of animals for disease—the ‘oncomouse’, a mouse with a genetic susceptibility to cancer, bred as a suitable subject for cancer research, is just one example of an attempt to supplant nature’s evolutionary preference for the more survival-enhancing traits, with the scientific pursuit of survival-inimical traits where this will advance our own (human) interests;

3 more general environmental hazards—included here are a number of well-publicized problems such as the production of toxic wastes, the depletion of important resources, erosion and desertification of vast tracts of land, damage to the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, pollution of rivers—in short, a variety of changes with large-scale environmental impact.

Very often, in these cases a greater good is being sacrificed for purely short-term gains—or even the good (profit) of some for the good (health) of others, so that they cannot in the long run be defended on grounds of utility, since this requires an overall balance of good effects over bad. This is a point made strongly by philosophical utilitarians such as Singer, who oppose many of these practices. But while it is true that a more reflective and philosophical form of utilitarianism can avoid these consequences, there are other problems of a more theoretical nature that its philosophical defenders must confront. Briefly, these amount to, first, difficulties in dealing with certain specific categories of cases, and second, a more fundamental difficulty in giving a satisfactory account of justice.

The special categories of cases that pose problems for utilitarianism are, first, nations whose standard of living is currently vastly lower than that taken for granted in the affluent countries of the developed world. Utilitarianism seems to require some equalization of the situation, but implications of that for the inhabitants of rich nations are problematic, particularly if asymmetry in population growth is taken into account. That is to say, if the population of potential donor countries declines, while the population of countries which might qualify for help continues to expand, the steady state needed to make realistic utilitarian calcu-lations is lacking. Second, there is the case of future generations, problematic not only because of the sheer impossibility of knowing what their wishes or prefer-ences are likely to be, or even whether such generations will exist and in what numbers, but also because, if their preferences were to rank equally alongside our own, the calculations demanded by the theory would be overwhelmed by the infinite number of preferences that would need to be taken into account.

Finally, although leading defenders of animal rights like Singer are utilitarians, it is hard tosee that utilitarianism itself entails consideration for animals - this despite the tradition initiated by Jeremy Bentham when he famously advanced the claims of animals for moral consideration by saying that ‘The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk! but, Can they suffer?’ (1960: ch. 17, sec. 1). That is to say, the judgement that animals are included in our moral universe—that their happiness and welfare matter—cannot itself be made on utilitarian grounds. The question of who or what should be included is in the end a line-drawing exercise and may in the end be a matter of arbitrary decision. Even leading advocates of animal rights hesitate as to whether a virus must be protected and preserved, while the conscientious philosophical vegetarian, searching for criteria, may sometimes be found hesitating in the borderland inhabited by prawns and scallops. A distinction proposed by Robin Attfield (1991:154) between moral significance and moral standing might suggest a way out of this difficulty—his suggestion is that we can allot moral standing to lesser creatures, but still decide to sacrifice them for beings of greater moral significance. This has the advantage of fitting with intuition and common sense, but does not ne-cessarily provide a way out of their difficulties for utilitarians. Utilitarian theory makes central the notion of equal consideration of interests, and cannot therefore easily accommodate this concept of differential worth. To value some more than others is to import a notion of value from some quite different source.

Of most relevance to the present discussion, however, is the debate that centres round the question of whether utilitarianism necessarily involves a willingness to countenance the sacrifice of the few for the many, and hence injustice. John Rawls (1981:315) writes:

The conception of justice in classical utilitarianism conflicts…with the conception of justice as reciprocity. For on the utilitarian view justice is assimilated to benevolence and the latter in turn to the most effective design of institutions to promote the general welfare. Justice is a kind of efficiency.

Rawls goes on to cite Bentham’s contemptuous rejection of the notion of justice:

justice, in the only sense in which it has a meaning, is an imaginary personage, feigned for the convenience of discourse, whose dictates are the dictates of utility, applied to certain particular cases. Justice, then, is nothing more than an imaginary instrument, employed to forward on certain occasions, and by certain means, the purposes of benevolence.

However, Bentham’s successor and disciple in utilitarian theory, John Stuart Mill, had a higher regard for the notion, which he believed could in fact be derived from utility. Mill’s view was that: ‘Justice is a name for certain classes of moral rules, which concern the essentials of human well-being more clearly, and are therefore of more absolute obligation than any other rules for the guidance of life’ (Mill 1954: ch. 5). There is a form of utilitarianism, then, which would seek to reconcile the claims of justice and utility; meanwhile, utilitarianism, even in its classic form, cannot in any event be written off as wholly irrelevant to the environmental debate: to value life but not to value happiness—even human happiness—would strike most people as perverse, although a few extreme environmentalists do this. For everyone else, the immediate question is: what of apparent environmental value may be sacrificed for the sake of the comfort of some members of the current human population? There is, however, a more fundamental question to be asked as well: what in fact is it for humans to be happy? The theory known as virtue ethics addresses this second question directly in the notion of flourishing.

VIRTUE ETHICS

The idea of flourishing, which is an essential aspect of virtue ethics, is in many ways more useful to environmental concerns than the cruder measure of utility. It is a notion familiar from Greek philosophy, particularly that of Aristotle, although Plato had already suggested a model of this kind when he equated justice with health, and immorality with disease. The theory begins by noting that every kind of object has an end or function that in a sense defines it—a knife is for cutting, a seat for sitting on, and so on. With animate creatures, or even with plants, this end may be more complex and open to debate. In the case of humans, Aristotle identified it with what is most uniquely distinctive of human beings the exercise of their rational faculty. For an object or a creature to flourish, then, is for it to be fulfilling its essential function well. More broadly, flourishing may be taken as a matter of well-being or health in general, and the flourishing of animals and plants is easily graspable by analogy (see Pence 1991).

This theory can be applied, too, to generate obligations beyond the present generation to the people of the future, for the well-being of our descendants can be seen as essential to our own flourishing. Something of this thought is captured in Solon’s saying—‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’ It is a remark we would do well to ponder as we reassess the value that we could attach to our own lives and projects—our raising of children, our cultural products, our political achievements—if we were to have no posterity.

Some would argue that virtue ethics with its concern for flourishing is too inward-looking, in that it encourages a focus on the self and an egotistical preoccupation with its improvement; it is also generally taken to be concerned with individuals, whereas environmentalism is concerned with species and with the natural world. However, a selfish concern with only one’s own flourishing is far from an essential aspect of virtue ethics, and it would be a very reasonable step to progress from that to concern for other individuals and their flourishing; it would be natural to move on from there to concern with the flourishing of species and indeed of the biosystem itself. Hence there are no a priori considerations that prevent the incorporation of a broadly conceived and extended virtue ethics within the justice framework, and there is certainly no incompatibility in their practical implications. The Greek conception of the scope of virtue was in any case extensive and overlapped with justice. Aristotle quotes with approval a Greek proverb: ‘In justice is summed up the whole of virtue’ (1976:173).

THE JUSTICE APPROACH

Justice, together with its central concept of rights, essentially looks outwards from individual persons, setting bounds to the ways in which they may interact. Historically, it is connected with the notion of balance and harmony—terms which are central to environmental thought, but which have until recently been seen as applying only to relations between human beings in a social or political setting. Within this social context, the necessity for harmonization arises from conflicts of interest. John Rawls draws together these apparently antithetical notions of harmony and conflict when he writes of ‘the usual sense of justice in which it means essentially the elimination of arbitrary distinctions and the establishment within the structure of a practice of a proper share, balance, or equilibrium between competing claims’ (Rawls 1981:293).

It is these elements that constitute the liberal notion of justice, to which the idea of rights is central. The modern liberal theory of justice is related to political theories that ground the obligation to obey the laws of a state or community on contract and the consent of the governed. The idea of rational choice is fundamental to such theories. But if reason and a capacity to choose are essential conditions for rights and hence for access to justice, this will place this theory, too, at risk as far as the three categories so far considered are concerned. To begin with, it would seem to exclude other species from the liberal’s moral universe, and also to confine the application of the theory to the human beings currently alive. Consent, too, is a notion applicable only within the limits of a particular community or political system, and, increasingly, people have been looking beyond the boundaries of their own society to extend such notions to a more internationalist conception of justice. Peoplesee themselves as having some responsibility for strangers starving, or dying from treatable disease, in distant lands, although they may disagree as to whether the morally relevant requirement in this case is indeed justice or merely compassion.

They are also more inclined to admit marginal cases to the moral community. The higher apes, for example, are currently the focus of a campaign to have them treated more on a par with their human cousins, but the interests, too, of dogs, cats and h...