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Teaching and Learning Resource (TLR)
1. Title
Approaches in Environmental Ethics
2. Keywords
Anthropocentrism, Deep Ecology, environmental ethics, instrumentalism, intrinsic value, Land Ethic, Utilitarianism.
3. Introduction
The development of modern environmentalism has been accompanied by the emergence of a new field within the discipline of philosophy: environmental ethics. Working within this field, philosophers and others seek to explore the nature of the moral relationships that might be said to exist between humans and non-humans, asking questions such as:
Responses to these questions reveal that the field of environmental ethics encompasses a highly diverse range of approaches, which differ greatly in their potential implications for environmental decision making (individual, corporate, governmental). The study of environmental ethics, therefore, provides students with an opportunity for developing more informed judgements about their own personal practice, and about the environmental prescriptions, decisions and practice of others.
4. Aim
The aim of this TLR is to introduce students to a variety of approaches that have been advocated in the field of environmental ethics, and to provide them with an opportunity to compare and contrast those approaches in terms of their underlying principles and their implications for environmental decision making. The TLR does NOT seek to cover all possible approaches to environmental ethics.
5. Learning outcomes
After using this TLR, students should:
6. Pre-requisites
There are no formal pre-requisites for this TLR. (See Links with other TLRs below.)
7. How to use TLR
The TLR has been designed to be used broadly as follows:
As described above, the TLR can be used with a class of 12-20 students, and the whole exercise completed in ninety minutes. Smaller and larger class sizes could be accommodated by varying the size of group into which the students are divided; but it should be noted that as group size and total class size increase, the opportunity for individual students to make an active contribution is diminished. The time required for completion of the exercise could be reduced by simply reducing the time available for each part of the exercise. Time savings could also be achieved by ensuring that students have read the four readings before the session begins. However, it would be difficult to achieve the learning outcomes in less than one hour.
8. Instructions to students
For the reading assigned to your group:
9. Stimulus Material
The TLR is based on four readings which exemplify distinct and contrasting approaches in environmental ethics:
1. The Land Ethic - extract from Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1968 - first published in 1949). pp 201-4, 223-5:
"There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.
The extension of ethics to this element in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity ...
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these 'resources' but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state.
In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such ...
The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."
2. Utilitarian Environmental Ethics - extract from Peter Singer's Practical Ethics, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1979). pp 49-51:
"The argument for extending the principle of equality beyond our own species is simple, so simple that it amounts to no more than a clear understanding of the nature of the principle of equal consideration of interests. We have seen that this principle implies that our concern for others ought not to depend on what they are like, or what abilities they possess (although precisely what this concern requires us to do may vary according to the characteristics of those affected by what we do). It is on this basis that we are able to say that the fact that some people are not members of our race does not entitle us to exploit them, and similarly the fact that some people are less intelligent than others does not mean that their interests may be disregarded. But the principle also implies that the fact that beings are not members of our species does not entitle us to exploit them, and similarly the fact that other animals are less intelligent than we are does not mean mat their interests may be disregarded.
... [M]any philosophers have advocated equal consideration of interests, in some form or other, as a basic moral principle. Few recognized that the principle has applications beyond our own species. One of the few who did was Jeremy Bentham, the founding father of modern utilitarianism. In a forward-looking passage, written at a time when black slaves in the British dominions were still being treated much as we now treat nonhuman animals. Bentham wrote:"The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?"In this passage Bentham points to the capacity for suffering as the vital characteristic that entitles a being to equal consideration. The capacity for suffering -or more strictly, for suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness- is not just another characteristic like the capacity for language, or for higher mathematics. Bentham is not saying that those who try to mark 'the insuperable line' that determines whether the interests of a being should be considered happen to have selected the wrong characteristic. The capacity for suffering and enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful way. It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being tormented, because it will suffer if it is.
If a being suffers, them can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering -in so far as rough comparisons can be made- of any other being. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing enjoyment or happiness, there is nothing to be taken into account. This is why the limit of sentience (using the term as a convenient, if not strictly accurate, shorthand for the capacity to suffer or experience enjoyment or happiness) is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others. To mark this boundary by some characteristic like intelligence or rationality would be to mark it in an arbitrary way."
3. Instrumental Environmental Ethics - extract from Pearce, Markandya and Barber's Blueprint for a Green Economy, Earthscan, London (1989). pp 5-7:
"One of the central themes of environmental economics, and central to sustainable development thinking also, is the need to place proper values on the services provided by natural environments. The central problem is that many of these services are provided 'free'. They have a zero price simply because no market place exists in which their true values can be revealed through the acts of buying and selling. Examples might be a fine view, the water purification and storm protection functions of coastal wetlands, or the biological diversity within a tropical forest. The elementary theory of supply and demand tells us that if something is provided at a zero price, more of it will be demanded than if there was a positive price. Very simply, the cheaper it is the more will be demanded. The danger is that this greater level of demand will be unrelated to the capacity of the relevant natural environments to meet the demand. For example, by treating the ozone layer as a resource with a zero price there never was any incentive to protect it. Its value to human populations and to the global environment in general did not show up anywhere in a balance sheet of profit or loss, or of costs and benefits.
The important principle is that resources and environments serve economic functions and have positive value. To treat them as if they had zero value is seriously to risk overusing the resource. An 'economic function' in this context is any service that contributes to human well-being, to the 'standard of living', or 'development'. This simple logic underlines the importance of valuing the environment correctly and integrating those correct values into economic policy.
It is this argument that leads us to reject the first line of reasoning against the emphasis on environmental quality. We have a sound a priori case for supposing that the environment has been used to excess. Its degradation results, in part at least, from the fact that it is treated as a zero-priced resource when, in fact, it serves economic functions that have positive value.
Notice that this does not mean we should automatically introduce actual, positive prices for environmental functions wherever we can. There is a case for 'making the user pay', as we shall see. But for the moment the important principle to establish is that in our economic accounting, in the weighing up of the pros and cons of capital investments and economic policies, we should try, as best we can, to record the economic values that natural environments provide. It is, after all, something of an accident that some goods and services and some natural resources have markets whereas others do not. Even if it is possible to argue that, eventually, all natural resources will generate their own markets, we have no assurance at all that those markets will evolve before the resource is extinguished or irreparably damaged ...
4. Deep Ecology - extract from Devall and Sessions' Deep Ecology, Peregrine Smith Books (1985). p70.
"Basic Principles:
1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.
4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
5. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.
7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.
8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes."
10. Degree stage
The TLR has been developed primarily for use at level three. It could be used at an earlier stage, but students at level 2 and (especially) level 1 are likely to find it more difficult to appreciate the wider socio-political implications of trying to operationalise the different ethical approaches.
11. Resource requirements
The TLR has no special resource requirements.
12. Preparation
Students should be asked to read and think about the readings before the session and, perhaps, to have a preliminary look at some introductory literature on environmental ethics. (See Recommended Reading below.)
13. Links with other TLRs
To some extent, this TLR builds upon the less formal approach to environmental values adopted in the Introduction to Personal Environmental Values TLR, but can also be used independently.
More generally, the aims and/or learning outcomes of this TLR are related to those of other TLRs listed in the following 'thematic cluster':
14. Follow-up activities
Students could be encouraged to apply insights developed here in a wide variety of teaching and learning situations, and in their private/professional lives more generally. Specifically, they could be encouraged to subject all kinds of environmental text (eg academic works, popular accounts, policy documents) to ethical analysis on a regular basis.
15. Recommended reading
Books
For an accessible introduction to the field of environmental ethics, see:
Des Jardins, Joseph R (1993) Environmental Ethics. An Introduction to
Environmental Philosophy. Wadsworth: Belmont, California.
For an anthology of works that provide a broad cross-section of
approaches within environmental ethics, see:
Armstrong and Botzler (eds) (1993) Environmental Ethics. Divergence and
Convergence. MacGraw-Hill, London.
For a work of historical importance in the development of environmental
ethics see:
Leopold, Aldo (1968) A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press,
Oxford (First published in 1949).
For works that systematically develop particular approaches to
environmental ethics, see:
Deval, William and George sessions (1985) Deep Ecology. Peregrine Smith
Books.
Regan, Tom (1984) The Case for Animal Rights (London: Routledge)
Rolston, Holmes (1988) Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the
Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press)
Singer, Peter (1975) Animal Liberation (New York: Thorsons, Harper
Collins)
Taylor, Paul (1986) Respect for Nature. Princeton University Press,
Princeton.
Journals
The longest-standing and, perhaps, most important journal in this
field is:
Environmental Ethics. Published by the Centre for Environmental
Philosophy, The University of North Texas, USA.
Other relevant journals include:
Environmental Values. Published by The White Horse Press, Cambridge, UK.
Ethics and the Environment. Published by JAI Press Inc, Stamford,
Connecticut, USA.
Ethics, Place and Environment. Published by Carfax Publishing Ltd,
Abingdon, UK.
Worldviews. Environment, Culture, Religion. Published by Brill Academic
Press.
Internet Resources
The Centre for Environmental Philosophy at The University of North
Texas maintains a World Wide Web server "dedicated to providing
access to Internet resources throughout the world that pertain to or focus
on environmental ethics and environmental philosophy."
(http://www.cep.unt.edu/)
Amongst other things, the site contains an extensive bibliography and
links to the International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE) and the
electronic discussion forum enviroethics.
16. Users' comments
“[Its main strength is that it] introduces a very complex and very important subject area to students; simply, concisely and in an interesting way.”
“Covers a wide range of ethical standpoints from deep ecology to the principles underlying the 'standard' approach to environmental economics.”
“[Its main weakness is that] one of the readings too obscure for students and one too transparent.”
“Readings need to be separable and in a common format.”
“Very feasible and very appropriate. The session went well.”
“We didn’t bother with assessment, but the enthusiasm of the students and their engagement with the material suggested that these TLRs offered a valuable learning experience.”