Environmental Ethics

Anthropocentrism has been proposed as the underlying cause of modern society’s environmental impact. Concomitantly, hunter-gatherers’ orientation towards nature is connected with minimal environmental change or conservation, and seen as validating the idea that ‘what people do about their ecology depends upon what they think about themselves in relation to things around them’. Here it is argued that the notion that orientation towards nature is instrumental in environmental impact in any generalisable way has little empirical support and, most importantly, is under-theorised (...) and conceptually flawed. Employing a strong structurationist approach, it is shown that the tendency to abstract particular values from their social and environmental context must be resisted and that a deeper conception of the ‘inner lives’ of agents is required. Such an approach is more expansive and engages with a range of other motives as well as the unintended environmental consequences of actions. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to review some basic ethical concepts in their historical and substantive development, within the context of the environment and environmental knowledge. It also tries to answer the question whether there is a difference between traditional and environmental ethics. The comparative-historical method is used, which considers some classical ethical concepts and their interpretations related to the environment. The concepts of classical and modern scientists are also analyzed. The authors consider whether these concepts should be supplemented with (...) new content in this area or should be reformulated in terms of moral relevance not only for the human community, but also for all non-human inhabitants of the environment. The article explores issues about the origin of morality, as well as some ideas about the moral status of attitudes among primates. More important conclusions are that ethics and environmental knowledge must be developed in cooperation in order to explain and form moral consciousness, a new type of ethos that does not allow indifference to the environment in human interaction with it, and that moral considerations should contain not only prescriptions for due human behavior in human society, but also obligations to non-human inhabitants of nature or to the environment. (shrink)

Part of what makes the environment valuable is its autonomy. There are some who think that any human influence on an environment is necessarily autonomy-compromising because it is a form of human control. In this article, I will assume human influence on the environment necessarily undermines autonomy. However, I will argue, even given this assumption, it is still possible for the intervention to enable autonomy in the long run. My focus is on genetic intervention into organisms, because some might think (...) human influence in these cases cannot dissipate. I argue this is mistaken and, borrowing a concept from botany, I argue genes, even genes inserted into a genome by humans, can “naturalize.” Furthermore, they can function in ways that are autonomy-enabling to the individual and to the system to which the organism belongs. (shrink)

Animal welfare in livestock farming is a general concept that involves many concrete ethical issues for which solutions need to be developed. To avoid disturbing the internal market, the European Union encourages market players to develop harmonized solutions to such issues. One issue is the castration of piglets without pain relief, the practice of which causes pain to piglets. Although scientists have found alternatives to replace castration without pain relief, the process of solving the castration issue has stagnated. Questions remain (...) as to why this painful castration practice has still not been addressed after three decades, how it is likely to develop in the near future, and whether it will lead to a single harmonized solution for the EU. To answer these questions, this study examines the development of the castration issue using in-depth interviews and desk research. The results show that different countries have developed different solutions at different stages of the issue’s development. For a long period, the developments did not set a course toward a single solution; most EU pork producers waited for a castration ban in Germany. Such a situation was turbulent in solving the issue because the heterogeneous EU was unlikely to agree upon on a single alternative. With the EU now taking a market-based orientation, however, solving the issue now seems more likely. More attention is needed to understand market opportunities and chain integration in this area. (shrink)

Central to the social membership model of animal rights is the claim that relations with nonhuman animals should be reorganized such that domesticated animals are recognized as members of our shared societies. Though some elements of the membership model remain contested, the core of the membership model is that domesticated animals have a claim on, and a direct entitlement to, the benefits of cooperative relations. For many political theorists, however, distributive justice considerations apply only to a certain kind of cooperative (...) relationship. The community of justice recipients is thought to be limited by what Brian Berkey calls the Contribution/Capacity Basis of Entitlement. Accordingly, justice considerations apply to a scheme of cooperation and a conception of justice “entail[s] direct entitlements only for those who are contributors, or, alternatively, those who at least possess the capacities that are necessary to be capable of contributing to such a scheme”. This thesis – referred to as ‘contributionism’ – has typically been utilized to exclude nonhuman animals from justice considerations. The paper argues that contributionism is not fundamentally at odds with justice for domesticated animals, and conversely that contributionism remains a useful conceptual tool for explaining resource sharing with these nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Two problems are considered here. One relates to who has moral status, and the other relates to who has moral responsibility. The criteria for mattering morally have long been disputed, and many humans and nonhuman animals have been considered “marginal cases,” on the contested edges of moral considerability and concern. The marginalization of humans and other species is frequently the pretext for denying their rights, including the rights to health care, to reproductive freedom, and to bodily autonomy. There is broad (...) agreement across cultural and philosophical traditions about the capacities and responsibilities of moral agents. I propose an inclusive and expansive way of thinking about moral status, situating it not in the characteristics or capacities of individuals, but in the responsibilities and obligations of moral agents. Moral agents, under this view, are not privileged or entitled to special treatment but rather have responsibilities. I approach this by considering some African communitarian conceptions of moral status and moral agency. I propose that moral agency can also be more expansive and include not just individual moral agents but collective entities that have some of the traits of moral agents: power, freedom, and the capacity to recognize and act on the demands of morality and acknowledge and respect the rights of others. Expanding who and what is a moral agent correspondingly extends moral responsibility for respecting rights and fostering the conditions for the health and well-being of humans and animals onto the collective entities who uniquely have the capacity to attend to global-scale health threats such as pandemics and human-caused climate change. (shrink)

How can an ecofeminist perspective help us understand and respond to the problems of water pollution and energy production that we face today? Using contemporary examples ranging from the Arrowhead-Weston Project to Manitoba Hydro, Sumas Energy 2, and the Columbia River dams, this article exposes the corporate appropriations of water power from the people and from the land. Ecofeminism illuminates the way in which gendered, cultural assumptions about water, power, and human relations have led to creating a water-power infrastructure that (...) perpetuates environmental sexism, environmental racism, and environmental classism. As an alternative, an ecofeminist approach to water justice advocates strategies for bringing about an ecological democracy, an ecological economics, and a partnership culture in which water and energy flow freely. (shrink)

How have forest-related international environmental agreements affected domestic policy and forest owners in industrialised, forest-rich countries? This question is investigated by identifying and explaining the effects of IEAs on Norwegian forest policy and forestry. The analysis shows that international commitments and recommendations have had little effect on domestic forest policy. While environmental certification of forest owners by private initiative is in compliance with international recommendations and European criteria and indicators of sustainable forest management, competitiveness concerns and pressures from environmental organisations (...) and the marketplace have been more important for this initiative than IEAs. Although environmental certification can be explained as strategic adaptation to market demands, this mechanism is dependent upon actors valuing and having internalised certain norms and principles. It is argued that IEAs have contributed to establish, strengthen and disseminate norms and principles regarding conservation of old-growth forests and biodiversity. The interplay between rational calculative and cognitive processes is thus important for understanding domestic adaptations to forest-related agreements. (shrink)

In the wake of the chimpanzee genome publication, Pascal Gagneux, James J. Moore and Ajit Varki consider the ethical and scientific challenges for scientists who work on captive great apes.

The ethics of human genetic engineering.

Ecological field research has generated a wealth of valuable information, much of which informs conservation efforts. Such research raises ethical issues when we propose to modify or endanger the individual organism, populations, species, or ecosystem we study. Yet the scientific literature contains little explicit consideration of the impact of ecological study itself on organisms or ecosystems. We propose that the lack of public ethical discourse among field scientists is due to trepidation about initiating a controversy that could endanger future research (...) efforts; an assumption that the relative benefits or our research outweigh potential short-term costs to the study object ; difficulties in perceiving the potential negative impact of our work; tacit assumptions about certain experiments that are simply "wrong" to do. Ethical considerations have already arisen with the collection of organisms, the effects of scientific observation on survivorship and behavior, and experimental manipulations of whole ecosystems. The literature on environmental ethics and animal experimentation, two sources that bear tangitially on the issues of ecological ethics, may afford diverse and occasionally conflicting value systems on which to build an ethic of ecological experimentation. Although methods specifically devised to minimize the impact on study subjects have been published, we find few existing formal mechanisms of external regulation or self-regulation of research activities in the field. We suggest that ethical considerations, conservation and restoration measures that are compatible with sound scientific protocols, may be profitably incorporated into the design of field experiments. We encourage a dialogue between scientists and philosophers on this issue. (shrink)

This article critically explores what it might mean to ‘represent nature’ in discursive dialogue and whether such representation must necessarily be anthropocentric in a substantive rather than merely trivial sense. The analysis also examines whether, and to what extent, it is legitimate to inscribe ecocentric norms into the procedures of discursive dialogue as a matter of justice. Against Habermas, it is argued that the capacity for self‐directedness, however rudimentary, rather than communicative competence per se, should be accepted as the basis (...) for moral considerability. Habermas's objection to allowing nature's interests to condition the dialogue are shown to be primarily epistemological rather than normative. However, if these epistemological barriers are accepted as secondary to questions of morality, then non‐human beings ought to enter the circle of moral considerability and the idea of special discursive procedures for the incorporation of nature's interests becomes defensible. The precautionary principle is defended as one example of a convenient and parsimonious ‘decision rule’ which may incorporate and ‘represent’ nature's interests in practical discursive arenas. (shrink)

In this paper, the feasibility of using stakeholder approaches to assess forest management practices is examined. The paper focuses on two such approaches: the idea of ethical accounting developed for livestock farming, and the so-called ethical matrix. More extensive accounting is needed in forestry. The public is increasingly sensitive to, and aware of, the broader impact of forest management, not only on human welfare but also on environmental values such as nature conservation and biodiversity. Green accounting is being used to (...) assess the environmental effects of forestry. In a broader approach such as ethical accounting as developed for livestock farming, both the purpose and the type of use that is being made of the forest must be examined. It is also necessary to ask which visible or invisible stakeholders are to be included. However, it is important to note that the adoption of stakeholder approaches does not remove the need to reflect on one's fundamental ethical position. In fact, one must critically consider one's basic values before applying these approaches to forestry. (shrink)