A river tumbles through forested ravines and rocky gorges towards the sea. The state hydro-electricity commission sees the
falling water as untapped energy. Building a dam across one of the gorges would provide three years of employment for a thousand people, and longer-term employment
for twenty or thirty. The dam would store enough water to ensure that the state could economically meet its energy needs for
the next decade. This would encourage the establishment of energy-intensive industry thus further contributing to employment
and economic growth.
The rough terrain of the river valley makes it accessible only to the reasonably fit, but it is nevertheless a favoured spot
for bushwalking. The river itself attracts the more daring whitewater rafters. Deep in the sheltered valleys are stands of
rare Huon pine, many of the trees being more than a thousand years old. The valleys and gorges are home to many birds and animals, including an endangered species of marsupial mouse that has seldom
been found outside the valley. There may be other rare plants and animals as well, but no one knows, for scientists are yet
to investigate the region fully.
Should the dam be built? This is one example of a situation in which we must choose between very different sets of values.
The description is loosely based on a proposed dam on the Franklin River, in the south-west of Australia's island state, Tasmania.
An account of the fate of that proposal can be found in Chapter 11, but I have deliberately altered some details, and this
description should be treated as a hypothetical case. Many other examples would have posed the choice between values equally
well: logging virgin forests, building a paper mill that will release
pollutants into coastal waters, or opening a new mine on the edge of a national park. In this chapter, I shall explore the
values that underlie debates about these decisions, and the example I have presented can serve as a point of reference to
these debates. I shall focus particularly on the values at issue in controversies about the preservation of wilderness because
here the fundamentally different values of the two parties are most apparent. When we are talking about flooding a river valley,
the choice before us is starkly clear.
In general terms, we can say that those who favour building the dam are valuing employment and a higher per capita income
for the state above the preservation of wilderness, of plants and animals (both common ones and members of endangered species)
and of opportunities for outdoor recreational activities. Before we begin to scrutinize the values of those who would have
the dam built and those who would not, however, let's look at the roots of our attitudes towards the natural world.
Western attitudes to nature grew out of a blend of those of the Hebrew people, as represented in the early books of the Bible,
and the philosophy of ancient Greece, particularly that of Aristotle. In contrast to some other ancient traditions, for example those of India, both the Hebrew and the Greek traditions put humans
at the centre of the moral universe. Indeed, in some respects even that understates the importance that humans have in the
Western tradition, because it suggests that other beings have moral significance, even if they are less centrally important.
For much of the Western tradition, however, humans are not merely of central moral significance, they constitute the entirety
of the morally significant features of this world.
The biblical story of creation in
Genesis makes very clear the Hebrew view of the special place of human beings in the divine plan:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over
the fowl of the air, and over the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said upon them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have
dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Today, Christians debate the meaning of this grant of ‘dominion’. Those concerned about the environment prefer to interpret
it as ‘stewardship’; that is, not as a license to do as we will with other living things, but rather as a directive to look
after them, on God's behalf, and be answerable to God for the way in which we treat them. There is, however, little justification
in the text itself for such an interpretation; and given the example God set when he drowned almost every animal on earth
in order to punish human beings for their wickedness, it is no wonder that people should think the flooding of a single river
valley is hardly worth worrying about. After the flood there is a repetition of the grant of dominion in more ominous language:
And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all
that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hands are they delivered.
The implication is clear: to act in a way that causes fear and dread to everything that moves on the earth is not improper;
it is, in fact, in accordance with a God-given decree.
The most influential early Christian thinkers had no doubts about how man's dominion was to be understood. ‘Doth God care
for oxen?’ asked Paul, in the course of a discussion of an Old Testament command to rest one's ox on the Sabbath, but it was
only a rhetorical question – he took it for granted that the answer must be negative, and the command was to be explained
in terms of some benefit to humans. Augustine shared this line of thought. He explained the puzzling stories in the New Testament in which Jesus appears to show
indifference to both trees and animals – fatally cursing a fig tree and causing a herd of pigs to drown – as intended to teach
us that ‘to refrain from the killing of animals and the destroying of plants is the height of superstition’.
When Christianity prevailed in the Roman Empire, it absorbed elements of the ancient Greek attitude to the natural world.
The Greek influence was entrenched in Christian philosophy by the greatest of the medieval scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, whose
life work was the melding of Christian theology with the thought of Aristotle. Aristotle regarded nature as a hierarchy in
which those with less reasoning ability exist for the sake of those with more:
Plants exist for the sake of animals, and brute beasts for the sake of man – domestic animals for his use and food, wild ones
(or at any rate most of them)
for food and other accessories of life, such as clothing and various tools.
Since nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain, it is undeniably true that she has made all animals for the sake of man.
In his own major work, the Summa Theologica, Aquinas followed this passage from Aristotle almost word for word, adding that the position accords with God's command,
as given in Genesis. In his classification of sins, Aquinas has room only for sins against God, ourselves or our neighbours. There is no possibility
of sinning against nonhuman animals or against the natural world.
This was the thinking of mainstream Christianity for at least its first eighteen centuries. There were gentler spirits, certainly,
like Basil, John Chrysostom and Francis of Assisi, but for most of Christian history they have had no significant impact on
the dominant tradition. It is therefore worth emphasising the major features of this dominant Western tradition, because these
features can serve as a point of comparison when we discuss different views of the natural environment.
According to the dominant Western tradition, the natural world exists for the benefit of human beings. God gave human beings
dominion over the natural world, and God does not care how we treat it. Human beings are the only morally important members
of this world. Nature itself is of no intrinsic value, and the destruction of plants and animals cannot be sinful, unless
by this destruction we harm human beings.
Harsh as this tradition is, it does not rule out concern for the preservation of nature, as long as that concern can be related
to human well-being. One could, within the limits of the dominant Western tradition, oppose the burning of fossil fuels, the
destruction of forests and the proliferation of methane-emitting cattle because of the harm to human health and welfare that
will occur as a result of climate change. As for arguments about preserving wilderness, there was a time when wilderness seemed
to be a wasteland, a useless area that needed clearing in order to render it productive and valuable. Now, however, a different
metaphor is more appropriate: the remnants of true wilderness left to us are like islands amidst a sea of human activity that
threatens to engulf them. This gives wilderness a scarcity value that provides the basis for a strong argument for preservation,
even within the terms of a human-centred ethic. That argument becomes much stronger still when we take a long-term view. We
shall now turn to this immensely important aspect of environmental values.
A virgin forest is the product of all the millions of years that have passed since the beginning of our planet. If it is cut
down, another forest may grow up, but the continuity has been broken. The disruption in the natural life cycles of the plants
and animals means that the forest will never again be as it would have been had it not been cut. The gains made from cutting the forest – employment, profits for business, export earnings and cheaper cardboard and paper
for packaging – are short-term. Even if the forest is not cut but drowned to build a dam to create electricity, it is very
likely that the benefits will last for only a few generations, for in time new technology will render such methods of generating
power obsolete. Once the forest is cut or drowned, however, the link with the past is gone forever. That is a cost that will
be borne by every generation that succeeds us on this planet. It is for that reason that environmentalists are right to speak
of wilderness as a ‘world heritage’. It is something that we have inherited from our ancestors and that we must preserve for our descendents if they are to have it at all.
In many stable, tradition-oriented human societies, the prevailing culture strongly emphasizes preservation. Our culture,
on the other hand, has great difficulty in recognizing long-term values. It is notorious that politicians rarely look beyond
the next election; but even if they do, they will find their economic advisors telling them that anything to be gained in
the future should be discounted to such a degree as to make it easy to disregard the long-term future altogether.
Economists have been taught to apply a discount rate to all future goods. In other words, a million
dollars in twenty years is not worth a million dollars today, even when we allow for inflation. Economists will discount the
value of the million dollars by a certain percentage, usually corresponding to the real long-term interest rates. This makes
economic sense, because if I had a thousand dollars today I could invest it so that it would be worth more, in real terms,
in twenty years, but the use of a discount rate also means that values gained in the more distant future may count for very
little today. Suppose that we believe that in 200 years, people would be prepared to pay a million dollars (that's in today's
dollars, not inflated ones) to be able to have an unspoilt valley. Now imagine that today we can profit by cutting down the
forest in the valley, which will never regrow. If we apply an annual discount rate of 5 percent, compounded exponentially,
how big would that profit have to be to justify the loss of a million dollars in 2210? The answer, surprisingly, is just sixty
dollars! That's all that a million dollars in 200 years is worth, at that rate of discount. Obviously, then, if we use a 5
percent discount rate, values gained one thousand years in the future scarcely count at all. This is not because of any uncertainty
about whether there will be human beings or other sentient creatures inhabiting this planet at that time, but merely because
of the compounding effect of the rate of return on money invested now. From the standpoint of the priceless and timeless values
of wilderness, however, applying a discount rate gives us the wrong answer. There are some things that, once lost, no amount
of money can regain. Thus, to justify the destruction of an ancient forest on the grounds that it will earn us substantial
export income is unsound, even if we could invest that income and increase its value from year to year; for no matter how
much we increased its value, it could never buy back the link with the past represented by the forest.
This argument does not show that there can be no justification for cutting any virgin forests, but it does mean that any such
justification must take full account of the value of the forests to the generations to come in the more remote future, as
well as those in the more immediate future. This value will obviously be related to the particular scenic or biological significance
of the forest; but as the proportion of true wilderness on the earth dwindles, every part of it becomes significant, because
the opportunities for experiencing wilderness become scarce, and the likelihood of a reasonable selection of the major forms
of wilderness being preserved is reduced.
Can we be sure that future generations will appreciate wilderness? Not really; perhaps they will be happier playing electronic
games more sophisticated than any we can imagine. Nevertheless, there are several reasons why we should not give this possibility
too much weight. First, the trend has been in the opposite direction: the appreciation of wilderness has never been higher
than it is today, especially among those nations that have overcome the problems of poverty and hunger and have relatively
little wilderness left. Wilderness is valued as something of immense beauty, as a reservoir of scientific knowledge still to be gained, for the recreational
opportunities that it provides, and because many people just like to know that something natural is still there, relatively
untouched by modern civilization. If, as we all hope, future generations are able to provide for the basic needs of most people,
we can expect that for centuries to come, they too will value wilderness for the same reasons that we value it.
Arguments for preservation based on the beauty of wilderness are sometimes treated as if they were of little weight because
they are ‘merely
aesthetic’ – even though we go to great lengths to preserve the artistic treasures of earlier human civilizations. It is difficult
to imagine any economic gain that we would be prepared to accept as adequate compensation for, for instance, the destruction
of all the art in the Louvre. How should we compare the aesthetic value of wilderness with that of the art in the Louvre?
Here, perhaps, judgment does become inescapably subjective; so I shall report my own experiences. I have looked at the paintings
in the Louvre, and of many of the other great galleries of Europe and the United States. I think I have a reasonable sense
of appreciation of the fine arts; yet I have not had, in any museum, experiences that fill my aesthetic senses as they are
filled when I hike to a rocky peak and pause there to survey the forested valley below, or if I sit by a stream tumbling over
moss-covered boulders set among tall tree ferns growing in the shade of the forest canopy. I do not think I am alone in this –
for many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation, rising to an almost spiritual
intensity.
It may nevertheless be true that this appreciation of nature will not be shared by people living a century or two hence. If
wilderness can be the source of such deep joy and satisfaction, that would be a great loss. Moreover to some extent, whether
future generations value wilderness is up to us; it is, at least, a decision we can influence. By our preservation of areas
of wilderness, we provide opportunities for generations to come; and by the books and films we produce, we create a culture
that can be handed on to our children and their children. If we feel that a walk in the forest, with senses attuned to the
appreciation of such an experience, is a more deeply rewarding way to spend a day than playing electronic games, or if we
feel that to carry one's food and shelter in a backpack for a week while hiking through an unspoilt natural environment will
do more to develop character than watching television for an equivalent period, then we ought to do what we can to encourage
future generations to have a feeling for nature.
Finally, if we preserve intact the amount of wilderness that exists now, future generations will at least have the choice
of going to see a world that has not been created by human beings. If we destroy the wilderness, that choice is gone forever.
Just as we rightly spend large sums to preserve cities like Venice, even though future generations conceivably may not be
interested in such architectural treasures, so we should preserve wilderness even though it is possible that future generations
will care little for it. Thus, we will not wrong future generations, as we have been wronged by members of past generations
whose thoughtless actions have
deprived us of the possibility of seeing such animals as the dodo, Steller's sea cow, or the thylacine, the striped marsupial
also known as the ‘Tasmanian tiger’. We must take care not to inflict equally irreparable losses on the generations that follow
us.
For this reason, too, the efforts to mitigate the greenhouse effect discussed in the previous chapter deserve the highest
priority. For if by ‘wilderness’ we mean that part of our planet that is unaffected by human activity, it is already too late:
there is no wilderness left anywhere on our planet. The first popular book to warn of the dangers of climate change was Bill McKibben's The End of Nature. In it, McKibben argued: ‘By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived
nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature's independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing
but us.’ This is a profoundly disturbing thought. Yet McKibben does not develop it in order to suggest that we may as well
give up our efforts to reverse the trend. It is true that, as McKibben says, ‘we live in a postnatural world’. Nothing can
undo that; the climate of our planet is under our influence. We still have, however, much that we value in nature, and it
may still be possible to save at least a part of what is left.
Thus, a human-centred ethic can be the basis of powerful arguments for what we may call ‘environmental values’. Properly understood,
such an ethic does not imply that economic growth is more important than the preservation of wilderness. In the light of our
discussion of speciesism in Chapter 3, however, it should also be clear that it is wrong to limit ourselves to a human-centred
ethic. We need to consider more fundamental challenges to this traditional Western approach to environmental issues.
Although some debates about significant environmental issues can be conducted by appealing only to the long-term interests
of our own species, in any serious exploration of environmental values a central issue will be the question of intrinsic value.
We have already seen that it is arbitrary to hold that only human beings are of intrinsic value. If we find value in human
conscious experiences, we cannot deny that there is value in at least some experiences of nonhuman beings. How far does this
extend? To all, but only, sentient beings? Or beyond the boundary of sentience?
To explore this question, a few remarks on the notion of ‘intrinsic value’ will be helpful. Something is of intrinsic value
if it is good or desirable in itself, in contrast to something having only ‘instrumental value’ as a means to some other end
or purpose. Our own happiness, for example, is of intrinsic value, at least to most of us, in that we desire it for its own
sake. Money, on the other hand, is only of instrumental value. We want it because of the things we can buy with it. If we
were marooned on a desert island, we would not want it. Happiness, however, would be just as important to us on a desert island
as anywhere else.
Now consider again the issue of damming the river described at the beginning of this chapter. If the decision were to be made
on the basis of human interests alone, we would balance the economic benefits of the dam against the loss for bushwalkers,
scientists and others, now and in the future, who value the preservation of the river in its natural state. We have already
seen that because this calculation includes an indefinite number of future generations, the loss of the wild river is a much
greater cost than we might at first imagine. Even so, once we broaden the basis of our decision beyond the interests of human
beings, we have much more to set against the economic benefits of building the dam. Into the calculations must now go the
interests of all the nonhuman animals who live in the area that will be flooded. Most of the animals living in the flooded area will die: either they will be drowned, or they will starve. A few may be able
to move to a neighbouring area that is suitable, but wilderness is not full of vacant niches awaiting an occupant. If there
is territory that can sustain a native animal, it is most likely already occupied. Neither drowning nor starvation are easy
ways to die, and the suffering involved in these deaths should, as we have seen, be given no less weight than we would give
to a similar amount of suffering experienced by human beings. This will significantly increase the weight of considerations
against building the dam.
What of the fact that the animals will die, apart from the suffering that will occur in the course of dying?
As we have seen, one can, without being guilty of arbitrary discrimination on the basis of species, regard the death of a
nonhuman ‘merely conscious’ animal as less significant than the death of a person, because normal humans are capable of foresight
and forward planning in ways that merely conscious animals are not. This difference between causing death to a person and
to a merely conscious animal does not mean that the deaths of the animals should be treated as being of no account.
On the contrary, utilitarians will take into account the loss that death inflicts on the animals – the
loss of all their future existence and the experiences that their future lives would have contained. When a proposed dam would
flood a valley and kill thousands, perhaps millions, of sentient creatures, these deaths should be given great importance
in any assessment of the costs and benefits of building the dam.
For those utilitarians who accept the total view discussed in Chapter 4, moreover, if the dam destroys the habitat in which
the animals lived, then it is relevant that this loss is a continuing one. If the dam is not built, animals will presumably
continue to live in the valley for thousands of years, experiencing their own distinctive pleasures and pains. One might question
whether life for animals in a natural environment yields a surplus of pleasure over pain, or of satisfaction over frustration
of preferences – and if there will be fish in the dam, the total utilitarian would have to take the pleasures of their existence
into account too as offsetting, to some extent, the loss of the pleasures of the forest animals. At this point, the idea of
calculating benefits becomes almost absurd; but that does not mean that the loss of future animal lives should be dismissed
from our decision making.
That, however, may not be all. Should we also give weight, not only to the suffering and death of individual animals, but
to the fact that an entire species may disappear? What of the loss of trees that have stood for thousands of years? How much – if any – weight should we give to the preservation of the animals, the species, the trees and the valley's ecosystem,
independently of the interests of human beings – whether economic, recreational or scientific – in their preservation?
Here we have a fundamental moral disagreement: a disagreement about what kinds of beings ought to be considered in our moral
deliberations. Let us look at what has been said on behalf of extending ethics beyond sentient beings.
Reverence for Life
The ethical position developed in this book extends the ethic of the dominant Western tradition but in other respects is recognizably
of the same type.
It draws the boundary of moral consideration around all sentient creatures, but it leaves other living things outside that
boundary. The drowning of the ancient forests, the possible loss of an entire species, the destruction of several complex
ecosystems, the blockage of the wild river itself and the loss of those rocky gorges are factors to be taken into account
only insofar as they adversely affect sentient creatures. Is a more radical break with the traditional position possible?
Can some or all of
these aspects of the flooding of the valley be shown to have intrinsic value, so that they must be taken into account independently
of their effects on human beings or nonhuman animals?
To extend an ethic in a plausible way beyond sentient beings is a difficult task. An ethic based on the interests of sentient
creatures is on familiar ground. Sentient creatures have wants and desires. The question: ‘What is it like to be a possum
drowning?’ at least makes sense, even if it is impossible for us to give a more precise answer than ‘It must be horrible’.
In reaching moral decisions affecting sentient creatures, we can attempt to add up the effects of different actions on all
the sentient creatures affected by the alternative actions open to us. This provides us with at least some rough guide to
what might be the right thing to do. There is, however, nothing that corresponds to what it is like to be a tree dying because
its roots have been flooded. Once we abandon the interests of sentient creatures as our source of value, where do we find
value? What is good or bad for nonsentient creatures, and why does it matter?
It might be thought that as long as we limit ourselves to living things, the answer is not too difficult to find. We know
what is good or bad for the plants in our garden: water, sunlight and compost are good; extremes of heat or cold are bad.
The same applies to plants in any forest or wilderness, so why not regard their flourishing as good in itself, independently
of its usefulness to sentient creatures?
One problem here is that without conscious interests to guide us, we have no way of assessing the relative weights to be given
to the flourishing of different forms of life. Is a thousand-year-old Huon pine more worthy of preservation than a tussock
of grass? Most people will say that it is, but such a judgment seems to have more to do with our feelings of awe for the age,
size and beauty of the tree, or with the length of time it would take to replace it, than with our perception of some intrinsic
value in the flourishing of an old tree that is not possessed by a young grass tussock.
If we cease talking in terms of sentience, the boundary between living and inanimate natural objects becomes more difficult
to defend. Would it really be worse to cut down an old tree than to destroy a beautiful stalactite that has taken even longer
to grow? On what grounds could such a judgment be made?
Probably the best known defence of an ethic that extends to all living things is that of the remarkable theologian, philosopher,
musician, physician and humanitarian, Albert Schweitzer. In 1952, Schweitzer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian
work in founding a hospital in Gabon and for his ethic of ‘reverence for life’. Though that phrase is often quoted, the arguments
he offered in
support of such a position are less well-known. Here is one of the few passages in which he defended his ethic:
True philosophy must commence with the most immediate and comprehensive facts of consciousness. And this may be formulated
as follows: ‘I am life which wills to live, and I exist in the midst of life which wills to live’…Just as in my own will-to-live
there is a yearning for more life, and for that mysterious exaltation of the will which is called pleasure, and terror in
face of annihilation and that injury to the will-to-live which is called pain; so the same obtains in all the will-to-live
around me, equally whether it can express itself to my comprehension or whether it remains unvoiced.
Ethics thus consists in this, that I experience the necessity of practising the same reverence for life toward all will-to-live,
as toward my own. Therein I have already the needed fundamental principle of morality. It is good to maintain and cherish
life; it is evil to destroy and to check life. A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help
all life which he is able to succour, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. To
him life as such is sacred. He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no
flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he walks. If he works by lamplight on a summer evening he prefers to keep
the window shut and to breathe stifling air, rather than to see insect after insect fall on his table with singed and sinking
wings.
The American philosopher Paul Taylor defended a similar view in his book Respect for Nature, arguing that every living thing is ‘pursuing its own good in its own unique way’. Once we see this, he claims, we can see
all living things ‘as we see ourselves’, and therefore ‘we are ready to place the same value on their existence as we do on
our own’.
It is not clear how we should interpret Schweitzer's position. The reference to the ice crystal is especially puzzling, for
an ice crystal is not alive at all. Does Schweitzer perhaps see any form of killing as a kind of vandalism, a pointless destruction
of something of value? Putting this possibility aside, however, the problem with the defences offered by both Schweitzer and
Taylor for their ethical views is that they use language metaphorically and then argue as if what they had said was literally
true.
We may often talk about plants ‘seeking’ water or light so that they can survive, and this way of thinking about plants makes
it easier to accept talk of their ‘will to live’ or of them ‘pursuing’ their own good. Once we stop to reflect on the fact
that plants are not conscious and cannot engage in any intentional behaviour, however, it is clear that all this language
is metaphorical; one might just as well say that a river is pursuing its own good and striving to reach the sea, or that the
‘good’ of a guided missile
is to blow up its target. It is misleading of Schweitzer to attempt to sway us towards an ethic of reverence for all life
by referring to ‘yearning’, ‘exaltation’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘terror’. Plants experience none of these.
Holmes Rolston, an American environmental philosopher, has objected to my comparison – which first appeared in the second
edition of this book – between the ‘seeking’ behaviour of a plant and a guided missile. He argues that when a missile closes
in on a target and blows it up, that may be good for the people who launched the missile, but it is not good for the missile
itself. The missile was designed and built for a purpose. With plants and other natural organisms, on the other hand, Rolston
writes:
Natural selection picks out whatever traits an organism has that are valuable to it, relative to its survival. When natural
selection has been at work gathering these traits into an organism, that organism is able to value on the basis of those traits.
It is a valuing organism, even if the organism is not a sentient valuer, much less a conscious evaluator. And those traits,
though picked out by natural selection, are innate in the organism, that is, stored in its genes. It is difficult to dissociate
the idea of value from natural selection.
Rolston fails to explain why natural selection gives rise to valuing in the organism, but human design and manufacture does
not. He must be aware that there is something odd about the idea of a valuer that is not sentient or conscious. In defence
of that view, he asks what he appears to think is a rhetorical question: ‘Why is the organism not valuing what it is making
resources of?’ But we can build solar-powered machines that turn their solar panels to the sun so as to get the most energy
for their batteries. Should we say that these devices are valuing the sunlight they use? If not, does the difference lie in
the fact that the plant's means of sending its roots out towards water are encoded in its genes, whereas the machine's means
of obtaining sunlight are encoded in its computer programs? Why would that make one a valuer and the other not?
There are important differences between living things and machines designed by humans. Nevertheless, in the case of both plants and machines, it is possible to give a purely physical explanation of what the organism
or machine is doing; and in the absence of consciousness, there is no good reason why we should have greater respect for the
physical processes that govern the growth and decay of living things than we have for those that govern non-living things.
This being so, it is at least not obvious why we should have greater reverence for a tree than for a stalactite, or for a
single-celled organism than for a mountain.
Deep Ecology
More than sixty years ago, the American ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote that there was a need for a ‘new ethic’, an ‘ethic dealing
with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it’. His proposed ‘land ethic’ would enlarge ‘the
boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land’. The rise of ecological
concern in the 1970s led to a revival of interest in this attitude. The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess wrote a brief but influential article distinguishing between ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ strands
in the ecological movement. Shallow ecological thinking was limited to the traditional moral framework: those who thought
in this way were anxious to avoid pollution to our water supply so that we could have safe water to drink, and they sought
to preserve wilderness so that people could continue to enjoy walking through it. Deep ecologists, on the other hand, wanted to preserve the integrity of the biosphere for its own sake, irrespective of the
possible benefits to humans that might flow from so doing. Subsequently, several other writers have attempted to develop some
form of ‘deep’ environmental theory.
Whereas the reverence for life ethic emphasises individual living organisms, proposals for deep ecology ethics tend to take
something larger as the object of value: species, ecological systems, and even the biosphere as a whole. Leopold summed up
the basis of his new Land Ethic thus: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the
biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’
Subsequently, Arne Naess and George Sessions, an American philosopher involved in the deep ecology movement, set out several
principles for a deep ecological ethic, beginning with the following:
1. The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent
value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes.
2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.
Although these principles refer only to life, in the same paper Naess and Sessions say that deep ecology uses the term ‘biosphere’
in a more
comprehensive way, to refer also to non-living things such as rivers (watersheds), landscapes and ecosystems.
Two Australians working at the deep end of environmental ethics, Richard Sylvan and Val Plumwood, extended their ethic beyond
living things, including in it an obligation ‘not to jeopardise the wellbeing of natural objects or systems without good reason’.
In the previous section, I quoted Paul Taylor's remark to the effect that we should be ready, not merely to respect every
living thing, but to place the same value on the life of every living thing as we place on our own. This is a common theme
among deep ecologists, often extended beyond living things. In Deep Ecology Bill Devall and George Sessions defend a form of ‘biocentric egalitarianism’:
The intuition of biocentric equality is that all things in the biosphere have an equal right to live and blossom and to reach
their own individual forms of unfolding and self-realization within the larger Self-realization. This basic intuition is that
all organisms and entities in the ecosphere, as parts of the interrelated whole, are equal in intrinsic worth.
If, as this quotation appears to suggest, this biocentric equality rests on a ‘basic intuition’, it is up against some very
strong intuitions that point in the opposite direction – for example, the intuition that the rights to ‘live and blossom’
of normal adult humans ought to be preferred over that of yeasts, and the rights of gorillas over those of grasses. If, on
the other hand, the point is that humans, gorillas, yeasts and grasses are all parts of an interrelated whole, then it can
still be asked how this establishes that they are equal in intrinsic worth. Is it because every living thing plays its role
in an ecosystem on which all depend for their survival? But, firstly, even if this showed that there is intrinsic worth in
micro-organisms and plants as a whole, it says nothing at all about the value of individual micro-organisms or plants, because
no individual is necessary for the survival of the ecosystem as a whole. Secondly, the fact that all organisms are part of
an interrelated whole does not suggest that they are all of intrinsic worth, let alone of equal intrinsic worth. They may
be of worth only because they are needed for the existence of the whole, and the whole may be of worth only because it supports
the existence of conscious beings.
The ethics of deep ecology thus fails to yield persuasive answers to questions about the value of the lives of individual
living beings. Perhaps, though, this is the wrong kind of question to ask. The science of ecology looks at systems rather
than individual organisms. In the same way, ecological ethics might be more plausible if it looks at the level of species
and
ecosystems rather than individual organisms.
Behind many attempts to derive values from ecological ethics at this level lies some form of holism – some sense that the
species or ecosystem is not just a collection of individuals but really an entity in its own right.
This holism is made explicit in Lawrence Johnson's
A Morally Deep World. Johnson is quite prepared to talk about the interests of a species, in a sense that is distinct from the sum of the interests
of each member of the species, and to argue that the interests of a species or an ecosystem ought to be taken into account,
alongside individual interests, in our moral deliberations.
In
The Ecological Self, Freya Mathews contends that any ‘self-realizing system’ has intrinsic value in that it seeks to maintain or preserve itself.
Living organisms are paradigm examples of self-realizing systems, but Mathews, like Johnson, includes in this category species
and ecosystems as holistic entities or selves with their own form of realization.
She even includes the entire global ecosystem, following James Lovelock in referring to it by the name of the Greek goddess
of the earth, Gaia. On this basis, she defends her own form of biocentric egalitarianism.
There is, of course, a real philosophical question about whether a species or an ecosystem can be considered as the sort of
individual that can have interests, or a ‘self’ to be realized; and even if it can, the deep ecology ethic will face problems
similar to those we identified in considering the idea of reverence for life. For it is necessary, not merely that trees, species and ecosystems can properly be said to have interests, but that they have
morally significant interests. If they are to be regarded as ‘selves’, it will need to be shown that the survival or realization of that kind of self has
moral value, independently of the value it has because of its importance in sustaining conscious life.
We saw in discussing the ethic of reverence for life that one way of establishing that an interest is morally significant
is to ask what it is like for the entity affected to have that interest unsatisfied. The same question can be asked about
self-realization: what is it like for the self to remain unrealized? Such questions yield intelligible answers when asked
of sentient beings but not when asked of trees, species or ecosystems.
The fact that, as James Lovelock points out in
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, the biosphere can respond to events in ways that resemble a self-maintaining system does not in itself show that the biosphere
consciously desires to maintain itself. Calling the global ecosystem by the name of a Greek goddess is a cute idea, but it
may not be the best way of helping us to think clearly about its nature.
Similarly, on a smaller scale, there is nothing that corresponds to what it feels like to be an ecosystem flooded by a
dam, because there is no such feeling. In this respect, trees, ecosystems and species are more like rocks than they are like
sentient beings;
so the divide between sentient and nonsentient creatures is to that extent a firmer basis for a morally important boundary
than the divide between living and non-living things, or between holistic entities and any other entities that we might not
regard as holistic. (Whatever these other entities could be: even a single atom is, when seen from the appropriate level,
a complex system that ‘seeks’ to maintain itself.)
This rejection of the ethical basis for a deep ecology ethic does not mean that the case for the preservation of wilderness
is not strong. All it means is that one kind of argument – the argument from the intrinsic value of the plants, species or
ecosystems – is, at best, problematic. Unless it can be placed on some other, firmer, footing, we should confine ourselves
to arguments based on the interests of sentient creatures – present and future, human and nonhuman. These arguments are quite
sufficient to show that, at least in a society where no one needs to destroy wilderness in order to obtain food for survival
or materials for shelter from the elements, the value of preserving the remaining significant areas of wilderness greatly
exceeds the economic values gained by its destruction.
The broad outlines of a truly environmental ethic are easy to discern. At its most fundamental level, such an ethic fosters
consideration for the interests of all sentient creatures, including subsequent generations stretching into the far future.
It is accompanied by an aesthetic of appreciation for wild places and unspoilt nature. At a more detailed level, applicable
to the lives of dwellers in cities and towns, it discourages large families. (Here, it forms a sharp contrast to some existing
ethical beliefs that are relics of an age in which the earth was far more lightly populated; it also offers a counterweight,
in practical terms, to the apparently repugnant implication of the ‘total’ version of utilitarianism discussed in Chapter
4.) An environmental ethic rejects the ideals of a materialist society in which success is gauged by the number of consumer
goods one can accumulate. Instead, it judges success in terms of the development of one's abilities and the achievement of
real fulfilment and satisfaction.
It promotes frugality and re-use, insofar as that is necessary for minimising the impact we have on the planet.
Thus, the various ‘green consumer’ guides and books about things we can do to save our planet – recycling
what we use and buying the most environmentally friendly products available – are part of the new ethic that is required.
An environmental ethic leads us to re-assess our notion of extravagance. In a world under environmental pressure, this concept
is not confined to chauffeured limousines and Dom Perignon champagne. Timber that has come from a rainforest is extravagant,
because the long-term value of the rainforest is far greater than the uses to which the timber is put. Disposable paper products
are extravagant if ancient hardwood forests are being converted into woodchips and sold to paper manufacturers. Motor sports
are extravagant, because we can enjoy races that do not require the consumption of fossil fuels and the emission of greenhouse
gases. Beef is extravagant because of the high methane emissions that are involved in its production, not to mention the waste
of most of the food value of the grain and soybeans that are fed to beef cattle.
In Britain during the Second World War, when fuel was scarce, posters asked: ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ The appeal
to national solidarity against a very visible and immediate danger was highly effective. The danger to our environment is
harder to see, but the need to cut out unnecessary journeys, and other forms of unnecessary consumption, is just as great.
The emphasis on frugality and a simple life does not mean that an environmental ethic frowns on pleasure, but that the pleasures
it values do not come from conspicuous consumption. They come, instead, from loving relationships; from being close to children
and friends; from conversation; from sports and recreations that are in harmony with our environment instead of harmful to
it; from food that is not based on the exploitation of sentient creatures and does not cost the earth; from creative activity
and work of all kinds; and (with due care so as not to ruin precisely what is valued) from appreciating the unspoilt places
in the world in which we live.