Every day people make choices that affect the natural world: what to eat, how to travel, where to build, what to throw away. Communities decide whether to drain a marsh, dam a river or protect a forest. Environmental ethics is the branch of philosophy that asks what we owe to the natural world and to the people, animals and living things that depend on it, and why.
A young field with old roots
People have reflected on humanity's place in nature for thousands of years, in religious texts, poetry and folk wisdom. As an academic field, though, environmental ethics took shape in the 1970s. Public concern had grown after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) described the harm that pesticides such as DDT were doing to birds and other wildlife, and after the first Earth Day in 1970. Philosophers began to ask whether traditional ethics, built mainly around duties between human beings, had the tools to handle these problems. The journal Environmental Ethics was founded in 1979.
Three big questions
- Who counts? A being has moral status when its interests or its good must be taken into account for its own sake, not only because of how it affects others. Everyone agrees that humans have moral status. The debate is about animals, plants, species, rivers and whole ecosystems.
- What has value, and what kind? Some things are valuable as a means to something else, the way a river is valuable for drinking water. Others may be valuable in themselves. Level 2 looks at this distinction closely.
- What should we do? Even if we agree on who counts and what matters, we still have to weigh competing claims: jobs against habitat, present needs against future ones, rich countries against poor ones.
Agents and patients
Philosophers distinguish moral agents, beings who can act morally and be held responsible for what they do, from moral patients, beings who can be wronged and whose interests matter even though they cannot be held responsible. A newborn baby is a moral patient but not yet a moral agent. Many environmental ethicists argue that animals, and perhaps other living things, are moral patients too. A wolf that kills a deer does nothing wrong, but a person who tortures a wolf might.
The expanding circle
Many writers describe moral history as an expanding circle: over centuries, many societies widened the group whose interests count, from family and tribe toward all of humanity. Environmental ethics asks whether the circle should widen further. Critics warn that the metaphor can make every widening look automatically right; each step, they say, needs its own argument.
The last man
In 1973 the Australian philosopher Richard Routley (later Richard Sylvan) offered a famous thought experiment. Imagine the last person alive after a world catastrophe sets out to destroy every remaining living thing, plant and animal, before he dies. No human will ever be harmed by this. Has he done anything wrong? Many people feel strongly that he has. If so, Routley argued, the value of nature cannot depend entirely on its usefulness to humans. Others reply that the intuition may simply reflect what the act says about the person's character.
Facts and values
Environmental debates mix scientific and ethical questions, and it helps to keep them apart. Science can tell us what is likely to happen if a wetland is drained: which species will decline, how flooding will change. Ethics asks what we ought to do given those facts. Good decisions need both: accurate evidence, and careful thought about whose interests count and how to weigh them. Many disagreements that look scientific are really about values, and the reverse is also true.
Worked example: the marsh and the mall
Imagine a town council considering a plan to drain a forty-acre marsh at the edge of town and build a shopping center. The developer promises 300 jobs and new tax revenue. A local birdwatching club objects. How would an environmental ethicist begin to sort out the debate?
First, separate facts from values. Some questions are scientific: How many bird species nest in the marsh? Does it absorb floodwater that would otherwise reach nearby homes? Will the jobs really appear? These can be answered, at least roughly, with evidence. Other questions are ethical: How much do the birds' lives matter compared with the jobs? Does the marsh have value beyond what it does for people?
Second, ask who counts. List everyone affected: the job seekers, the homeowners downstream, taxpayers, future residents of the town, the birds, frogs and fish, and perhaps the marsh itself as a living system. Different ethical views draw the line in different places, and that choice shapes the answer.
Third, notice the kinds of value involved. The marsh is useful for flood control, it is beautiful to many residents, and some will argue it is worth protecting for its own sake. The mall is useful for jobs and shopping.
Fourth, look for options. Perhaps the mall could be built on an empty lot elsewhere, or on part of the site while the wettest section is protected. Ethics is not only about choosing between two fixed choices; clear thinking about values often reveals new ones.
The rest of this course gives you tools for each of these steps.