1 Introduction

After arguing boldly and ingeniously that his relational normative ethical theory is superior to both utilitarianism and Kantianism in explaining moral duties between human beings, Thaddeus Metz turns the innovative normative ethical theory of A Relational Moral Theory to environmental ethics.Footnote 1 He argues with admirable and characteristic rigor for the superiority of his account. Metz’s discussion of environmental ethics focuses narrowly on the moral status of nonhuman animals in comparison to humans, suggesting that he takes that to be a central, perhaps the central, issue of environmental ethics. Challenging Metz’s view is no easy task, but that is what I attempt here. My discussion in Part II takes Metz on his own terms, focusing on moral status. He claims that the relational theory accounts for important moral intuitions, against which any theory should be judged. I am not convinced that it does. In Part III I query relationalism more broadly by comparing Metz’s account of moral status to another recent relational account in order to suggest that the problems I identify in Metz’s view may be less due to relationalism per se, than to Metz’s version of it. In Part IV I argue that Metz’s account of moral status, and any other that focuses on duties to individual animals, provides insufficient moral understanding and guidance regarding one of the most pressing contemporary environmental concerns, namely the possibility of mass extinction. And finally in Part V I argue that a theory that focuses on what we owe to individual animals is ill-suited to a traditional concern of environmentalism to preserve natural habitat and animals in the wild.

2 Saving Intuitions

Metz understands the concept of moral status to be that in virtue of which something is owed duties for its own sake, that is to say directly (149).Footnote 2 The ambition of his argument is to account for the intuition that nonhuman animals have a partial moral status, but less so than all humans. (147) This is the driving intuition of Metz’s argument. His central claim is that his relational theory, which includes a conception of moral status based on the capacity of being the subject and object of friendly relations, coheres better with that driving intuition than either utilitarianism or Kantianism. Moreover, although multivalent accounts might provide for the intuition, Metz claims that the unity of his account provides sufficient reason to favor it over multivalent rivals.

It is a noteworthy feature of Metz’s argument on behalf of his relational theory’s conception of moral status that a necessary and sufficient condition for moral status is an extrinsic rather than intrinsic property. The distinction between these two kinds of properties, as Metz draws it, is that an intrinsic property of a thing, “is one that is internal to an individual and includes no essential positive relation with any other being.” (150) In contrast, an extrinsic property of a thing is a “kind of intensional (attitudinal) or causal (behavioural) property with regard to another being.” (151) For Metz, the extrinsic property relevant to moral status is an attitudinal and behavior property, “an individual’s capacity to relate to others…” (152) This is the core of his relational account of moral status. Crucially, the degree of moral status of an entity depends on whether, or the extent to which, human agents can relate to the entity, but moral status increases to the extent that an organism can also relate to human agents. This is important for the claim that the relational theory coheres with the driving intuition that nonhuman animals have a moral status, but a lesser one than humans. The idea is that although some nonhuman animals have the capacity to relate both to each other and to us communally, humans have a greater capacity to do so.

Metz distinguishes degrees of moral status on the basis of the possession of the relevant extrinsic properties. He claims that “full moral status goes to those who can be subject and objects of such a friendly way of relating and partial moral status goes to those that can be merely objects of it.” (153) Although moral status is scalar, his explanation is based in part on a binary distinction, the capacity to be both subject and object of friendly relations versus the capacity to be merely the object of friendly relations. The former capacity is characteristic of most humans beyond a certain age, and the latter is characteristic of some nonhuman animals. This is central to the theory’s coherence with the driving intuition. The scales then are within two different kinds, subjects and objects of friendly relations. “[L]arge and not merely incremental differences in the degree of ability to be either a subject or an object of a friendly relationship constitute a difference in moral status.” (153)

Metz, however, sometimes describes the scalar nature of the external property necessary to moral status not in terms of an extrinsic property of the thing itself, but in terms of the capacity for human response to it. For example, consider the following: “[I]f, by virtue of the nature of human beings, elephants, and molluscs, a moral agent were in principle much more able to identify with and exhibit solidarity towards elephants than molluscs, then elephants would have a greater moral status than molluscs.” (153) This suggests that in order for something to have moral status the relevant attitude or behavior must be of a kind to which humans are able to respond with attitudes of identification and solidarity.

Now, presumably, it is the ability of humans to so respond, and not their actual response, that matters. If most of us recoil from a naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber), when in fact, as a fellow mammal, we are far more capable of identifying with and of being in solidarity with such a rat than we are with a cockatiel (Nymphicus hollandicus), then we should, all else being equal, reconsider our responses and prioritize duties to the mole-rat over those to a cockatiel. It would follow, according to Metz, that, since we are demonstrably able to be quite friendly to cockatiels, we should be doing much more for naked mole-rats than we currently are.

The idea that the extrinsic property must be of the kind capable of human response implies a central place for human capacities in the explanation of moral status. Nonetheless, Metz contends that that does not render the account anthropocentric in the common way that the term is understood (often negatively) in environmental ethics (166). This seems a fair contention because after all the view he defends is that not only humans have moral status. Still some will object because human capabilities to respond to extrinsic properties play a central role in the moral status of an entity. There is a kind of privileging of humans in Metz’s account of the moral status of entities that some environmental thinkers may want to challenge. Metz’s answer would be that he is interested in the duties that humans have. “For something to have a moral status is for a moral agent to owe it dutiful treatment for its own sake. In this book I am strictly interested in our moral duties, those of human persons as the relevant moral agents, with the duties of possible Martian or Vulcan persons being a large, distinct matter for another engagement.” (156) So, the reference point to human capacities is not at all to deny the status of nonhuman animals, but to understand what we owe to them directly.

That the explanation of entities to which humans have direct duties involves reference to human capacities is due to features specific to Metz’s relational account. For Metz the morally relevant relations have to be those of which we are capable. “If we cannot commune with a being because of its nature, that means that we, no matter what we do, cannot advance its ends or improve its quality of life.” (156) Again, the topic is our duties. According to his relational account, our duties are limited by the kinds of relations we can have. Thinking like a mountain, as Aldo Leopold recommended, is out of the question because such thinking is not a possible human relation.

Metz is confident that his account coheres with the driving intuition that although nonhuman animals have moral status, the moral status of all (or nearly all) humans is higher than that of all nonhuman animals. The relevant passage compares the moral status of “extremely autistic, psychopathic, and mentally incapacitated human beings” who by assumption are members of the class of humans who are “utterly incapable of being subjects of a friendly relationship” (164) with a class of nonhuman animals that includes mice and elephants (164). For the sake of fidelity to Metz’s view, I quote the passage at length:

The relational view entails that although these [human] individuals would lack a dignity equal to ours, their moral status would be higher than that of animals. These persons would have the capacity for being an object of a friendly relationship with us to a much greater degree than that had by other beings such as mice and elephants. Compared with animals, characteristic human beings are more able to include ‘deformed’ humans such as extremely autistic, psychopathic, and incapacitated individuals in a ‘we’, cooperate with them, act in a way likely to improve their quality of life, exhibit sympathetic emotions with them, and act for their sake. We do much more for the autistic, psychopathic, and incapacitated than we do [for] animals, which is evidence of a greater ability to make them and object of a friendly relationship and hence a higher moral status than what animals have. (164-165)

As I understand it, the claims relevant to the comparison between the two classes that Metz makes are the following:

  1. (A)

    Neither humans of the class under consideration nor any nonhuman animals are capable of being the subject of friendly relations.

  2. (B)

    Humans who are incapable of being the subjects of friendly relations nonetheless have a greater capacity to be the objects of friendly relations than the nonhuman animal of the comparisons class.

  3. (C)

    We are more able to include humans who are incapable of being the subjects of friendly relations in a ‘we’ and to cooperate with them than we are able to do with the nonhuman animals.

  4. (D)

    As a matter of fact, we do more for humans of this class than we do for nonhumans, and this fact is evidence of (C).

There are, I think, very good reasons to doubt the first three of these claims. Indeed, given the evidence, there is reason to believe that these three claims are more likely to be false than true. And (D) is simply false, unless the term “evidence” is understood far more weakly than seems to be the point of the passage.

Regarding (A), Metz takes cooperation as one important marker of the capacity for friendly relations (157), and there is important evidence that suggests that he is underestimating the capabilities of nonhuman animals to engage in cooperation with humans. Let’s suppose that the scale along which the capacity to be a subject of friendly relations varies includes to the capacity to modify one’s actions on behalf of the interests of others, and especially human others. There is increasing evidence that some wild animals have that capacity to a degree beyond the capacity of many of the humans of the comparative class that Metz uses. A recent article in People and Nature, the journal of the British Ecology Society, discusses two kinds of evidence, observed and reported, of human-wildlife cooperation, understood as “a type of mutualism in which a human and a wild, free-living animal actively coordinate their behaviour to achieve a common beneficial outcome.”Footnote 3 The observed evidence is of human-honeyguide bird interaction and human-dolphin interaction. The reported evidence is the testimony of human-wolf and human-orca interaction. The researchers report that, “in all cases, a food source located by the animal is made available to both species by a tool-using human, coordinated with cues or signals.”Footnote 4 The study finds that observations and testimony offer support for the belief that both humans and nonhuman animals “coordinate the interaction by altering their behaviour in response to the partner species’ actions in order to achieve a common goal.”Footnote 5 Contrary to claim (A), there is evidence to indicate that some nonhuman animals are capable of being subjects of friendly action.

Credible evidence of human-nonhuman animal cooperation would also disconfirm (B). We have seen that, according to Metz, to be an object of friendly relations is to have extrinsic properties to which human capabilities might respond. The adjustment of action by both humans and nonhuman animals so as to produce common benefit suggests that the nonhuman animals are objects of friendly action to a significant degree. Insofar as some of the members of the comparative class of humans are incapable of such cooperative action, it is implausible to claim that extrinsic properties render them objects of friendly action to a higher degree. Even if we engage in more caring for such humans than nonhuman animals, we seem to cooperate with some nonhuman animals in a way impossible with the comparative class of humans. For Metz’s account, it is, in any case, the degree of capacity to be object of friendly action that matters, not the actual instances of being objects of friendly action.

Research in the study under discussion also disconfirms (C) since it indicates that humans are able to coordinate action with some nonhuman animals in ways that result in a mutual advantage. And, taking Metz at his word, the comparison class of humans are “utterly incapable of being subjects of a friendly relationship” (164).

Finally, (D) is false. It neglects the distinction between fact and capacity, what we do and what we are capable of doing. Even if it were the case that we did more on behalf of all humans than any nonhuman animals, it would not provide compelling evidence that we are capable of helping humans more. When we reflect on how we help the comparison class of humans, for example, with their needs for security, nutrition, and community, it is by no means clear that we could not help many nonhuman animals to a similar degree. What is more, the evidence of human-nonhuman cooperation provides a strong reason to believe that we are able to help nonhuman animals very significantly.

Metz sets out to demonstrate that the relational theory can accommodate the driving intuition that we have direct moral duties to nonhuman animals but weightier direct duties to humans. This, he argues, is due to the scalar nature of moral status, and to the more elevated moral status that all humans have over all nonhumans. If we take the cited findings of human-nonhuman cooperation seriously, Metz’s relational theory account of moral status—in terms of being capable of being the subjects and objects of friendly relations—seems unable to account for the intuition. If this is right, either the account of moral status or the intuition has to be given up. Either would come at a high price for Metz’s account. Giving up on the intuition would be depressing programatically since Metz’s argument throughout the book so often turns on the relational theory’s capacity to account for important intuitions, a capacity, Metz claims, that is greater than the rivals of utilitarianism and Kantianism. But giving up on the account of moral status may be an even bigger blow. This depends upon the extent to which an alternative account of moral status can be developed from within the broader commitments of the relational moral theory. If the account of status follows deductively from other commitments of the theory, then the pain induced by modus tollens may motivate saving theory and by modus ponens thereby sacrificing the intuition.

3 Another Relationalism is Possible

A relational moral theory is not necessarily bound by relations of friendliness. In order to understand whether the problems identified in the previous section are features of relational theories per se or of Metz’s version, a comparison to another recent approach may prove useful. R. Jay Wallace defends an account that interprets the modern moral practice of making and honoring claims as essentially relational.Footnote 6

There are, however, limits to any comparison we can draw between Metz’s account and Wallace’s. For unlike Metz, Wallace is not offering a normative ethical theory intended to rival utilitarianism and Kantianism. This explains in part why Wallace, unlike Metz, is not in the business of offering explanations of intuitions about the members of which species we may run over in order to avoid running over others. Nor is Wallace engaged in a straightforward meta-ethical discussion of the reality of moral properties. He does not explicitly discuss moral status as a property, and thus he does not discuss it as a scalar property. His effort is directed toward an interpretation of the relations of modern morality, the central feature of which—he claims—involves making and honoring claims that guide our expectations of one another. Wallace believes that it is fundamental to modern moral experience that we make claims regarding expected treatment from others, and we honor the claims made by others. This practice he interprets as essentially relational. Wallace does address who the parties to the community of claim-makers and claim-honorers are, and his account is suggestive of an alternative that could be compared to Metz’s view.

Wallace discusses cases of persons who are unable to engage in the kind of reciprocal relations that characterize modern morality as he interprets it. Infants and infirm adults can be incorporated into the community straightforwardly, he argues. “Infancy and adult infirmity do not designate classes of person, but phases in the lives of individuals who, in their prime, normally exhibit some reasonable degree of facility with thoughts about what people owe to each other.”Footnote 7 According to Wallace, it is relations between persons as claimholders vis-à-vis one another over the course of their lifetimes that is a core concern of modern morality. Claim holders are moral persons “even during phases when the claimholders are not (yet) able to assert the claims on their own behalf.”Footnote 8 For Wallace personhood is a status over time, more like a video than a snapshot.

Wallace also discusses the classes of persons he describes as “individual members of our species who, through illness or genetic misfortune, will never be able to develop normal adult capacities for bipolar [claim making and honoring] or other forms of normative thought.”Footnote 9 It will not do to consider these persons as claimholders who are temporarily unable to assert their claim on others. So, the explanation of their claims must be different.

In including such people in the manifold of moral persons, we might plausibly be understood to be taking implicit account of their species nature. They belong to a biological kind whose members normally develop capacities for bipolar normative thought, and the conditions that prevent the emergence of such capacities in these individuals should therefore be understood in relation to these norms, as conditions that damage them or impede their natural development.Footnote 10

Wallace contends that the species membership of these people, “non-arbitrarily situates them within the domain of moral claimholders, and our reactive responses to the mistreatment of such individuals serve to acknowledge their standing as bearers of claims against others.”Footnote 11 Characteristic claimholders are those who are able to assert their claims in the relations that comprise morality. And such claimholders are typically members of the species Homo sapiens. Species membership, then, even absent the ability to assert claims, is sufficient to justify moral reactive attitudes of the rest of us when the claims to which such persons are entitled are not respected.

Wallace seems to be offering a disjunctive account of membership in the moral community. Either the capacity to enter into a relation of making and honoring claims or species membership is sufficient for membership. For he claims that, “It is conceivable that there are rational creatures of one kind or another who are not human beings but who nevertheless are able to entertain thoughts about what one individual owes to others. If there are such creatures, then it seems to me that they are straightforwardly eligible for membership in the manifold of moral persons, whatever else might be true about their species nature.”Footnote 12 Such beings would be both subjects of claim making and the objects claims. He also includes artificial corporate agents. “We should also be prepared to include in the moral manifold artificial persons whose capacities for collective agency incorporate mechanisms for recognizing and responding to relational requirements. There are basic expectations that universities and private corporations owe it to their employees to live up to, for instance…”.Footnote 13

Although membership in the species Homo sapiens suffices for membership in the moral community, according to Wallace, it is not necessary. Entities that can make and respond to claims are claimholders regardless of species membership. This opens the door in principle to what Metz takes to be the central question of environmental ethics, the moral status of nonhuman animals. Wallace’s views in the following passage are relevant to this matter:

Plausible candidates for claimholders who do not stand under reciprocal moral obligations are many of the higher animals, insofar as they exhibit the following characteristics: (a) a conscious point of view on the world; (b) individual interests that are registered by the individual who has them, for example in a susceptibility to pain and pleasure; and (c) some capacity for structured protest against treatment that is inimical to the individual’s interests, or otherwise unwelcome. The latter feature in particular seems to me interesting and significant, insofar as it enables us to understand our vicarious assertion of claims on behalf of the individual animal as continuous with more primitive (albeit nonnormative) reactions that it is capable of on its own behalf.Footnote 14

This allows Wallace to interpret some responses by nonhuman animals “as incipiently in touch with the normative significance that claims have for those who bear them.”Footnote 15 In a footnote to this assertion, he clarifies the idea of being incipiently aware of the moral significance of claims. The protests of non-rational animals “do not involve the capacity to grasp normative contents. But they are responses to facts about actions and attitudes that we can recognize as constituting wrongs.”Footnote 16 Wallace seems to be claiming that at least some nonhuman animals could have a partial membership in the moral community in part because of their objections to what we understand to be wrongs. Some nonhuman animals might be claim holders in relation to those who can interpret their actions as responses to wrongs, even though they are not the object of claims by others. This would seem to leave open the possibility that such animals do not wrong one another but might be wronged by us.

Because Wallace does not address degrees of moral status, he does not offer an alternative explanation of the intuition that drives Metz’s account, namely that although nonhuman animals have moral status, all humans have a higher status. I argued in the previous section that Metz’s theory has difficulty accounting for that intuition on the assumption, apparently confirmed by recent science, that humans and nonhuman animals engage in kinds of cooperation that it is impossible for us to have with some humans who are unable to cooperate due to biological circumstance, accident, or infirmity. For Wallace membership in the moral community seems to be disjunctive; being either a claim maker or a human suffices.

Wallace’s account of membership parallels accounts of moral status that are pluralistic. Metz claims that such accounts are explanatorily less compelling than his monist account. “[A]ll things being equal, a view is more desirable the greater its simplicity and explanatory power, meaning that a plausible monist theory would be preferable.” (162) Wallace’s account of modern morality can serve as inspiration for imagining an account of moral status that offers a direct comparison to Metz.

Let’s consider the pluralist view that the sufficient condition for moral status is either being a claim maker or being human. Now, Metz claims that all else being equal, a simpler account is preferable to a less simple one. We have already seen reason to doubt that all else is equal since Metz’s account seems ill-suited to explain his driving intuition that all humans have greater moral status than all nonhuman animals. The pluralist view provides the possibility of accounting for the intuition in cases that are problems for Metz’s account, cases in which some nonhuman animals are capable of cooperation and some humans are not. To do so, the pluralist view would have to weigh membership in the species Homo sapiens as more important than being a claim-maker. That would, of course, open the account up to a version of the charge of speciesism. But in light of the incapacity of Metz’s account to capture the driving intuition, it seems plausible that any account capable of capturing that intuition will be speciesist. This should not seem surprising for arguably the intuition itself is speciesist. It should come as no shock then if the most plausible account of it is also speciesist.

One lesson that can be drawn from the discussion of Wallace, is that it is doubtful that a monist theory could account for the intuitions that at least some nonhuman animals have moral status and that all humans have higher status than all nonhuman animals. The apparent difficulties of Metz’s account are instructive. Any theory accounting for the intuition would have to register both species membership and the importance of capacities that some nonhumans have. It is not clear how an account based on a single consideration could do that. Metz offers an ingenious answer in the capacity for friendly relations (as both subject and object), but the intuition is explained only if the apparent evidence of human-nonhuman animal cooperative activity is ignored. Pluralist accounts that save the intuition are possible, but the price of accounting for the intuition seems to be to weigh membership in Homo sapiens more than other sufficient conditions.

4 Species Extinction

Five times in roughly the last half a billion years three quarters of the Earth’s species have gone extinct in a geologically brief period of time. Natural scientists call these events “mass extinctions.” In the Permian mass extinction 245 million years ago, an estimated 77 to 96 per cent of all marine species went extinct.Footnote 17 Recovery of biological diversity after such events takes tens of millions of years.Footnote 18 The evidence is mounting that biodiversity loss has become so extensive and rapid that another mass extinction has begun, this one anthropogenic.Footnote 19 This is an environmental problem of immense, nearly unimaginable, proportions. It is so profoundly important that it is not unreasonable to think of it as one of just a handful of problems that are most urgent to environmentalism at the dawn of the Anthropocene. If environmental ethics is to be relevant to environmentalism, it will have to speak to the problem of biodiversity loss in a way that is informative and insightful. It is difficult for me to see how the relational theory that Metz develops will be of help to environmental ethics in this regard.

One approach that one could take from within the theory would be to characterize the problem of biodiversity loss as a profound failure to be friendly to the particular animals who are expected to die as a result of the problems that humans are causing. The idea is that our destruction of their habitat is inconsistent with caring relations. This response would simply ignore all non-animal species, and many animal species that are not the object of our friendly relations. But that’s not all.

Even if species extinction occurs in virtue of individual organisms dying, the significance of species extinction to an environment or ecosystem is not the same as the death of an individual organism. Suppose a species is comprised of N individuals at a point of relatively stable equilibrium. The loss of any particular member is a regular occurrence that normally is replenished by the birth of new members. But when the mortality rate exceeds the rate of replenishment, the species begins to decline, and the number of members becomes less than N. The loss of members grows in significance as the remaining population becomes a smaller percentage of N. When only five per cent of the population remains, the loss of an individual is of much greater significance than when ninety-nine per cent remains. Significance does not track the loss of individuals per se, but the loss at a greater rate than replacement, and significance grows as the percentage of individuals in relation to N declines.

Insofar as the loss of an individual registers differently depending on whether the species is declining, the difference in significance is not captured by a focus on the moral status of individuals. To use a distinction Metz employs, the significance is based on an extrinsic property of the individual. But it is not the extrinsic property that is the basis of Metz’s theory of moral status, namely whether the organism can be the subject or object of friendly relations with us. Rather the extrinsic property has to do with the relationship between the organism and the population of fellow species members. The relevant relation is the extent to which the death of the organism will contribute to the decline of the species. Just as the extent to which an individual’s death contributes to the death rate exceeding the replacement rate is significant for a concern about species extinction, the decline of a species is significant in relationship to the stability of the ecosystems it inhabits.

In “Thinking like a Mountain” Aldo Leopold constructs a perspective from which the difference between the loss of an individual and the extinction of the species can be appreciated. Although his essay begins with the image of the “fierce green fire dying” in the eyes of an individual she-wolf, his argument does not highlight a wrong to her, but the destruction of a mountain ecosystem of which she is a part.Footnote 20 That destruction is not registered by the deaths of individuals, which, taken in isolation, are irrelevant to the mountain. The unnecessary killing of the wolf by the young Leopold and his buddies may be the focus of a moral evaluation based on friendly relations to individuals, but that event in isolation does not concern the mountain. One need not deny the appropriateness of evaluating the killing of the individual in order to appreciate the significance of the decline of a predator species to the stability of the ecosystem. And to think like a mountain is to engage in that kind of appreciation.

What does this mean for the account of environmental ethics that is based on an account of moral status understood as the capacity to engage in friendly relations? Such an account is, at best incomplete in a very important way since it cannot account for a problem of fundamental importance to contemporary environmentalism.

Metz does, however, suggest a response. He claims that not all that is valuable is morally valuable (167). We can and should value species and ecosystems, even though we do not value them morally. That is a position that I have also defended.Footnote 21 It is a plausible response, I believe, to the charge that the relational theory cannot capture the value of species preservation. But that would be to admit that the theory is not, in and of itself, important to one of the most pressing problems of contemporary environmentalism.

I agree with Metz that what is valuable about species and ecosystems does not have to do with moral status. We have no duties directly to species and ecosystems to preserve them. Their value is not deontic. We also have no duties to great works of art. But it would be inconsistent with appreciating their intrinsic value to allow them to deteriorate and not to seek to preserve them.Footnote 22 According to this response, Metz could claim that the moral status of certain animals, as capable of being subjects and objects of friendly relations, is only one pillar upon which an environmental ethics adequate to the challenges of the Anthropocene is built. A second pillar must be the non-deontic value of species and ecosystems. In order to assess the response, in the next section, I will consider then whether the first pillar can bear the weight of environmental concern.

5 Nature Preservation

A traditional concern of environmentalism is nature preservation. The aim of the preservation of areas relatively less disturbed by humans and of the organisms in them is not easily accounted for by accounts of morality that direct us to fulfill putative duties to individual organisms and only to them. Metz’s account shares in those problems, but it also contains problems peculiar to the normative ethical focus on friendly relations. Metz is aware of these problems and discusses them, albeit only briefly (163).

It should be stressed that Metz is not attempting to deduce normative ethical principles of an environmental ethic of friendliness. But he does conjecture that our duties to wild animals would seem to require that “we come closer to them” (163) He elaborates as follows:

More specifically, by the relational moral theory we appear to have duties of some weight to identify with and exhibit solidarity towards animals capable of being related to in that way, such as elephants and wolves (not so much insects and bacteria). That, in turn, appears to permit, if not require, domestication, amongst other ways of integrating our lives with animals, such as routinely entering what had been wild spaces. (163)

To temper that conclusion a bit, he suggests that friendliness will often require leaving wild animals alone. To disrupt their natural ways in order to pursue community would produce subordination (163). And, seeking community with wild animals could result in relations in which their quality of life is reduced.

The problem with this sort of response is that it seems to discount fully just how harsh the conditions are for animals in the wild. Such conditions, relations of predation above all else, ensure that the number of animals making it to the age of reproduction is a fraction of those that are born. As Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote of nature, “of fifty seeds, She often brings but one to bear.” The deaths are ghastly; torn limb for limb, many animals are eaten alive. As Tennyson observes, nature is “red in tooth and claw.”Footnote 23 Mark Sagoff, some time ago, argued that there is a deep inconsistency between the individualist focus on animal well-being and the aims of nature preservation. His central claim seems apposite when adapted to the ethic of friendliness: To pursue solidarity with nonhuman animals “and at the same time to let nearly all of them perish unnecessarily in the most brutal and horrible ways”Footnote 24 is very difficult to reconcile. Perhaps a friend could allow such carnage, but hardly without deep anguish and profound regret. Metz registers no anguish because he seems to see the problem as episodic rather than pervasive.

To the extent that Metz does recognize the pervasive character of predation, he is willing to forgo nature preservation completely. “[T]here are admittedly occasions when it would be possible not only to share a way of life with animals, but also to do so in ways that would not compromise our ability to care for their quality of life. And, here, I am inclined to bite the bullet and say that there is nothing inherently wrong with integrating our lives into theirs—in the name of love.” (163) Given the pervasive character of animal suffering, biting the bullet would seem to involve not simply intermittent acts of loving kindness, but something along the lines of the complete separation of many species from one another and their maintenance by means of nutritional provision. It looks like vast but humane zoos would replace uncultivated tracks of nature.

This counterintuitive conclusion raises a familiar dilemma for the account. Either affirm the theory of moral status, despite its counterintuitive implications, thereby forgoing the general methodological aim of saving intuitions, or reject the theory because it cannot, in principle, rule out the counterintuitive implications.

6 Closing

There is so much to admire in Metz’s book, its clarity of argumentation, the novelty of its thesis, and certainly the ambition of its aim. Metz set his ambitions very high: To offer a superior normative ethical alternative to both utilitarianism and Kantianism. That leads him, presumably for the sake of completeness, to discuss the moral status of individual animals. Here I find him unconvincing in his attempt to offer an explanation that accounts for the intuition that although some nonhuman animals have moral status, none has a higher moral status than any human. If I am right, that’s a disappointment, but perhaps not a defeat. It’s not as if either utilitarianism or Kantianism could account for that intuition. Indeed, many utilitarians will reject the intuitions as speciesist. So, perhaps Metz has argued to a draw on this point. Given the prominence of these theories in the history moral philosophy, that would be no small accomplishment.

In another way, however, I am more critical, not of his theory, but of his judgment. I do not think that the emphasis that Metz puts on the moral status of individual animals is relevant to the biggest problems of environmentalism today, and to the extent that environmental ethics should aim to contribute to environmentalism, the relevance of the moral status of animals to environmental ethics is much less than Metz seems to give it. Many people will, however, want to disagree with me and even side with Metz on this point. I have also identified a problem of significance to environmentalism, namely that nature preservation, does not even seem to register on the theory that Metz proposes. Worse yet, the theory is at times openly hostile to that concern. Perhaps these are merely problems of labelling. If Metz had entitled his chapter “Animal Ethics,” he would not be called to account for problems of its relation to environmentalism. But it seems he wants to offer an account of environmental ethics, if so, then asking him to account in this way is not inappropriate.