Abstract
A number of areas of biology raise questions about what is of value in the natural environment and how we ought to behave towards it: conservation biology, environmental science, and ecology, to name a few. Based on my experience teaching students from these and similar majors, I argue that the field of environmental ethics has much to teach these students. They come to me with pent-up questions and a feeling that more is needed to fully engage in their subjects, and I believe some exposure to environmental ethics can help focus their interests and goals. I identify three primary areas in which environmental ethics can contribute to their education. The first is an examination of who (or what) should be considered to be part of our moral community (i.e., the community to whom we owe direct duties). Is it humans only? Or does it include all sentient life? Or all life? Or ecosystems considered holistically? Often, readings implicitly assume one or more of these answers; the goal is to make the student more sensitive to these implicit claims and to get them to think about the different reasons that support them. The second area, related to the first, is the application of the different answers concerning the extent of the ethical community to real environmental issues and problems. Students need to be aware of how the different answers concerning the moral community can imply conflicting answers for how we should act in certain cases and to think about ways to move toward conflict resolution. The third area in which environmental ethics can contribute is a more conceptual one, focusing on central concepts such as biodiversity, sustainability, species, and ecosystems. Exploring and evaluating various meanings of these terms will make students more reflective and thoughtful citizens and biologists, sensitive to the implications that different conceptual choices make.
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- 1.
In some ways, environmental ethics is a subdiscipline of ethics, and in other ways it is a subdiscipline of the philosophy of biology, but it might also simply be considered a discipline unto itself.
- 2.
- 3.
Here I describe what has come to be known as “act utilitarianism.” I will leave off discussion of other forms of utilitarianism, such as “rule utilitarianism.”
- 4.
Here I consider only the ethical weight of pain itself and not any other possible downstream consequences of that pain.
- 5.
This is known as the Categorical Imperative; there are other formulations, but again, I focus on the one that is most relevant for environmental ethics.
- 6.
Or by making claims that humans feel greater pain and pleasure than other species – but those claims are difficult to substantiate, and do not seem to be true in all cases. It would be hard to show, for example, that one’s pleasure in eating chicken outweighs the suffering of a chicken in a factory farm.
- 7.
I will use the term “sentience” (or “sentient”) to refer to the capacity for suffering and enjoyment, although the reader should be aware that different authors use this term differently.
- 8.
The application of Singer’s views and the other ethical views described in this section to various environmental challenges will be discussed in further detail in Sect. 3 below.
- 9.
Or, at least the most important interests of humans. Of course, determining what those are is a non-trivial matter and is bound to be controversial.
- 10.
The Dust Bowl was a phenomenon that occurred in the 1930s in the south-central plains of the United States. After decades of poor farming practices that destroyed the grasses protecting the soil, an extended drought hit the region, leading to massive dust storms and consequent loss of topsoil. Not much grew in the area for about a decade.
- 11.
Here one might worry about what ecocentrism is committed to with respect to “natural” (as opposed to human-caused) extinctions. By my reading, the cause of the extinction is not relevant, but rather, whether the extinction threatens the ecosystem of which the organism is a part. And here, I think that Leopold’s message is that we should generally err on the side of caution and assume that the organism in question is important to the ecosystem, given our ignorance of the interdependencies between organisms. Also, given widespread human-caused global changes such as global warming, it would be hard to say that humans did not have a hand in any given extinction.
- 12.
Although I think the death of stability models in ecology can be exaggerated, it is certainly worth thinking about how we ought to behave towards ecosystems that are not naturally stable. I leave the empirical question of what percentage of ecosystems are best characterized in terms of stability models and what percentage are best characterized in terms of instability models to ecologists.
- 13.
Indeed, what does ecocentrism tell us about the ethics of lying? What does Kantian ethics tell us about the ethics of siting a power plant in the habitat of an endangered species versus a non-endangered one? What does utilitarian ethics tell us about an invasive plant species that is replacing the native ones (if, for example, it turned out that the effects on sentient creatures were negligible)? It seems as though there are questions on which each ethical theory will simply be silent and thus fail to provide any insight or guide for our behavior.
- 14.
My discussion of this case relies heavily on “Case 25” of Patrick Derr and Edward McNamara’s 2003 Case Studies in Environmental Ethics, a book I recommend highly as a source of diverse case studies to prompt discussion and thought.
- 15.
However, an animal-centric Kantian ethic implies that killing the pigs in order to preserve the ecosystem would never be justified; non-lethal means of controlling the pigs would have to be found. Disseminating birth control to the pigs might be one such means.
- 16.
My discussion of this case relies on “Case 16” in Derr and McNamara (2003).
- 17.
Again, as Marietta emphasizes, such decisions should not be made in the abstract.
- 18.
My discussion of this case relies on Peck (2009).
- 19.
As Peck (2009) argues.
- 20.
Biologists who study microbial life, for example, do not tend to endorse the biological species concept (see Bourrat et al. this volume); for one, some microbes do not reproduce sexually and so the biological species concept seems inapplicable to them.
- 21.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to multiple classes of environmental ethics undergraduates at CSU East Bay and UC Davis, for helping to shape my view of what the interesting and important issues in environmental ethics are. Thanks also to my 2012 graduate seminar at UC Davis for an enlightening quarter discussing the concepts of “biodiversity” and “sustainability.” Finally, thanks to Kostas Kampourakis and James Justus for extremely helpful referee comments.
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Millstein, R.L. (2013). Environmental Ethics. In: Kampourakis, K. (eds) The Philosophy of Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6537-5_31
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