Environmental Ethics

Volume 31, Issue 2, Summer 2009

The Move from Is to Good in Environmental Ethics

Moves from is to good—that is, principles that link fact to value—are fundamental to environmental ethics. The upshot is fourfold: (1) for nonanthropogenic goods, only those moves from is to good are defensible which conceive goodness as goodness for biotic entities; (2) goodness for nonsentient biotic entities is contribution to their autopoietic functioning; (3) biotic entities also function “exopoietically” to benefit related entities, and these exopoietic benefits are on average greater than their own goods; and (4) the most general is-to-good principles that are defensible (and hence the ones of greatest importance for environmental ethics) concern a realm of nonanthropogenic goodness that encompasses both living and nonliving nature.