Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Chapter 16 Contested Frameworks in Environmental Ethics Clare Palmer Abstract This chapter provides an overview of some key, and contrasting, ideas in environmental ethics for those unfamiliar with the field. It outlines the ways in which environmental ethicists have defended different positions concerning what matters ethically, from those that focus on human beings (including issues of environmental justice and justice between generations) to those who argue that nonhuman animals, living organisms, ecosystems and species have some kind of moral status. The chapter also considers different theoretical approaches to environmental ethics in terms of consequentialist, broadly deontological and virtue theories. Finally, three different interpretations of moral pluralism in environmental ethics are introduced: pluralism about values, pluralism about theories, and a pragmatic, methodological pluralism. Keywords Environmental ethics • Moral considerability • Moral pluralism • Anthropocentrism • Ethical holism 16.1 Introduction Environmental ethics emerged as an academic field during the 1970s, and grew rapidly. Today, courses in environmental ethics are taught in universities across the world; textbooks, journals and monographs in the field have proliferated.1 As the field has grown, it has diversified, now supporting a wide range of contrasting views concerning what should be understood as the fundamental problems of environmental ethics, how to approach and prioritize such problems and, more 1 For a longer, though still brief history, see http://www.cep.unt.edu/novice.html C. Palmer (*) Department of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, 4237 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-4237, USA e-mail: cpalmer@philosophy.tamu.edu R. Rozzi et al. (eds.), Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World: Values, 191 Philosophy, and: Action, Ecology (EBSCOhost) and Ethics 1, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7470-4_16, EBSCO Publishing eBook Collection - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 192 C. Palmer specifically, what has value, why it has value, and in what kind of ethical theory such values should be embedded. Attempting to give an overview of such a contested field in a short paper is difficult; so this paper is necessarily limited. I will outline three kinds of divisions in broadly “Anglo-American” approaches to environmental ethics. This means there will inevitably be important omissions. I won’t discuss environmental philosophy more generally construed (including approaches drawn from Continental or Latin American philosophical traditions, Deep Ecology, Ecofeminism and Social Ecology2) and I won’t focus on particular issues (such as ecological restoration3, climate change or wilderness4) that have been highly significant in the development of the field. Instead, I’ll concentrate on underlying theoretical frameworks, which may help to locate different approaches to such issues (while noting that some environmental ethicists argue that this theoretical approach is the wrong starting place). Some of the conflicting approaches to environmental ethics I’ll discuss are derived from differences found more generally within ethics. Others relate to the specifically environmental concerns of the field. The conflicts I’ll explore here offer different answers to the following three questions: 1. Are human individuals the only things that matter morally? If not, what else is of moral relevance, and why? 2. What approach to ethical theory should environmental ethicists adopt? 3. Should environmental ethicists be ethical monists or pluralists? Commitment to a particular answer to question 1 doesn’t require any particular answer to question 2. So, there can be disagreements along two dimensions; approaches to environmental ethics can diverge both about what matters morally and about ethical theory. However, answers to the first two questions may lead to a particular answer to question 3. 16.2 16.2.1 Conflicting Approaches: Moral Status Key Terminology The first key term here is “moral status” or, alternatively, “moral considerability”. Most simply, “moral status” is usually used to refer to something or being 2 For more information about approaches drawn from Continental philosophy, see Brown and Toadvine (2003); Foltz and Frodeman (2004), and from Latin American philosophy see Rozzi (2012). For Deep Ecology see Brennan and Witoszek (1999); for Social Ecology, see Bookchin (1995), Light (1998); for ecofeminism, see Plumwood (1994), Warren (1997). 3 But see Elliot (1997), Throop (2000) on ecological restoration. 4 See Callicott and Nelson (1998) on wilderness. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 16 Contested Frameworks in Environmental Ethics 193 that we should take directly into account in our decision-making; “we may not treat it just in any way we please” (Warren 2000, p. 3). Even if some thing, or being, with moral status is useful to us, it is not just useful; it is also something for which we should be directly concerned. On most accounts something that possesses moral status has interests, a good of its own. Some further distinctions are useful here: (a) To say that something has moral status/considerability is not necessarily to say that it has rights. Rights possession is usually construed much more narrowly (see Goodpaster 1978). Most environmental ethicists, if they accept rights arguments at all, confine rights to a small group of beings, either just human beings, or more broadly, humans and mammals. (b) To say that some thing or being has moral status says nothing about comparative value. Moral status/moral considerability should be understood as threshold terms. If we say a being has moral status, all we’re saying is that it counts for something. The term “moral significance” is usually reserved for comparative judgments of value; we could say that two beings (say a bear and a beetle) are morally considerable, but that the bear has more moral significance than the beetle. (c) Moral status/considerability is often closely related to the term intrinsic value. But the term “intrinsic value” is used in many different ways, too complex to discuss here.5 However, two points to note: In environmental ethics, “intrinsic value” is commonly used to mean non-instrumental value; the “value of things as ends in themselves regardless of whether they are also useful as means to other ends” (Brennan and Lo 2008). Second, on some accounts, to say that some being, thing, or state has intrinsic value just is to say that it is morally considerable. But, alternatively, it is also possible to argue that some thing (such as a painting) can be valued intrinsically, without having to maintain that it has moral status (see Cahen (1988) for further discussion of this distinction). 16.2.2 Understandings of Moral Status There are two independent fault lines within environmental ethics with respect to moral status. These are (a) an anthropocentric/non-anthropocentric fault line, and (b) an individualist/holistic fault line. There is also substantial disagreement over (c) what capacities or qualities give some thing or being moral status, and add to its moral significance. 5 So, for instance, on some accounts intrinsic value is taken to mean the value some thing or state has in itself, independently of its relations; while alternatively, on other accounts, intrinsic value is the value an object, state or fact has an end, rather than as a means. See O’Neill (1992); McShane (2007) and Zimmerman (2010) for further discussion. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 194 16.2.3 C. Palmer Anthropocentrism/Non-anthropocentrism Anthropocentrism just means “human-centered,” and as such can refer very broadly to worldviews and attitudes, as well as to values. Here, however, I’m concerned with a narrower sense of anthropocentrism, anthropocentrism about moral status. This can take different forms. On one view, only humans have moral status; the natural world matters only inasmuch as it is important or useful for human beings. An alternative form of anthropocentrism maintains that humans have higher, or much higher, moral significance than anything else in the natural world, but that at least some nonhuman beings or things have some degree of moral significance. These are sometimes called “strong” and “weak” anthropocentric views, although these terms can be used in different ways.6 A non-anthropocentric view maintains that at least some nonhuman beings or things have high moral significance; perhaps as high, or even higher, than human beings. Non-anthropocentric views can also take many forms, however, as I’ll explain below. Very significant environmental ethics problems exist, even if one is strongly or weakly anthropocentric about moral status. For even if only humans are thought to have moral status, there are still substantial inter-human environmental justice issues with relation to the environment. In the case of human contemporaries, some individuals and groups (both within nations, and internationally) may bear a disproportionate burden of environmental harms, be unfairly deprived of access to key environmental resources, and be excluded from decision-making procedures about the environments in which they live. And justice issues between generations can be even more starkly drawn. Future generations are vulnerable to the actions of present generations; they can play no direct part in decision-making about actions that will affect them; and environmental costs, burdens and deprivations can be pushed forward to future people, while present people gain the benefits. The term “anthropocentric” in environmental ethics has sometimes carried negative valence (in a similar way to the negative valence popularly carried by the term “egocentrism”). However, some environmental ethicists have strongly defended anthropocentric approaches to ethics, especially for strategic reasons. In public policy debates, it is maintained, anthropocentric arguments for environmental protection are much more likely to be persuasive than non-anthropocentric ones (de-Shalit 2000; Light 2002). Norton (1993, 1997) argues that if anthropocentrism is sufficiently reflective – that is, if it takes future people, ecosystem services, and other cultural and aesthetic interests seriously enough – there will, in practice, be convergence between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric environmental policy. So, there is no need to argue for more contentious, non-anthropocentric ethical views. However, these views are highly contested in environmental ethics, as I’ll point out later. 6 “Strong” and “weak” anthropocentrism can be used in different ways. For instance, these terms may describe the origin of values, or the objects of values; here I’m referring to the objects of values. Bryan Norton takes “strong anthropocentrism” to mean instrumentally valuing nature for consumptive uses and “weak anthropocentrism” to mean “widely” instrumentally valuing nature for nonconsumptive “higher uses” (e.g. as an aesthetic and spiritual resource). EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 16 Contested Frameworks in Environmental Ethics 16.2.4 195 Individualistic/Holistic A second distinct fault line concerns whether only individuals can be thought to have moral status. Actually, putting it this way begs a key question, since one problem here concerns what constitutes an “individual.” Traditionally, “individual” has referred to individual human beings, animals and other living organisms. Many views in environmental ethics maintain that only individuals of these kinds – some or all organisms – can have moral status. Why? Most simply, because (on this view) only living individuals can have a well-being, interests, can be harmed or benefited, and/or have a good of their own. And it is only beings about which we can make these kinds of claims that could have moral status. If something can’t be harmed or benefited (it is argued) why should we take it directly into account morally? However, this opens up two possible responses, both of which can be found within environmental ethics. The first is to argue that some things in the natural world generally thought of as groups, sets or collectives, have more cohesion than these terms imply. This cohesion is such that they can be thought of as “quasiindividuals” that can be in some way harmed or benefited, and thus that they can, like more traditional individuals, have moral status. The second response is to maintain that groups such as communities should be valued, or can have moral status, as a group, even though they lack individual-like qualities. Both these responses – I’ll call them “holistic” – may conflict strongly with individualist, organism-focused views. The conflict between these approaches has underpinned some of the most enduring disputes in environmental ethics, particularly in the context of ecosystem management, hunting and culling, where the claims of particular individuals may compete with the claims of “wholes” such as systems or species. 16.2.5 Differing Grounds for Moral Status It is generally thought that individual adult humans are “paradigm cases” of moral status. However, even in the human case, reasons for maintaining this differ. In starkly simple terms, there are two important traditions here. One – a broadly Kantian tradition – focuses on human rationality; the second on human sentience (very roughly, the human capacity to feel and to experience). Most strong ethical anthropocentrism works with the first tradition. Humans are autonomous, capable of reasoning, in particular of reasoning about ethics; they can enter into agreements with one another; they can reciprocate. Nothing else has such capacities; and these are the capacities that underpin moral status. So, only humans have moral status. Some worries about this view immediately arise. If this is the basis of moral status, only some humans will have it. Infants, the senile, those in comas, those with severe mental disabilities and fetuses are not capable of this kind of sophisticated reasoning. So, they do not appear to have moral status. For some philosophers, this implication alone (sometimes unhappily called the Argument from Marginal Cases) EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 196 C. Palmer is sufficient reason to reject the view. Others have attempted to extend arguments about reason to include those who are partial reasoners, potential reasoners or past reasoners; and yet others argue that it is enough for an individual to be “of the same kind” as those that do reason, where “kind” is interpreted as “species” (Cohen 1986). However, these arguments are problematic, as has frequently been pointed out (most comprehensively in Nobis 2004). The second perspective grounds moral status not on individuals’ reason, but on individuals’ sentience. As the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1989) famously commented, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” But if suffering is what matters, many non-human animals should also have moral status along with human beings. Although, of course, animal suffering has been a long-standing issue of popular, philosophical, and theological concern, it was the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975 that led to the prominence of sentience-centered ethics. Singer argued that suffering matters morally wherever it is found, and that every being that can suffer should be taken equally into account in our moral decision-making. Although many disagreed with Singer’s account of animals’ moral significance, the idea that if a being is sentient then it should be understood to have moral status has been very widely accepted, both inside and outside environmental ethics. This view forms a key individualist position in environmental ethics. Some environmental ethicists, however, argue that sentience-centered approaches do not go far enough. Moral status is still limited to those beings that have an “experiential well-being”. But, such philosophers argue, we can make sense of the idea of “well-being” without requiring that it be experienced. Failing to water a houseplant is bad for the plant; it is contrary to the plant’s interests. On this basis, it is argued, we should extend moral concern to plants; indeed, to all living things. On views of this kind – biocentric ethical views – all living organisms have moral status (though this should not be taken to mean that they all have high moral significance). Although biocentric ethicists have made slightly different arguments for the moral status of all living things, this approach to environmental ethics has been very significant (see Taylor 1986; Agar 2001; Varner 1988; Attfield 1987). These moves in environmental ethics are sometimes called ethical extensionism. Ideas of moral status have been extended from humans, to individual sentient animals, to all living organisms. However, this isn’t the only way in which extensionism in environmental ethics has moved. It has also extended holistically, outward from human communities to include, for instance, ecosystems and species. The most prominent kind of holism – ecocentric holism, or ecocentrism – originates in the work of Aldo Leopold (1949). Leopold argues for a rather different form of ethical extensionism: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively, the land” (Leopold 1968, p. 204). The starting point of Leopold’s ethical extension is not the individual, but the community; and inanimate things (such as “waters”) have moral relevance, since they form part of “the land.” The focus here is on whole ecological communities or ecosystems, and on emergent properties they may possess. So Leopold’s land ethic famously maintains that “A thing is right as long as it tends to EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 16 Contested Frameworks in Environmental Ethics 197 preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the land community. It is wrong as it tends otherwise” (Leopold 1968, p. 224). Integrity and stability are not properties possessed by individual community members, but by the community as a whole. In the past several decades, a number of environmental ethicists have attempted to develop a systematic underpinning for ecocentric ethics (see, for example, Callicott 1989; Rolston 1988; Johnson 1991). These accounts as to why ecological communities or ecosystems should be valued as wholes or accorded moral status differ considerably. Callicott (1989) argues – drawing on Hume and Darwin – that just as we have emotional loyalties and moral responsibilities towards human communities in which we are located, so too we should have such loyalties and responsibilities to the ecological communities of which we are also members. The argument proposed by Rolston (1988) focuses on ecosystems as wild processes that create and nurture life; it would be peculiar, Rolston insists, to value the organisms, the products of the system, without recognizing the value of the processes that produced them. Johnson (1991) argues that ecosystems should be understood as quasi-individuals with “interests,” interests that don’t necessarily coincide with the interests of their members. However, ecocentric views have run into many difficulties, including what kind of thing an ecological community, or an ecosystem, might be thought to be. Are ecosystems really distinct from what’s around them – do they have boundaries? Do ecological communities form any kind of coherent whole, or are they aggregates of individuals (and do different communities have different degrees of cohesion)? Does it make sense to talk about “ecosystem” or “ecological community” health? Do ecological communities reach a stable equilibrium, or are they in a constant state of flux and disequilibrium? (see McShane 2004; Odenbaugh 2007; Pickett and Ostfeld 1995). The more indistinct, incoherent, and rapidly changing ecosystems or communities seem to be, the more difficult it becomes to maintain certain kinds of ecocentric ethics, especially those that depend on the idea of ecological communities or ecosystems as having a “good” or “interests” that can be “set back.” Some environmental ethicists maintain that species have moral status, a view that’s usually grafted onto the position taken by some philosophers of biology that a species is not a class or set but rather a kind of concrete particular, an individual. For, it is argued, a species is connected not by relations of similarity common to the constituents of sets, but rather by causal and spatiotemporal connections (see, for instance, Hull 1978; Crane 2004). These descriptive arguments about how best to conceive of species are used to base claims about species’ moral status. Johnson (2003, p. 478), for instance, argues that a species is a living entity, an ongoing process that maintains near equilibrium with its environment. This kind of life process, he argues, has interests in “whatever contributes to its coherent and effective functioning as the particular ongoing life process which it is.” Such species interests, Johnson (2003, p. 479) maintains, can be distinguished from the sum of the interests of individuals of the species; something could be in the interests of a species that’s not in the interests of any individuals that are part of it. For this reason, Johnson argues, species’ interests are of moral significance; other things being equal, we should protect and promote EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 C. Palmer Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 198 species’ interests. Of course, arguments of this kind are contentious; even if this description of a species is accepted, the claims that species have interests, and that those interests are of moral relevance, are troublesome to defend (see, for instance, Sandler and Crane 2006). I’ve identified two key fault lines here: between anthropocentric views and a variety of non-anthropocentric views; and between individualistic/holistic views. Commitments with respect to one don’t necessarily determine commitments with respect to the other; individualistic views can be both anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric, as can holistic views. 16.3 Conflicting Approaches: Ethical Theory I’ve focused so far on competing approaches to moral status. However, to be action-guiding, ideas about moral status must be embedded within what’s called an ethical theory. I’ll outline three differing ethical theories that have been important in environmental ethics: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. I will show how these link back to ideas about moral status, and indicate key conflicts between them.7 16.3.1 Consequentialism A consequentialist aims at bringing about best outcomes, most commonly by his or her actions or practices. Standard forms of consequentialism are maximizing (we should bring about the best expected outcomes possible), and require us to take the whole outcome into account (including the outcomes of omitting to do things we could have done).8 Given this framework, what we take “best outcomes” to be in terms of what we think is good (or bad) is critical. This takes us back to moral status, because the capacities that give moral status/significance are usually closely connected to what we think is “good.” Here’s an example: Suppose we take a sentience-centered position on moral status, so beings that can feel pleasure and pain matter morally. Then we combine it with a consequentialist ethical theory. This gives us the basic structure of what’s known as hedonistic utilitarianism; utilitarianism is the best-known form of consequentialism. For a sentience-centered consequentialist, “pleasure” is the good (to be maximized) and “pain” is the bad (to be 7 I won’t discuss some theories important in ethics more generally (such as ethical egoism and moral contractarianism) that have been less significant in environmental ethics. 8 This is, of course, oversimplified; there are forms of consequentialism that don’t focus on actions; and there are satisficing, not maximizing consequentialisms; but these variations have not been highly significant in environmental ethics. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 16 Contested Frameworks in Environmental Ethics 199 minimized). The aim of actions, then, will be to bring about the greatest amount of expected pleasure, net of pain; this constitutes the “best outcome.”9 But consequentialism does not only apply where states of pleasure (pain) are the good (bad). Other forms of utilitarianism emphasize preference satisfaction, where the good is satisfied preferences, and the bad frustrated preferences; for biocentric consequentialists the good (to be maximized) is organismic flourishing, and the bad (to be minimized) is setting back organismic flourishing (see Attfield 1987). Holistic views may also be consequentialist; one might aim at maximizing ecosystemic health, or species flourishing. Consequentialists have very diverse ideas of what constitutes the good. What makes them consequentialist is the forward-looking aim at best outcomes. 16.3.2 Deontology Consequentialist ethical theories contrast with what are (roughly) known as deontological theories. Consequentialists aim to bring about the best states of affairs in the world – states such as pleasure and flourishing. But one worry about consequentialism is that to get to the best states of affairs, particular individuals may need to be sacrificed. So, for instance, if inflicting suffering on one would relieve the suffering of many, a consequentialist may require that the one suffers. Second, the maximizing nature of consequentialism seems relentless; all our actions seem to be swept up into the moral sphere.10 Deontologists, therefore, argue that consequentialism is unjust (in requiring the sacrifice of some individuals to create best states of affairs overall) and overdemanding (in requiring a constant aim at best consequences). In particular, deontological theorists argue that there are some things that should never be permitted, even if doing them does bring about the best consequences; there should be restrictions on maximizing the good. Most deontological theorists also argue that one is not always required to maximize the good; for instance, it is at least sometimes permissible to pursue one’s own private interests (such as reading a good book in the armchair) even though better consequences might be brought about if one did something else. Deontological theories in environmental ethics emphasize rules, principles, duties, rights or some combination of these. The basic idea is that we should adopt certain principles or respect certain rights, rather than that we are required always to maximize the good. Although the distinction between deontological and consequentialist approaches occurs in all kinds of environmental ethics, the most prominent battle has been between utilitarian and rights theorists concerning animals. A hedonistic utilitarian, of the kind mentioned above, could support animal 9 There are other forms of consequentialism that work with intended or actual, not expected outcomes. 10 Some sophisticated forms of consequentialism – in particular various kinds of indirect consequentialism avoid these difficulties; I’m just sketching relatively simple forms here. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 200 C. Palmer experimentation in certain (rare) circumstances, where the expected outcome of some particular painful experiments would be to reduce overall suffering. However, deontological rights theorists – such as Tom Regan (1984) – reject this view. For Regan, if a being has moral status (he has a rather sophisticated account of moral status) then it has rights. And one should not infringe on a being’s rights, even if doing so would bring about best outcomes overall. On this view, practices such as eating meat and animal experimentation should be abolished, because they infringe on animals’ rights. A consequentialist approach, in contrast, while finding many instances of both meat eating and animal experimentation morally objectionable (because they don’t maximize pleasure/minimize pain overall) would not support absolute abolition of such practices. Deontological approaches are not confined to sentience-centered views. Paul Taylor, a prominent biocentric ethicist, argues that we have certain deontological duties to respect all wild individual living organisms. Deontological views could also be holistic; for instance, we might have duties towards species, such that we should never render a species extinct, even if doing so would promote the flourishing of five other species. 16.3.3 Virtue Ethics Rather than being concerned primarily with actions and practices (as consequentialists are) or with rights, principles or rules (as deontological theorists are), virtue theorists are primarily interested in character. Virtue ethics asks how we should live, what sort of people we should be, what it is to be a “good person” and how to make ourselves into such a person. Virtues (vices) are understood as dispositions or traits of character that it is desirable (undesirable) to have. In an environmental context then, what’s at stake is not so much norms of action as norms of character (Sandler and Cafaro 2005, p. 1); that is, virtue ethics concerns our attitudes and dispositions with respect to the environment. Obviously, this yields a very different moral theoretical approach to one that’s either outcomeoriented (as is consequentialism) or rule-following (as deontology). For this reason, environmental virtue ethics is less obviously concerned with environmental policy and legislation. But still, virtue ethicists can argue, character is the right place for our primary ethical focus. Our environmental actions flow from our characters. If we are greedy, selfish, short-sighted, complacent, ungrateful, and callous in our attitudes and dispositions towards people, animals and the non-human world, then it is not surprising that environmental crises result. As Sandler and Cafaro (2005, p. 3) argue: “How one interacts with the environment is largely determined by one’s disposition towards it, and it seems to many that the enabling cause of reckless environmental exploitation is the attitude that nature is a boundless resource for satisfying human wants and needs.” Virtue ethics, then, is an ethical approach that claims to get at the heart of environmental problems by examining the kinds of people we are. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 16 Contested Frameworks in Environmental Ethics 201 A related theoretical approach, sometimes called the “ethics of care,” has also played an important role in debates in environmental ethics, in particular in feminist approaches to animal ethics (see Donovan and Adams 2007). Care ethics, as its name suggests, maintains that caring relationships, usually with particular others, lie at the heart of ethics; we should attend to individual people (or other organisms) rather than primarily to consequences or principles. Virtue and care ethics share certain features in common; indeed, it has been argued that care ethics should be understood as a form of virtue ethics (where “being caring” is taken to be a critical virtue). Both approaches maintain that human emotions should play a significant part in ethical decisions; we are not only rational beings. Developing and expressing the moral emotions such as compassion, sympathy and empathy should form part of a rich and flourishing moral life. This emphasis on the place of human emotion in ethical decisions, as well as the focus on character, makes for a contrast between deontological and consequentialist approaches on the one hand, and care and virtue ethics on the other. 16.4 Conflicting Approaches: Monism and Pluralism I have so far outlined different views on moral status and ethical theory. But suppose one finds several different accounts of moral significance plausible, though they appear to be in conflict? Or suppose one finds attractive (or repellent!) elements of different ethical theories? This raises questions about whether one should be a monist or a pluralist in environmental ethics. In fact, the terms “monist” and “pluralist” can be understood in various different ways; what I say here will inevitably simplify these debates, which can be framed rather differently (see Brennan 1992; Wenz 1993). With this caveat in mind, I will discuss three kinds of pluralism: pluralism about values, pluralism about ethical theory, and what has been called methodological pluralism. 16.4.1 Value Pluralism Environmental ethicists have argued for the moral importance of many different capacities, (such as sentience), states (such as pleasure), and qualities (such as naturalness). And I have had no room to discuss other ethical considerations that are generally thought to be important – such as justice, equality, and liberty. But there may be occasions where these values might conflict; or at least, respecting one might mean denying another. One way of thinking about this is to maintain that only one value is fundamentally morally important. The others are either not values at all, or are not independently valuable; they should be “cashed out” in terms of one “master” value. This is the route taken by value monists. Value pluralists, on the other hand, accept that there is EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 202 C. Palmer more than one (and perhaps many) moral values and considerations. These values cannot all be translated into one “master value currency,” but neither should they be silenced or ignored. Values really are plural, and potentially in conflict with each other. The central problem for value monists, then, is to identify this “master” fundamental value, explain why it is so significant, and how to translate other values into its terms. The central problem for value pluralists is to provide a way of prioritizing or balancing competing values when they come into conflict. Hedonistic utilitarianism is a key example of value monism. The master, fundamental value/disvalue is pleasure/pain; all other values and considerations can be translated into the master value (so, justice is important inasmuch as it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain; rationality is important inasmuch as it intensifies or lessens pains and pleasures). Sometimes this is called “strong value commensurability:” since there is a master value, all values are commensurable. However, many environmental ethicists reject strong value commensurability. They argue that values are fundamentally plural. For instance, both “being sentient” and “being rational” are morally important; rationality is not only important because it can enhance or reduce pleasure and pain. Hence there can be a genuine conflict between these values. How does one deal with such conflicts? On the view that’s sometimes called “weak value commensurability,” one can consistently rank values. For instance, one can say that both sentience and rationality are important, but that when they conflict, one (say, rationality) always has priority over the other (sentience). That is, some kind of lexical priority rule can be adopted, where one value (or an amount of the value) is always given priority over another value (or amount of the value). Other value pluralists reject such regular ranking patterns, arguing for different forms of value incommensurability. On these views, value-rankings either vary by context (so in some cases one might prioritize one value, in other cases a different value) or on some occasions at least, values just cannot be ranked at all; rational choices can’t be made between them. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously called these “tragic choices.” Value pluralism of one kind or another has the significant advantage, as Carter (2005, p. 76) puts it, of “recognizing that each value continually exercises its pull.” This position has been widely adopted in environmental ethics. There are individualist value pluralists who maintain that, for instance, being alive, being sentient, being rationally autonomous are all different but important values, and have come up with various frameworks for decision-making in situations of conflict. Equally, there are holistic value pluralists, who maintain, for instance, both that “species protection” and “naturalness” are values, and have systems for adjudicating between them when species protection requires human intervention. And finally there are ethicists – such as Johnson (1991) – who accept both individualist and holistic values, and find ways of balancing, prioritizing or trading off these values when they conflict.11 11 This kind of value pluralism is of particular significance to consequentialists, who aim at bringing about the best outcomes. There is a similar kind of pluralism of principles, more common among deontologists, that I do not have space to discuss here. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 16 Contested Frameworks in Environmental Ethics 16.4.2 203 Pluralism About Ethical Theory A second debate concerns pluralism in ethical theory. In environmental ethics, this debate largely arose in response to a claim by Stone (1988) that a moral pluralist might be a utilitarian in public life but adopt a non-consequentialist ethical theory in his or her private life. This form of moral pluralism seems to endorse the view that we could theory-switch in different contexts. The majority of environmental ethicists have been skeptical about this kind of moral pluralism. Attfield (2003, p. 90) argues that theory-switching is incoherent, since the same action could thereby appear to be both right and wrong simultaneously. Other worries concern the integrity of moral agents. Callicott (1990) goes so far as to maintain that theoryswitching is open to (perhaps unconscious) manipulation – if a theory comes up with an answer you don’t like, you appear to be permitted to switch to the theory that gives the answer you actually want. There seems to be a deeper worry about the consistency involved in attempting to be pluralist about ethical theory than value. While there could be pluralism in ethical theory that reduces worries about theory-switching, this would require rules about which theory should be consistently applied in which circumstances, or a lexical ordering rule about which theory has priority when there are conflicts. Of course, frequently ethical theories coincide in the actions they recommend; in these cases we could describe the action as multi-determined. This isn’t to say, though, that aspects of different moral theories can’t be combined into one coherent theory. There are advocates of what’s called “virtue consequentialism,” where a commitment to virtues is adopted as an indirect way of bringing about best consequences (Jamieson 2007). Other hybrid theories also exist, for instance Scheffler’s (1984) hybrid consequentialism. However, hybrid theories are not strictly pluralist, since they create a unified theory composed from elements of several independent theories. True pluralism in ethical theory, especially where this involves theory-switching, is not very common. 16.4.3 Methodological Pluralism “Methodological pluralism” is particularly relevant to environmental policy and practice, and is connected to a school in environmental ethics called “environmental pragmatism” (see Light 1996, 2002). Methodological pluralism maintains that, in terms of making environmental policies and interacting with environmental professionals, we should be tolerant of a wide range of different values and theories. People can and do value nature in many different ways; rather than seeking to persuade people to value the “right things,” we should work with the values people actually have. So, for instance, Andrew Light (2002) a prominent methodological pluralist, argues that if we look at the actual environmental values people hold, we EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 C. Palmer Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 204 see that people are generally very concerned about the environment their children and future people will live in, but have few non-anthropocentric concerns. Rather than trying to persuade people to become non-anthropocentric (i.e., to have the “right” values) it is better – methodologically – to work with their existing values to achieve environmental protection. This may also involve adopting strategic anthropocentrism. Of course, this methodologically pluralistic argument is easier to maintain where diverse theories and values coincide in practice. As we’ve seen, Norton argues that if anthropocentrism is sufficiently “reflective,” then divergent positions about anthropocentric/non-anthropocentric value will so converge. Yet, as critics have pointed out, there will surely be some cases where anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric values come apart. Norton (1993) denies this, maintaining that most such human/nature conflicts are set-ups. And, of course, if individuals’ values are not sufficiently “reflective”, it still looks as though there is a need to persuade people to embrace more wide-ranging human-centered values, which at least constrains the breadth of methodological pluralism that is under discussion. More fundamental objections to methodological pluralism have also been made. If anthropocentrism is a morally objectionable attitude (like sexism, for instance) it can be argued that there is good reason to try to change the attitude, even if agreement can be reached on particular actions and practices without doing so. So, although in practice most environmental policy does spring from a coalition of different value positions, there is disagreement among environmental ethicists as to whether methodological pluralism should be adopted as a governing approach in practical and policy contexts. 16.5 Conclusion I began with three questions: 1. Are human individuals the only things that matter morally? If not, what else is of moral relevance, and why? 2. What approach to ethical theory should environmental ethicists adopt? 3. Should environmental ethicists be ethical monists or pluralists? As we have seen, there are conflicting approaches – and answers – to all three questions. The territory of environmental ethics still is highly contested. This raises a series of further questions. Should such diversity about moral status, values, and theory be welcomed? Is more agreement about these questions possible, or desirable? What are the implications of such deep fissures in environmental ethics for environmental professionals, in particular for those engaged in environmental conservation and restoration? Is the best we can hope for, on the ground, some form of methodological pluralism? EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/21/2016 9:45 AM via TEXAS A&M UNIV COLLEGE STATION AN: 697802 ; Rozzi, Ricardo.; Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World : Values, Philosophy, and Action Account: s8516548 Copyright © 2013. Springer. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 16 Contested Frameworks in Environmental Ethics 205 References Agar N (2001) Life’s intrinsic value. Columbia University Press, New York Attfield R (1987) The theory of value and obligation. Routledge, London Attfield R (2003) Biocentric consequentialism, pluralism and the minimax implication: a reply to Alan Carter. Utilitas 15(1):76–91 Bookchin M (1995) The ecology of freedom. AK Press, Oakland Brennan A (1992) Moral pluralism and the environment. Environ Values 1(1):15–32 Brennan A, Lo YS (2008) Environmental ethics. 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