Abstract
Due to the significant and often careless human impact on the natural environment, there are serious problems facing the people of today and of future generations. To date, ethical, aesthetic, religious, and economic arguments for the conservation and protection of the natural environment have made relatively little headway. Another approach, one capable of garnering attention and motivating action, would be welcome. There is another approach, one that I will call a rights approach. Speaking generally, this approach is an attempt to address environmental issues via the language and theory of legal and moral rights. Ultimately, it is our duties to our fellow humans that explain why we have duties regarding the natural environment. There are three main contenders among theories that can be called rights approaches to environmental issues. The first identifies the (alleged) human right to a healthful environment as the source of our obligations to conserve and protect nature. The second approach has it that our duties to nature arise from the rights of the constituents of nature themselves, its flora and fauna. The third approach to addressing environmental problems via rights is, I argue, the best path to environmental conservation and protection. This approach—which grounds duties toward nature on the human right to health—has the benefits of being a straightforward, uncontroversial, and simple approach to issues and problems that desperately need to be resolved.
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Notes
Available online at http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/en/Treaties/Html/035.htm.
Unless otherwise noted, this section draws from Hayward (2005, pp. 1–13).
These, again, are just examples of claims these two groups might make against the destruction of an area of rainforest. They show that while the groups’ ultimate interests might be different—protection of nature for one, protection of human rights for the other—the ways in which these interests might be satisfied can be the same. I don’t mean to suggest that an environmentalist’s only recourse it an appeal to nature’s inherent value or that a human rights advocate’s only option is an appeal to the right to a healthful environment.
Such a proposal is discussed in Alston (1984: 610).
While I will say something below about the adequacy of the set of duties generated by the right to health, I lack the space to attend fully to the matter of an anthropocentric environmental ethic’s ability to adjudicate in cases of competing interests—short- and long-term in particular. My assumption here is that if an anthropocentric environmental ethical theory is capable of adequately dealing with competing claims by, for example, business interests and environmentalists, then it will be a theory rooted in the human right to health (and not the right to nature of a healthful sort). I thank an anonymous reviewer for reminding me of this persistent problem with human-centered environmental ethical theories. I should think that a worthwhile place to begin concerning this topic would be with Rolston (2003) and Sterba (1994).
See Boyle (1996: 54) for such a list.
I drop, for the time being, the modifier “human.” Here, we are dealing with the rights of non-humans, both flora and fauna.
Although I will use the phrase “animal rights” to refer to the rights of non-human animals, I don’t mean to imply that humans are not animals. The phrase is a sort of shorthand for the more cumbersome “non-human animal rights.”
It is not clear whether Regan meant this to be an empirical claim about all moral thinkers or whether he was merely expressing an intuition. This question, and the question of which Regan ought to have meant, has been dealt with in Franklin (2005, p. 22).
Most do not deny this, anyway. Surely some do, but Regan seems to take for granted that “marginal” humans are regarded by the rest of us as possessing as much inherent value as we do. See Regan (1985: 23) for an instance of Regan’s assertion that the retarded child and the mentally deranged have as much inherent value as the rest of us.
A similar statement, one tying respect to rights, comes in Regan (1985: 21). “For either of us to treat the other in ways that fail to show respect for the other’s independent value is to act immorally, to violate the individual’s rights.”
Perhaps, in recognizing the rights of wholes, one ends up treating wholes as though they were individuals—anthropomorphizing them. If so, perhaps there is something to Regan’s claim that “…paradigmatic rights-holders are individuals…” (Regan 1983: 362). This is one of those interesting questions that cannot be addressed at present.
I say “rights-attainment” to indicate the acquisition of legal rights, things these groups did not possess before the rights were officially granted.
See Carruthers (1992: 114–117).
The point here is not merely that health is necessary in order to realize the particular goals we set for ourselves—though that much is true. The point is to highlight the connection between health and purposive action in general. An unhealthy being cannot behave with complete autonomy, cannot effectively direct itself toward its goals. In other words, a lack of health diminishes the very possibility of goal-directed action, independent of any specific goals.
As reported on http://www.osha.gov/as/opa/oshafacts.html.
A full comparison of the various duties entailed by the right to health and recognized by ethical theories such as Utilitarianism, Deontology, Virtue Ethics, Deep Ecology, and Leopold’s Holism (among others) takes us too far afield at present. Such an undertaking is what motivates some of my current research. See above (footnote 5) for potentially helpful references relating to this matter.
Defined, tentatively, in terms of minimal cultivation or maintenance by humans and involving a dearth of features like roads and buildings.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editors of The Journal of Agricultural & Environmental Ethics and the anonymous reviewers of an earlier version of this paper for their helpful comments. Thanks also to Purdue University’s Mark Bernstein, William McBride, and Patrick Kain, whose assistance made this paper possible.
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Brei, A.T. Rights & Nature. J Agric Environ Ethics 26, 393–408 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-012-9385-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-012-9385-z