A Theory of Ecological Justice
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A Theory of Ecological Justice

Brian Baxter

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eBook - ePub

A Theory of Ecological Justice

Brian Baxter

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About This Book

In A Theory of Ecological Justice, Baxter argues for ecological justice - that is, for treating species besides homo sapiens as having a claim in justice to a share of the Earth's resources. It explores the nature of justice claims as applied to organisms of various degrees of complexity and describes the institutional arrangements necessary to integrate the claims of ecological justice into human decision-making.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2004
ISBN
9781134386017

1 The concept of ecological justice

In a three-part series entitled The State of the Planet, broadcast on BBC television in November 2000, Sir David Attenborough, the person associated, at least in British minds, with nature and the environment in all its forms, provided a lucid and alarming survey of the main ways in which human beings are currently destroying many of the plants and animals around them, driving many towards extinction. During the second episode, in the course of considering the reasons for the human-caused extinction of a species of snail unique to Hawaii, he addressed the issue of whether it mattered that one small species of snail should become extinct, especially as apparently no other ecological damage had resulted, as far as we know. His reply to this question was as follows: ‘Surely it is sad indeed that our descendants should inherit a natural world that is more impoverished than the one we inherited?’ (BBC 2000a). This sort of rather wistful response to the extinction of other species is often encountered. In voicing it David Attenborough was simply expressing a prevalent view, even among those who regard themselves as concerned for the natural environment. In further identifying as the injured party ‘our descendants’, he also adopted a standpoint which is widespread, even among those most concerned about the prospects of large-scale humancaused extinctions of other species. The possibility of there being any wrong done to the species of snail, or to the individual members of the species, receives no mention at all, not even to be dismissed. Apparently it is only the possible losses to actual and future human beings, whether aesthetic, cultural, scientific, medical, economic, recreational and so forth, that count.
One way to understand the point of this book is to see it as seeking to establish the wholly inadequate character of these responses. If the arguments presented below are correct we should rather say that human beings would have done something grossly unjust if they were to perpetrate the extinctions of other life-forms, as envisaged by Attenborough and many other well-informed commentators, when they could take steps to avoid doing so without serious harm to human life. This specific injustice, further, will have been done to the creatures themselves, not to human beings.
In order to flesh out this claim a little further it will be as well to begin with an outline of how the approach of this book towards human beings’ relationships with non-human life differs from that of other traditions and theories. The first point to make is that human beings have always had at least some concern to treat at least some of the other organisms with which they share the planet with what they regard as due respect (see Perlo 2003; Sylvan and Bennett 1994: 29–30). The basis of this respect differs across time and place. Often it is bound up with some religious belief which establishes obligation-grounding relationships between all human beings, or at least the believer’s own group, and other forms of life – either in general, or in specific categories. Sometimes this has involved the idea that other creatures share an important aspect of their inner selves in common with human beings. Sometimes a myth of a common ancestor does the job, sometimes a doctrine of reincarnation. Often various elements of such thoughts will all play a part. Often the idea that certain creatures – plants or animals – are sacred is important here. Other forms of religious-based concern for the non-human world involve a more indirect form of responsibility for it – a responsibility held directly to the benevolent creator for providing it for human use. In such patterns of thinking the idea of a duty of human stewardship towards other life-forms emerges as the guiding conception (see Attfield 1991; Daly and Cobb 1990).
In an age when religious ideas lose some of their power and plausibility, secular versions of at least some of these conceptions begin to emerge. For many modern people, the idea of the kinship between all life-forms, as revealed by Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory of evolution, plays an important moral function in sustaining a sense of human obligation towards other life-forms. The concept of stewardship has also been formulated in non-religious terms. In an age still dominated by the utilitarianism which emerged in its clearest form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, it was the capacity of some organisms to feel pleasure and pain which gained them admission to the area of moral concern. Animal rights advocates often focus upon this element of other organisms’ capacities to make the moral case against factory farming, scientific experiment using animals, and so forth.
In all these instances, whether religious or secular, we can see that human beings have for long found reason to adopt an attitude of concern towards at least some aspect of the non-human world, and to see it as a requirement of morality, in some form, to restrict their behaviour in some ways. Failure to do so results in impiety, sacrilege, inhumanity or cruelty.
None of these traditional ways of conceiving of the morality of human relationships with non-human organisms is the same as behaviour-influencing considerations drawn from the purely prudential concern to maintain a healthy non-human environment for the benefit of existing or future human beings, or groups thereof. A great deal of the modern Western concern for the environment is drawn from this source. We human beings derive all of our resources, directly or indirectly, from the natural world, and this fact has played a great and significant part in the modern environmental movement’s effort to articulate our continued interconnectedness with the biosphere of the planet, and to point to the various serious ways in which we appear to be harming it.
Such concerns have not been without effect in the world of politics, law and international relations. We now inhabit a world in which serious steps have been, and are being, taken to preserve species and habitats from human-caused damage. These have involved whole rafts of legislation to protect, in some way, endangered species within local and state jurisdictions, across state boundaries and in the open access areas, such as the open sea, beyond the reach of any one state’s jurisdiction. By one recent reckoning there now exist over 300 multilateral agreements to protect the environment. Of these, nearly one-third are at least in part designed to ‘protect biodiversity’, which is the phrase which has been coined to refer to the protection of endangered species. Although most of these are regional, thirteen have a global coverage (McGraw 2002: 9–10). There now exists a growing body of ecologists and conservation managers seeking to apply our scientific understanding of ecosystems to the maintenance of protected areas within which endangered species may continue to survive, and to foster their survival beyond protected areas by advising human economic actors how to operate in such a way as to remove the threats which their actions might otherwise pose for other life-forms.
To sum up, then, one can say that it is by no means a new or unusual thought that human beings have some moral responsibilities towards at least some parts of the non-human world. It is equally apparent that the idea that it is in the interest of human beings to maintain a healthy environment for themselves and their descendants is one which readily finds many supporters. Finally, these motivations have led human states to legislate and organize to provide some measure of protection for other life-forms, and to employ professional environmental caretakers to implement this protection.
From the point of view defended in this book these are all welcome phenomena. It is, of course, entirely possible to raise a sceptical voice against many of the forms of concern just outlined. The religious-based moral conceptions are open to criticism from the secular standpoint as part of the general critique of religious thought. Many from the religious side will see the secular approaches to environmental protection as doomed to failure unless human beings manage to recover a sense of the sacred. One may well ask how effective in practice are the legislative efforts, apparently so extensive, to protect the environment in the face of powerful economic, political and ideological forces operating in the opposite direction. Plainly, then, none of these phenomena can be treated as wholly unproblematic. However, their existence does at least help with the project of this book by showing that the very idea of seeking to protect the continued existence of nonhuman creatures on moral grounds is one which has a long history of human acceptance. Furthermore, the existence of institutions at all levels of human political organization – legislation, treaties, conventions, conservation organizations and managers – will play a very important role later in the book when we come to consider what institutional arrangements will be necessary to secure ecological justice.
However, the premise with which this book begins is that none of these existing ways, whether moral or purely prudential, of thinking about how human beings should conduct themselves towards non-human beings is fully satisfactory. The moral forms of thought either do not cover all relevant non-human life-forms, or cover them for the wrong reasons, morally speaking. For example, they restrict concern to some category of the sacred or to the sentient, or, when all life-forms are covered, as in the stewardship traditions, they operate with notion too vague to be very helpful. The purely prudential basis for producing such protection, based on the idea that it is in human self-interest to afford it, sounds tough-minded enough to appeal ‘in the real world’. However, it has always been, and may well remain, a matter of contention between ecologists how much species variety a ‘healthy’ environment needs, whether there are any ‘redundant species’ from the point of view of ecosystem health, and so on. Hence there will probably always be plenty of ‘wriggle room’ to allow decision-makers to permit human-caused exterminations to proceed on this basis. As Andrew Dobson has argued, this deficiency is apparent in the approach of the Brundtland Report to sustainable development (Dobson 2000: 59). That contains a purely instrumental (what I am here calling a ‘prudential’) defence of biodiversity which is not to be sneezed at, but which contains a worrying element of contingency in the connection between human self-interest and the survival of other species. If you begin, as many do, with the intuition that there is something intrinsically wrong with human-caused extinctions of other species, then this prudential approach will cause grave disquiet.
The view propounded in this book is defended on the basis that it is the best way of articulating and defending the intuition mentioned in the last paragraph, whatever practical conclusions follow from it, but also on the basis that it is needed to push the protection of endangered life-forms high enough up the scale of human moral concern. Only if we move beyond the idea that it would merely be ‘sad’ if large numbers of other life-forms are exterminated and become convinced by the idea that a serious injustice will have been done will we be likely to take the avoidance of that outcome with any real seriousness. Further, the concept of justice to be employed in this argument is a specific one – that of distributive justice – rather than the more general one which employs the term as almost synonymous with ‘morally right actions’. We must do right by other life-forms, but in a precise kind of way, namely by recognizing their claim to a fair share of the environmental resources which all life-forms need to survive and to flourish.
Of course, a moral argument of the kind offered in this book is unlikely all on its own to convince the unpersuaded. Notwithstanding the points made above about the prevalence across time and space of human beings’ receptivity to the idea of moral obligations of some sort towards the non-human, the present situation is one which requires that receptivity to be deepened, extended and located within a basic understanding of what 6 billion and more human beings are in the course of doing to the planet. Although the claims made on this issue are the subject of ongoing controversy, one might expect that the prima facie importance of the issues would lead to at least an interest on the part of an informed public. Many, of course, are so interested. Many, however, are not, or not to any significant degree. The following passage from a recent volume devoted to conservation management makes sobering reading in this regard:
The linkage of ecology to the every day concerns of people is highlighted by a survey done by the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity. That group engaged a professional survey firm to assess the views of voters who were neither committed to nor hostile toward the environment . . . This politically engaged but moderate public had little deep concern with environmental issues. Introducing other concerns, say crime or jobs, easily dislodged environmental concerns from their pride of place. The term “biodiversity,” which we suspect scientists view as a triumph of public relations savvy, seems to the public as a divisive and somehow negative idea . . . Contemporary human-caused extinctions are confused with the natural extinctions of the past. Extinctions are seen as something that have always happened . . . And . . . people do not see what species richness or degradation of ecosystem function have to do with them.
(Pickett et al. 1997: 398)
This is echoed in a recent comment on the public invisibility of the major international agreement which has the closest connection with the aims of this book – the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD):
The CBD reached its peak in popularity when the US announced it would not sign it. Since that time, the Convention has received negligible coverage in the mainstream media – especially when compared to its ozone and climate change counterparts. If the CBD is indeed viewed as both less popular and less prestigious than these other agreements, it is in part due to the nature of the issue area itself. Both the breadth and depth of biodiversity make it difficult to define a clear problematique.
(McGraw 2002: 26)
Plainly, a great deal of work remains to be done to produce the basic ecological understanding necessary among such groups of citizens in all the states of the world for a grasp of what the moral issues raised in this book and elsewhere are supposed to be. And moral theorists are also uneasily aware that moral argument, even when successful, is always problematic. People do not welcome being preached at or being made to feel guilty, however just the cause, and are probably most willing to accept moral prescriptions when they are firmly located in a religious world view which they are prepared to accept.
However, if an issue is a moral one then it does no good in the long run to pretend otherwise. We certainly need to appeal to the self-interest of human beings as well as to their moral sense in order to secure the changes in human behaviour necessary to achieve a world as rich in species as the current one. The concept of self-interest will need to be an enriched one, such as that eloquently developed by Tim Hayward (Hayward 1998), appealing to the intellectual, aesthetic, recreational and spiritual benefits which it is possible for at least many human beings to derive from ongoing encounters with the natural world, as well as to the material and economic advantages it provides. However, this book is written from the conviction that there is an important moral relationship here which needs to be stated and defended, and that an acceptance of it will significantly contribute to a better position for the goal of protection of endangered life-forms on the agenda of human action.
In order to explore this position a bit further we will need to explain the concept of justice with which we are operating here, and to do that we will need to begin with a brief survey of the ways in which the concept of justice has been developing in recent decades.

The idea of justice

For political philosophers working in the tradition of analytical philosophy the issue of justice, especially social or distributive justice, has been at the centre of attention ever since John Rawls put it there in the early 1970s (Rawls 1972). Much ingenuity has been devoted in the last thirty years to the development and critique of Rawls’s ideas and the offering of alternatives. For most of that time mainstream theorizing has worked with a distinctive view of what justice is about. This is that it essentially applies within a single society of contemporaneous human beings seeking to reach agreement on the basic rules to govern their lives together. It is only quite recently that this focus upon the domestic political order of a single society has been challenged.
As a result, issues of distributive justice, as Rawls himself latterly agreed (Rawls 1993: 245), are now frequently said to encompass two further broad groups of human beings: contemporary aliens, under the heading of ‘international distributive justice’, and people who have not yet been born, under the heading of ‘justice to future generations’ (see, for example, Beitz 1979; Sikora and Barry 1996). This is the result, to put the matter at its most general, of our increasing realization that human beings have important impacts upon each other’s well-being even when they do not inhabit the same society or historical period. Economic, cultural and environmental processes are the vehicles for these kinds of impact, of course, and they appear to raise matters which are indisputably matters of justice – what rights people have, how they may properly be treated and to what resources they are entitled.
Among the latter issues, that of environmental sustainability, which forms a large part of the problem of what we are morally required to bequeath to future generations, has emerged as the focus of much debate (see, for example, Dobson 1999). This forms part of a more general set of issues concerning the just distribution of environmental ‘goods’, such as agricultural land, clean water, and mineral resources, and ‘bads’, such as landfill sites and toxic waste disposal plants. This set of issues – how environmental goods and bads are to be distributed among human beings, within and across societies at any one time, and between generations across time – has recently received the label ‘environmental justice’ (see Low and Gleeson 1998). In the USA there has even developed an ‘environmental justice’ movement which has been inspired by just such concerns, especially with the combating of environmental racism – the distribution of environmental bads in ways which unfairly impinge upon particular racial groupings (see Szasz 1994; Dowie 1995: ch. 6). Clearly, then, this dimension of environmental justice cuts across the issues of intra-societal, international and intergenerational justice just identified.
In addition to all of these ways in which the issues of distributive justice between human beings have been made more complex, a further, more controversial, dimension has been introduced into the debate specifically by green theorists. This is the dimension of human–non-human relations. At a minimum, it involves the claim that at least some aspects of non-human nature are worthy of moral consideration – ‘possess moral considerability’, to use the term favoured in the literature (Goodpaster 1978). The idea is that non-human organisms, although not themselves moral agents, may intelligibly be said to have claims upon the actions of moral agents. On this planet, of course, the only moral agents we know of are human beings.
These claims more ambitiously involve postulating the prima facie right of organisms to continue to exist within the habitats required to sustain their existence so as to reproduce their own kind and maintain their existence as a species. It is recognized by those who put it forwar...

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