## 1. Introduction: The Challenge of Environmental Ethics



Suppose putting out natural fires, culling feral animals or removing
some individual members of overpopulated species is necessary for the
protection of the integrity of a certain ecosystem. Will these actions
be morally permissible or even required? Is it morally acceptable for
farmers in non-industrial countries to practise slash and burn
techniques to clear areas for agriculture? Consider a mining company
which has performed open pit mining in some previously unspoiled area.
Does the company have a moral obligation to restore the landform and
surface ecology? And what is the value of a humanly restored
environment compared with the originally natural environment? Many
people think that it is morally wrong for human beings to pollute and
destroy parts of the natural environment and to consume a huge
proportion of the planet's natural resources. If that is wrong,
is it simply because a sustainable environment is essential to human
existence and well-being? Or is such behaviour also wrong because the
natural environment and/or its various contents have certain values in
their own right so that these values ought to be respected and
protected in any case? These are among the questions investigated by
environmental ethics. Some of them are specific questions faced by
individuals in particular circumstances, while others are more global
questions faced by groups and communities. Yet others are more
abstract questions concerning the value and moral standing of the
natural environment and its non-human components.



In the literature on environmental ethics the distinction between
*instrumental value* and
 *intrinsic value*
 (in the sense of "non-instrumental value") is of
considerable importance. The former is the value of things as
*means* to further some other ends, whereas the latter is the
value of things as *ends in themselves* regardless of whether
they are also useful as means to other ends. For instance, certain
fruits have instrumental value for bats who feed on them, since
feeding on the fruits is a means to survival for the bats. However, it
is not widely agreed that fruits have value as ends in themselves. We
can likewise think of a person who teaches others as having
instrumental value for those who want to acquire knowledge. Yet, in
addition to any such value, it is normally said that a person, as a
person, has intrinsic value, i.e., value in their own right
independently of their prospects for serving the ends of others. For
another example, a certain wild plant may have instrumental value
because it provides the ingredients for some medicine or as an
aesthetic object for human observers. But if the plant also has some
value in itself independently of its prospects for furthering some
other ends such as human health, or the pleasure from aesthetic
experience, then the plant also has intrinsic value. Because the
intrinsically valuable is that which is good as an end in itself, it
is commonly agreed that something's possession of intrinsic
value generates a prima facie direct moral duty on the part of moral
agents to protect it or at least refrain from damaging it (see
O'Neil 1992 and Jamieson 2002 for detailed accounts of intrinsic
value).



Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, are
*anthropocentric* or human-centered in that either they assign
intrinsic value to human beings alone (i.e., what we might call
anthropocentric in a *strong* sense) or they assign a
significantly greater amount of intrinsic value to human beings than
to any non-human things such that the protection or promotion of human
interests or well-being at the expense of non-human things turns out
to be nearly always justified (i.e., what we might call
anthropocentric in a *weak* sense). For example, Aristotle
(*Politics*, Bk. 1, Ch. 8) apparently maintains that
"nature has made all things specifically for the sake of
man". Such purposive or teleological thinking may encourage the
belief that the value of non-human things in nature is merely
instrumental. It is difficult for anthropocentric positions to
articulate what is wrong with the cruel treatment of non-human
animals, except to the extent that such treatment may lead to bad
consequences for human beings. Immanuel Kant ("Duties to Animals
and Spirits", in *Lectures on Ethics*), for instance,
suggests that cruelty towards a dog might encourage a person to
develop a character which would be desensitized to cruelty towards
humans. From this standpoint, cruelty towards non-human animals would
be instrumentally, rather than intrinsically, wrong. Likewise,
anthropocentrism often recognizes some non-intrinsic wrongness of
anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) environmental devastation. Such
destruction might damage the well-being of human beings now and in the
future, since our very existence and well-being is essentially
dependent on a sustainable environment. This argument was made in the
previous century (see Passmore 1974; Bookchin 1990; Norton *et
al*. (eds.) 1995), and seems subsequently to have garnered wide
public support (see the results of surveys in Pew 2018).



When environmental ethics emerged as a new sub-discipline of
philosophy in the early 1970s, it did so by posing a challenge to
traditional anthropocentrism. In the first place, it questioned the
assumed moral superiority of human beings to members of other species
on earth. In the second place, it investigated the possibility of
rational arguments for assigning intrinsic value to the natural
environment and its non-human contents. It should be noted, however,
that some theorists working in the field see no need to develop new,
non-anthropocentric theories. Instead, they advocate what may be
called *enlightened* anthropocentrism (or, perhaps more
appropriately called, *prudential* anthropocentrism). Briefly,
this is the view that all the moral duties we have towards the
environment are derived from our direct duties to its human
inhabitants. The practical purpose of environmental ethics, they
maintain, is to provide moral grounds for social policies aimed at
protecting the earth's environment and remedying environmental
degradation. Enlightened anthropocentrism, they argue, is sufficient
for that practical purpose, and perhaps even more effective in
delivering pragmatic outcomes, in terms of policy-making, than
non-anthropocentric theories given the theoretical burden on the
latter to provide sound arguments for its more radical view that the
non-human environment has intrinsic value (cf. Norton 1991, de Shalit
1994, Light and Katz 1996). Furthermore, some prudential
anthropocentrists may hold what might be called *cynical*
anthropocentrism, which says that we have a higher-level
anthropocentric reason to be non-anthropocentric in our day-to-day
thinking. Suppose that a day-to-day non-anthropocentrist tends to act
more benignly towards the non-human environment on which human
well-being depends. This would provide reason for encouraging
non-anthropocentric thinking, even to those who find the idea of
non-anthropocentric intrinsic value hard to swallow. In order for such
a strategy to be effective one may need to hide one's cynical
anthropocentrism from others and even from oneself. The position can
be structurally compared to some indirect form of
 consequentialism
 and may attract parallel critiques (see
 Henry Sidgwick
 on utilitarianism and esoteric morality, and
 Bernard Williams
 on indirect utilitarianism).


## 2. The Development of Environmental Ethics



Although nature was the focus of much nineteenth and twentieth century
philosophy, contemporary environmental ethics only emerged as an
academic discipline in the 1970s. The questioning and rethinking of
the relationship of human beings with the natural environment over the
last thirty years reflected an already widespread perception in the
1960s that the late twentieth century faced a human population
explosion as part of a serious environmental crisis. Among the
accessible work that drew attention to a sense of crisis was Rachel
Carson's *Silent Spring* (1963), which consisted of a
number of essays earlier published in the *New Yorker* magazine
detailing how pesticides such as DDT, aldrin and dieldrin concentrated
through the food web. Commercial farming practices using these
chemicals to maximize crop yields and profits, Carson speculates, are
capable of impacting simultaneously on environmental and public
health. Their use, she claims, can have the side effects of killing
other living things (besides the targeted insects) and causing human
disease. While Carson correctly fears that over-use of pesticides may
lead to increases in some resistant insect species, the
intensification of agriculture, land-clearing and massive use of
neonicotonoid pesticides has subsequently contributed to a situation
in which, according to some reviews, nearly half of insect species are
threatened with extinction (Sanchez-Bayo and Wickhuys 2019, and
compare van der Sluijs and Vaage 2016, Komonen, Halme and Kotiaho
2019). Declines in insect populations not only threaten pollination of
plant species, but may also be responsible for huge declines in some
bird populations (Goulson 2021) and appear to go hand in hand with
cascading extinctions across ecosystems worldwide (Kehoe, Frago and
Sanders 2021).



In a much cited essay (White 1967) on the historical roots of the
environmental crisis, historian Lynn White argued that the main
strands of Judeo-Christian thinking had encouraged the
overexploitation of nature by maintaining the superiority of humans
over all other forms of life on earth, and by depicting all of nature
as created for the use of humans. White's thesis was widely
discussed in theology, history, and has been subject to some
sociological testing as well as being regularly discussed by
philosophers (see Whitney 1993, Attfield 2001). Central to the
rationale for his thesis were the works of the Church Fathers and The
Bible itself, supporting the anthropocentric perspective that humans
are the only things on Earth that matter in themselves. Consequently,
they may utilize and consume everything else to their advantage
without any injustice. For example, *Genesis* 1: 27-8
states: "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 unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the
earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over fish of the sea, and over
fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the
earth." Likewise, Thomas Aquinas (*Summa Contra
Gentiles*, Bk. 3, Pt 2, Ch 112) argued that non-human animals are
"ordered to man's use". According to White, the
Judeo-Christian idea that humans are created in the image of the
transcendent supernatural God, who is radically separate from nature,
also by extension radically separates humans themselves from nature.
This ideology further opened the way for untrammeled exploitation of
nature. Modern Western science itself, White argued, was "cast
in the matrix of Christian theology" so that it too inherited
the "orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature" (White
1967: 1207). Clearly, without technology and science, the
environmental extremes to which we are now exposed would probably not
be realized. The point of White's thesis, however, is that given
the modern form of science and technology, Judeo-Christianity itself
provides the original deep-seated drive to unlimited exploitation of
nature. Nevertheless, White argued that some minority traditions
within Christianity (e.g., the views of St. Francis) might provide an
antidote to the "arrogance" of a mainstream tradition
steeped in anthropocentrism. This sentiment is echoed in later
Christian writings on attitudes to nature (see for example Berry 2018,
chs 10, 11, and compare Zaheva and Szasz 2015).



Around the same time, the Stanford ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich
warned in *The Population Bomb* (Ehrlich 1968) that the growth
of human population threatened the viability of planetary life-support
systems. The sense of environmental crisis stimulated by those and
other popular works was intensified by NASA's production and
wide dissemination of a particularly potent image of Earth from space
taken at Christmas 1968 and featured in the *Scientific
American* in September 1970. Here, plain to see, was a living,
shining planet voyaging through space and shared by all of humanity, a
precious vessel vulnerable to pollution and to the overuse of its
limited capacities. In 1972 a team of researchers at MIT led by Donella
Meadows published the *Limits to Growth* study, a work that
summed up in many ways the emerging concerns of the previous decade
and the sense of vulnerability triggered by the view of the earth from
space. In the commentary to the study, the researchers wrote:



> 
> We affirm finally that any deliberate attempt to reach a rational and
> enduring state of equilibrium by planned measures, rather than by
> chance or catastrophe, must ultimately be founded on a basic change of
> values and goals at individual, national and world levels. (Meadows et
> al. 1972: 195)
> 



The call for a "basic change of values" in connection to
the environment (a call that could be interpreted in terms of either
instrumental or intrinsic values) reflected a need for the development
of environmental ethics as a new sub-discipline of philosophy. The aim
of facing up to the challenge of limited resources was fostered
subsequently by studies of the growing human "ecological
footprint" on the earth (Rees 1992, Wackernagel *et al*.
2018) and by the exploration of "planetary boundaries" and
the concept of a "safe operating space for humanity"
(Rokstrom *et al*. 2009, Biermann and Kim 2020).



The new field emerged almost simultaneously in three
countries--the United States, Australia, and Norway. In the first
two of these countries, direction and inspiration largely came from
the earlier twentieth century American literature of the environment.
For instance, the Scottish emigrant John Muir (founder of the Sierra
Club and "father of American conservation") and
subsequently the forester Aldo Leopold had advocated an appreciation
and conservation of things "natural, wild and free". Their
concerns were motivated by a combination of ethical and aesthetic
responses to nature as well as a rejection of crudely economic
approaches to the value of natural objects (a historical survey of the
confrontation between Muir's reverentialism and the
human-centred conservationism of Gifford Pinchot (one of the major
influences on the development of the US Forest Service) is provided in
Norton 1991; also see Cohen 1984 and Nash (ed) 1990). Leopold's
*A Sand County Almanac* (1949), in particular, advocated the
adoption of a "land ethic":



> 
> That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that
> land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. (Leopold
> 1949: vii-ix)
> 
> 
> 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. (Leopold 1949: 224-5)
> 
> 
> 



However, Leopold himself provided no systematic ethical theory or
framework to support these ethical ideas concerning the environment.
His views therefore presented a challenge and opportunity for moral
theorists: could some ethical theory be devised to justify the
injunction to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the
biosphere?



The land ethic sketched by Leopold, attempting to extend our moral
concern to cover the natural environment and its non-human contents,
was drawn on explicitly by the Australian philosopher Richard Routley
(later Sylvan). According to Routley (1973 (cf. Routley and Routley
1980)), the anthropocentrism imbedded in what he called the
"dominant western view", or "the western
superethic", is in effect "human chauvinism". This
view, he argued, is just another form of class chauvinism, which is
simply based on blind class "loyalty" or prejudice, and
unjustifiably discriminates against those outside the privileged
class. Echoing the plot of a popular movie some three years earlier
(see Lo and Brennan 2013), Routley speculates in his "last
man" (and "last people") arguments about a
hypothetical situation in which the last person, surviving a world
catastrophe, acts to ensure the elimination of all other living things
and the last people set about destroying forests and ecosystems after
their demise. From the human-chauvinistic (or absolutely
anthropocentric) perspective, the last person would do nothing morally
wrong, since his or her destructive act in question would not cause
any damage to the interests and well-being of humans, who would by
then have disappeared. Nevertheless, Routley points out that there is
a moral intuition that the imagined last acts would be morally wrong.
An explanation for this judgment, he argues, is that those non-human
objects in the environment, whose destruction is ensured by the last
person or last people, have intrinsic value, a kind of value
independent of their usefulness for humans. From his critique, Routley
concluded that the main approaches in traditional western moral
thinking were unable to allow the recognition that natural things have
intrinsic value, and that the tradition required overhaul of a
significant kind.



Leopold's idea that the "land" as a whole is an
object of our moral concern also stimulated writers to argue for
certain moral obligations toward ecological wholes, such as species,
communities, and ecosystems, not just their individual constituents.
The U.S.-based theologian and environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston
III, for instance, argued that species protection was a moral duty
(Rolston 1975). It would be wrong, he maintained, to eliminate a rare
butterfly species simply to increase the monetary value of specimens
already held by collectors. Like Routley's "last
man" arguments, Rolston's example is meant to draw
attention to a kind of action that seems morally dubious and yet is
not clearly ruled out or condemned by traditional anthropocentric
ethical views. Species, Rolston went on to argue, are intrinsically
valuable and are usually more valuable than individual specimens,
since the loss of a species is a loss of genetic possibilities and the
deliberate destruction of a species would show disrespect for the very
biological processes which make possible the emergence of individual
living things (also see Rolston 1989, Ch 10). Natural processes
deserve respect, according to Rolston's quasi-religious
perspective, because they constitute a nature (or God) which is itself
intrinsically valuable (or sacred).



Meanwhile, the work of Christopher Stone (a professor of law at the
University of Southern California) had become widely discussed. Stone
(1972) proposes that trees and other natural objects should have at
least the same standing in law as corporations. This suggestion was
inspired by a particular case in which the Sierra Club had mounted a
challenge against the permit granted by the U.S. Forest Service to
Walt Disney Enterprises for surveys preparatory to the development of
the Mineral King Valley, which was at the time a relatively remote
game refuge, but not designated as a national park or protected
wilderness area. The Disney proposal was to develop a major resort
complex serving 14000 visitors daily to be accessed by a purpose-built
highway through Sequoia National Park. The Sierra Club, as a body with
a general concern for wilderness conservation, challenged the
development on the grounds that the valley should be kept in its
original state for its own sake.



Stone reasoned that if trees, forests and mountains could be given
standing in law then they could be represented in their own right in
the courts by groups such as the Sierra Club. Moreover, like any other
*legal person*, these natural things could become beneficiaries
of compensation if it could be shown that they had suffered
compensatable injury through human activity. When the case went to the
U.S. Supreme Court, it was determined by a narrow majority that the
Sierra Club did not meet the condition for bringing a case to court,
for the Club was unable and unwilling to prove the likelihood of
injury to the interest of the Club or its members. In dissenting
minority judgments, however, justices Douglas, Blackmun and Brennan
mentioned Stone's argument: his proposal to give legal standing
to natural things, they said, would allow conservation interests,
community needs and business interests to be represented, debated and
settled in court. Stone's work was later cited in the successful
arguments to grant personhood to rivers and other natural features in
various parts of the world. In some of these cases, Stone's
arguments--along with those of Arne Naess (see
below)--have been said to provide analogues to indigenous
understandings of the intrinsic value of the land and the
interconnections of such understandings with human actions and
ancestral spirituality (Morris and Ruru 2010, Kramm 2020). Similar
suggestions have also been made about Leopold's work, but such
claims need to be interpreted with caution (White 2015).



Reacting to Stone's proposal, Joel Feinberg (1974) raised a
serious problem. Only items that have interests, Feinberg argued, can
be regarded as having legal standing and, likewise, moral standing.
For it is interests which are capable of being represented in legal
proceedings and moral debates. This same point would also seem to
apply to political debates. For instance, the movement for
"animal liberation", which also emerged strongly in the
1970s, can be thought of as a political movement aimed at representing
the previously neglected interests of some animals (see Regan and
Singer (eds.) 1976, Clark 1977, and also the entry on
 the moral status of animals).
 Granted that some animals have interests that can be represented in
this way, would it also make sense to speak of trees, forests, rivers,
barnacles, or termites as having interests of a morally relevant kind?
This issue was hotly contested in the years that followed. Meanwhile,
John Passmore (1974) argued, like White, that the Judeo-Christian
tradition of thought about nature, despite being predominantly
"despotic", contained resources for regarding humans as
"stewards" or "perfectors" of God's
creation. Skeptical of the prospects for any radically new ethic,
Passmore cautioned that traditions of thought could not be abruptly
overhauled. Any change in attitudes to our natural surroundings which
stood the chance of widespread acceptance, he argued, would have to
resonate and have some continuities with the very tradition which had
legitimized our destructive practices.



In sum, then, Leopold's land ethic, the historical analyses of
White and Passmore, the pioneering work of Routley, Stone and Rolston,
and the warnings of scientists, had by the late 1970s focused the
attention of philosophers and political theorists firmly on the
environment. The confluence of ethical, political and legal debates
about the environment, the emergence of philosophies to underpin
animal rights activism and the puzzles over whether an environmental
ethic would be something new rather than a modification or extension
of existing ethical theories were reflected in wider social and
political movements. The rise of environmental or "green"
parties in Europe in the 1980s was accompanied by almost immediate
schisms between groups known as "realists" versus
"fundamentalists" (see Dobson 1990). The
"realists" stood for reform environmentalism, working with
business and government to soften the impact of pollution and resource
depletion especially on fragile ecosystems or endangered species. The
"fundies" argued for radical change, the setting of
stringent new priorities, and even the overthrow of capitalism and
liberal individualism, which were taken as the major ideological
causes of anthropogenic environmental devastation. It is not clear,
however, that collectivist or communist countries do particularly well
in terms of their environmental record (see Dominick 1998). At the
same time, the rise of "environmental authoritarianism" in
some non-democratic countries appears to show that liberal democracies
may not have a monopoly on effective action to support sustainability
and biodiversity (Beeson 2010, Shahar 2015).



Underlying these political disagreements was the distinction between
"shallow" and "deep" environmental movements,
a distinction introduced in the early 1970s by another major influence
on contemporary environmental ethics, the Norwegian philosopher and
climber Arne Naess. Since the work of Naess has been
significant in environmental politics, the discussion of his position
is given in a separate section below.


## 3. Environmental Ethics and Politics


### 3.1 Deep Ecology



"Deep ecology" was born in Scandinavia, the result of
discussions between Naess and his colleagues Sigmund
Kvaloy and Nils Faarlund (see Naess 1973 and 1989; also
see Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999 for a historical survey and
commentary on the development of deep ecology). All three shared a
passion for the great mountains. On a visit to the Himalayas, they
became impressed with aspects of "Sherpa culture"
particularly when they found that their Sherpa guides regarded certain
mountains as sacred and accordingly would not venture onto them.
Subsequently, Naess formulated a position which extended the
reverence the three Norwegians and the Sherpas felt for mountains to
other natural things in general.



The "shallow ecology movement", as Naess (1973) calls
it, is the "fight against pollution and resource
depletion", the central objective of which is "the health
and affluence of people in the developed countries." The
"deep ecology movement", in contrast, endorses
"biospheric egalitarianism", the view that all living
things are alike in having value in their own right, independent of
their usefulness to others. The deep ecologist respects this intrinsic
value, taking care, for example, when walking on the mountainside not
to cause unnecessary damage to the plants.



Inspired by Spinoza's metaphysics, another key feature of
Naess's deep ecology is the rejection of atomistic
individualism. The idea that a human being is such an individual
possessing a separate essence, Naess argues, radically separates
the human self from the rest of the world. To make such a separation
not only leads to selfishness towards other people, but also induces
human selfishness towards nature. As a counter to egoism at both the
individual and species level, Naess proposes an alternative
*relational* "total-field image" of the world.
According to this relationalism, organisms (human or otherwise) are
best understood as "knots" in the biospherical net. The
identity of a living thing is essentially constituted by its relations
to other things in the world, especially its ecological relations to
other living things. If people conceptualise themselves and the world
in relational terms, the deep ecologists argue, then people will take
better care of nature and the world in general.



As developed by Naess and others, the position also came to focus
on the possibility of the *identification* of the human ego
with nature. The idea is, briefly, that by identifying with nature I
can enlarge the boundaries of the self beyond my skin. My
larger--ecological--Self (the capital "S"
emphasizes that I am something larger than my body and consciousness),
deserves respect as well. To respect and to care for my Self is also
to respect and to care for the natural environment, which is actually
part of me and with which I should identify. Naess quotes the
example of Saami people and their identification with the rivers on
which they depend for sustenance. Recognition of such identification
has underpinned the establishment in New Zealand of legal personhood
for some rivers and other natural areas (Kramm 2020).
"Self-realization" is thus the realization of a wider
ecological Self. Naess maintains that the deep satisfaction that
we receive from identification with nature and close partnership with
other forms of life in nature contributes significantly to our life
quality. (One historical antecedent to this kind of nature
spiritualism is the romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as expressed
in his last work, the *Reveries of the Solitary Walker*)



When Naess's view crossed the Atlantic, it was sometimes
merged with ideas emerging from Leopold's land ethic (see Devall
and Sessions 1985; also see Sessions (ed) 1995). But
Naess--wary of the supposed totalitarian political
implications of Leopold's position that individual interests and
well-being should be subordinated to the holistic good of the
earth's biotic community (see section 4 below)--took care
to distance himself from advocating any sort of "land
ethic". (See Anker 1999 for cautions on interpreting
Naess's relationalism as an endorsement of the kind of
holism displayed in the land ethic; cf. Grey 1993, Taylor and
Zimmerman 2005). Some critics have argued that Naess's deep
ecology is no more than an extended social-democratic version of
utilitarianism, which counts human interests in the same calculation
alongside the interests of all natural things (e.g., trees, wolves,
bears, rivers, forests and mountains) in the natural environment (see
Witoszek 1997). However, Naess failed to explain in any detail
how to make sense of the idea that oysters or barnacles, termites or
bacteria could have interests of any morally relevant sort at all.
Without an account of this, Naess's early "biospheric
egalitarianism"--that all living things whatsoever had a
similar right to live and flourish--was an indeterminate
principle in practical terms. It also remains unclear in what sense
rivers, mountains and forests can be regarded as possessors of any
kind of interests. This is an issue on which Naess always
remained elusive.



Biospheric egalitarianism was modified in the 1980s to the weaker
claim that the flourishing of both human and non-human life has value
in itself, without any commitment to these values being equal. At the
same time, Naess declared that his own favoured ecological
philosophy--"Ecosophy T", as he called it after his
Tvergastein mountain cabin--was only one of several possible
foundations for an environmental ethic. Deep ecology ceased to be a
specific doctrine, but instead became a "platform" of
eight simple points on which Naess hoped all deep green thinkers
could agree. The platform was conceived as establishing a middle
ground, between underlying orientations, whether indigenous,
Christian, Buddhist, Daoist, process philosophy, or whatever, and the
practical principles for action in specific situations, principles
generated from the underlying philosophies. Thus the deep ecological
movement became explicitly pluralist both morally and
epistemologically (see Brennan 1999; c.f. Light 1996, Akamani
2020).



While Naess's Ecosophy T sees human Self-realization as a
solution to the environmental crises resulting from human selfishness
and exploitation of nature, some of the followers of the deep ecology
platform in the United States and Australia further argue that the
expansion of the human self to include non-human nature is supported
by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which is said to
have dissolved the boundaries between the observer and the observed
(see Fox 1984, 1990, and Devall and Sessions 1985; cf. Callicott
1985). These "relationalist" developments of deep ecology
are, however, criticized by some feminist theorists. The idea of
nature as part of oneself, they argue, could justify the continued
exploitation of nature instead. For one is presumably more entitled to
treat oneself in whatever ways one likes than to treat another
independent agent in whatever ways one likes. According to these
feminist critics, the deep ecological theory of the "expanded
self" is in effect a disguised form of human colonialism, unable
to give nature its due as a genuine "other" independent of
human interest and purposes (see Plumwood 1993, Ch. 7, 1999, and
Warren 1999).



Meanwhile, other critics accuse deep ecology of being elitist in its
attempts to preserve wilderness experiences for only a select group of
economically and socio-politically well-off people. Ramachandra Guha
(1989, 1999) for instance, depicts the activities of many
western-based conservation groups as a new form of cultural
imperialism, aimed at securing converts to conservationism (cf.
Bookchin 1987 and Brennan 1998a). "Green missionaries", as
Guha calls them, represent a movement aimed at further dispossessing
the world's poor and indigenous people. "Putting deep
ecology in its place," he writes, "is to recognize that
the trends it derides as "shallow" ecology might in fact
be varieties of environmentalism that are more apposite, more
representative and more popular in the countries of the South."
Although Naess himself repudiates suggestions that deep ecology
is committed to any form of imperialism (see Witoszek and Brennan
(eds.) 1999, Ch. 36-7 and 41), Guha's criticism raises
important questions about the application of deep ecological
principles in different social, economic and cultural contexts.
Finally, in other critiques, deep ecology is portrayed as having an
inconsistent utopian vision (see Anker and Witoszek 1998).


### 3.2 Feminism and the Environment



Broadly speaking, a feminist issue is any that contributes in some way
to understanding the oppression of women. Feminist theories attempt to
analyze women's oppression, its causes and consequences, and
suggest strategies and directions for women's liberation. By the
mid 1970s, feminist writers had raised the issue of whether
patriarchal modes of thinking encouraged not only widespread
inferiorizing and colonizing of women, but also of people of colour,
animals and nature. Sheila Collins (1974), for instance, argued that
male-dominated culture or patriarchy is supported by four interlocking
pillars: sexism, racism, class exploitation, and ecological
destruction.



Emphasizing the importance of feminism to the environmental movement
and various other liberation movements, some writers, such as Ynestra
King (1989a and 1989b), argue that the domination of women by men is
historically the original form of domination in human society, from
which all other hierarchies--of rank, class, and political
power--flow. For instance, human exploitation of nature may be
seen as a manifestation and extension of the oppression of women, in
that it is the result of associating nature with the female, which had
been already inferiorized and oppressed by the male-dominating
culture. But within the plurality of feminist positions, other
writers, such as Val Plumwood (1993), understand the oppression of
women as only one of the many parallel forms of oppression sharing and
supported by a common ideological structure, in which one party (the
colonizer, whether male, white or human) uses a number of conceptual
and rhetorical devices to privilege its interests over that of the
other party (the colonized: whether female, people of colour, or
animals). Facilitated by a common structure, seemingly diverse forms
of oppression can mutually reinforce each other (Warren 1987, 1990,
1994, Cheney 1989, and Plumwood 1993).



Not all feminist theorists would call that common underlying
oppressive structure "androcentric" or
"patriarchal". But it is generally agreed that core
features of the structure include dichotomies, hierarchical thinking,
and a "logic of domination", which are typical of, if not
essential to, male-chauvinism. These patterns of thinking and
conceptualizing the world, many feminist theorists argue, also nourish
and sustain other forms of chauvinism including human-chauvinism
(i.e., anthropocentrism), which is responsible for much human
exploitation of, and destructiveness towards, nature. Writers comment
on dichotomous forms of thinking which depict the world in polar
opposite terms, such as male/female, masculinity/femininity,
reason/emotion, freedom/necessity, active/passive, mind/body,
pure/soiled, white/coloured, civilized/primitive,
transcendent/immanent, human/animal, culture/nature. When these
dichotomies involve hierarchy and domination they are often labelled
"dualisms". Under the influence of such dualisms all the first items
in these contrasting pairs are assimilated with each other, and all
the second items are likewise linked with each other. For example, the
male is seen to be associated with the rational, active, creative,
Cartesian human mind, and civilized, orderly, transcendent culture;
whereas the female is regarded as tied to the emotional, passive,
determined animal body, and primitive, disorderly, immanent nature.
These interlocking dualisms are not just descriptive dichotomies,
according to the feminists, but involve a prescriptive privileging of
one side of the opposed items over the other. Dualism confers
superiority to everything on the male side, but inferiority to
everything on the female side. The "logic of domination"
then dictates that those on the superior side (e.g., men, rational
beings, humans) are morally entitled to dominate and utilize those on
the inferior side (e.g., women, beings lacking in rationality,
non-humans) as mere means.



The problem with dualistic modes of thinking, however, is not just
that they are epistemically unreliable. It is not just that the
dominating party often falsely sees the dominated party as lacking (or
possessing) the allegedly superior (or inferior) qualities, or that
the dominated party often internalizes false stereotypes of itself
given by its oppressors, or that stereotypical thinking often
overlooks salient and important differences among individuals. More
important, according to feminist analyses, the very premise of
prescriptive dualism--the valuing of attributes of one polarized
side and the devaluing of those of the other, the idea that domination
and oppression can be justified by appealing to attributes like
masculinity, rationality, being civilized or developed, etc.--is
itself problematic.



Feminism represents a radical challenge for environmental thinking,
politics, and traditional social ethical perspectives. It promises to
link environmental questions with wider social problems concerning
various kinds of discrimination and exploitation, and fundamental
investigations of human psychology. However, whether there are
conceptual, causal or merely contingent connections among the
different forms of oppression and liberation remains a contested issue
(see Green 1994). The term "ecofeminism" (first coined by
Francoise d'Eaubonne in 1974) or "ecological
feminism" was for a time generally applied to any view that
combines environmental advocacy with feminist analysis. However,
because of the varieties of, and disagreements among, feminist
theories, the label may be too wide to be informative (see the entry
on
 feminist environmental philosophy).


### 3.3 Disenchantment and the New Animism



An often overlooked source of ecological ideas is the work of the
neo-Marxist Frankfurt School of critical theory founded by Max
Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969). While
classical Marxists regard nature as a resource to be transformed by
human labour and utilized for human purposes, Horkheimer and Adorno
saw Marx himself as representative of the problem of "human
alienation". At the root of this alienation, they argue, is a
narrow positivist conception of rationality--which sees
rationality as an instrument for pursuing progress, power and
technological control, and takes observation, measurement and the
application of purely quantitative methods to be capable of solving
all problems. Such a positivistic view of science combines determinism
with optimism. Natural processes as well as human activities are seen
to be predictable and manipulable. Nature (and, likewise, human
nature) is no longer mysterious, uncontrollable, or fearsome. Instead,
it is reduced to an object strictly governed by natural laws, which
therefore can be studied, known, and employed to our benefit. By
promising limitless knowledge and power, the positivism of science and
technology not only removes our fear of nature, the critical theorists
argue, but also destroys our sense of awe and wonder towards it. That
is to say, positivism "disenchants" nature--along
with everything that can be studied by the sciences, whether natural,
social or human.



The progress in knowledge and material well-being may not be a bad
thing in itself, where the consumption and control of nature is a
necessary part of human life. However, the critical theorists argue
that the positivistic disenchantment of natural things (and, likewise,
of human beings--because they too can be studied and manipulated
by science) disrupts our relationship with them, encouraging the
undesirable attitude that they are nothing more than things to be
probed, consumed and dominated. According to the critical theorists,
the oppression of "outer nature" (i.e., the natural
environment) through science and technology is bought at a very high
price: the project of domination requires the suppression of our own
"inner nature" (i.e., human nature)--e.g., human
creativity, autonomy, and the manifold needs, vulnerabilities and
longings at the centre of human life. To remedy such an alienation,
the project of Horkheimer and Adorno is to replace the narrow
positivistic and instrumentalist model of rationality with a more
humanistic one, in which the values of the aesthetic, moral, sensuous
and expressive aspects of human life play a central part. Thus, their
aim is not to give up our rational faculties or powers of analysis and
logic. Rather, the ambition is to arrive at a dialectical synthesis
between Romanticism and Enlightenment, to return to anti-deterministic
values of freedom, spontaneity and creativity.



In his later work, Adorno advocates a re-enchanting aesthetic attitude
of "sensuous immediacy" towards nature. Not only do we
stop seeing nature as primarily, or simply, an object of consumption,
we are also able to be directly and spontaneously acquainted with
nature without interventions from our rational faculties. According to
Adorno, works of art, like natural things, always involve an
"excess", something more than their mere materiality and
exchange value (see Vogel 1996, ch. 4.4 for a detailed discussion of
Adorno's views on art, labour and domination). The
re-enchantment of the world through aesthetic experience, he argues,
is also at the same time a re-enchantment of human lives and purposes.
Adorno's work remains largely unexplored in mainstream
environmental philosophy, although the idea of applying critical
theory (embracing techniques of deconstruction, psychoanalysis and
radical social criticism) to both environmental issues and the
writings of various ethical and political theorists has spawned the
field of "ecocritique" or
"ecocriticism" (Vogel 1996, Luke 1997, van Wyk 1997,
Dryzek 1997, Garrard 2014).



Some students of Adorno's work have argued that his account of
the role of "sensuous immediacy" can be understood as an
attempt to defend a "legitimate anthropomorphism" that
comes close to a weak form of animism (Bernstein 2001, 196). Others,
more radical, have claimed to take inspiration from his notion of
"non-identity", which, they argue, can be used as the
basis for a deconstruction of the notion of nature and perhaps even
its elimination from ecocritical writing. For example, Timothy Morton
argues that "putting something called Nature on a pedestal and
admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does
for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic
admiration" (Morton 2007, 5), and that "in the name of all
that we value in the idea of 'nature', [ecocritique]
thoroughly examines how nature is set up as a transcendental, unified,
independent category. Ecocritique does not think that it is
paradoxical to say, in the name of ecology itself: 'down with
nature!'" (ibid., 13). In this vein, some thinkers have
insisted that environmental ethics makes a mistake in drawing a
significant distinction between the natural and the artificial (Vogel
2015). Such an idea, however, has drawn fierce criticism from some
Marxist theorists who argue that the "end of nature"
thesis is deeply confused (for example Malm 2018). It remains to be
seen, however, whether the radical attempt to purge the concept of
nature from ecocritical work meets with success. Likewise, it is
unclear whether the dialectic project on which Horkheimer and Adorno
embarked is coherent, and whether Adorno, in particular, has a
consistent understanding of "nature" and
"rationality" (see Eckersley 1992 and Vogel 1996, for a
review of the Frankfurt School's thinking about nature, and on
rationality see also the entry on
 critical theory).



On the other hand, the  *new animists* have been much inspired
by the serious way in which some indigenous peoples placate and
interact with animals, plants and inanimate things through ritual,
ceremony and other practices (for examples see Kimmerer 2020).
According to the new animists, the replacement of traditional animism
(the view that personalized souls are found in animals, plants, and
other material objects) by a form of disenchanting positivism directly
leads to an anthropocentric perspective, which is accountable for much
human destructiveness towards nature. In a disenchanted world, there
is no meaningful order of things or events outside the human domain,
and there is no source of sacredness or dread of the sort felt by
those who regard the natural world as peopled by divinities or demons
(Stone 2006). When a forest is no longer sacred, there are no spirits
to be placated and no mysterious risks associated with clear-felling
it. A disenchanted nature is no longer alive. It commands no respect,
reverence or love. It is nothing but a giant machine, to be mastered
to serve human purposes. The new animists argue for reconceptualizing
the boundary between persons and non-persons. For them, "living
nature" comprises not only humans, animals and plants, but also
mountains, forests, rivers, deserts, and even planets.



Whether the notion that a mountain or a tree is to be regarded as a
person is taken literally or not, the attempt to engage with the
surrounding world as if it consists of other persons might possibly
provide the basis for a respectful attitude to nature (see Harvey 2005
for a popular account of the new animism). If disenchantment is a
source of environmental problems and destruction, then the new animism
can be regarded as attempting to re-enchant, and help to save, nature.
More poetically, David Abram has argued that a phenomenological
approach of the kind taken by Merleau-Ponty can reveal to us that we
are part of the "common flesh" of the world, that we are
in a sense the world thinking itself (Abram 1995).



In her work, Freya Mathews has tried to articulate a version of
animism or panpsychism that captures ways in which the world (not just
nature) contains many kinds of consciousness and sentience. For her,
there is an underlying unity of mind and matter in that the world is a
"self-realizing" system containing a multiplicity of other
such systems (cf. Naess). According to Mathews, we are meshed in
communication, and potential communication, with the "One"
(the greater cosmic self) and its many lesser selves (Mathews 2003,
45-60). Materialism (the monistic theory that the world consists
purely of matter), she argues, is self-defeating by encouraging a form
of "collective solipsism" that treats the world either as
unknowable or as a social-construction (Mathews 2005, 12). Mathews
also takes inspiration from her interpretation of the core Daoist idea
of  *wuwei* as "letting be" and bringing about
change through "effortless action". The focus in
environmental management, development and commerce should be on
"synergy" with what is already in place rather than on
demolition, replacement and disruption. Instead of bulldozing away old
suburbs and derelict factories, the synergistic panpsychist sees these
artefacts as themselves part of the living cosmos, hence part of what
is to be respected. Likewise, instead of trying to eliminate feral or
exotic plants and animals, and restore environments to some imagined
pristine state, ways should be found--wherever possible--to
promote synergies between the newcomers and the older native
populations in ways that maintain ecological flows and promote the
further unfolding and developing of ecological processes (Mathews
2004). Panpsychism, Mathews argues, frees us from the
"ideological grid of capitalism", can reduce our desire
for consumer novelties, and can allow us and the world to grow old
together with grace and dignity. Again, some of Mathews work echoes
indigenous understandings of an enlarged subjectivity. As Deborah Rose
puts it: "subjectivity in the form of sentience and agency is
not solely a human prerogative but is located throughout other species
and perhaps throughout country itself" (Rose 2005, 302).



In summary, if disenchantment is a source of environmentally
destructive or uncaring attitudes, then both the aesthetic and the
animist/panpsychist re-enchantment of the world are intended to offer
an antidote to such attitudes, and perhaps also inspirations for new
forms of managing and designing for sustainability. The general
project of re-enchanting the world has surprising resonances with the
views of others who draw more explicitly on scientific understandings
of life on earth. Earth systems science, for example, draws on the
*Gaia hypothesis* proposed by James Lovelock (Lovelock 1972,
1979) suggesting that living things acting together regulate
significant aspects of the global environment (Lovelock and Margulis
1974). Later writers describe the Gaia hypothesis as conjecturing that
something overlooked by previous scientific thinking was of vital
importance to understanding the one thing that supports all life on
earth, namely a great stabilizing feedback system which regulates
itself in a way that maintains the habitability of the planet (Lenton
*et al*. 2020). This feedback system is itself under threat
from a changing climate, human overpopulation and reductions in
biodiversity (see further section 6 below and also Latour 2017). In
place of a vision of a grand cosmic self, champions of Gaia theory
argue for recognizing the value of Life itself, where the capital "L"
draws attention to the great feedback system--a single entity
comprising all the living things descended from the last universal
common ancestor (Mariscal and Dolittle 2008).


### 3.4 Social Ecology and Bioregionalism



Apart from feminist-environmentalist theories and Naess's
deep ecology, Murray Bookchin's "social ecology" has
also claimed to be radical, subversive, or countercultural (see
Bookchin 1980, 1987, 1990). Bookchin's version of critical
theory takes the "outer" physical world as constituting
what he calls "first nature", from which culture or
"second nature" has evolved. Environmentalism, in his
view, is a social movement, and the problems it confronts are social
problems. While Bookchin is prepared, like Horkheimer and Adorno, to
regard (first) nature as an aesthetic and sensuous marvel, he regards
our intervention in it as necessary. He suggests that we can choose to
put ourselves at the service of natural evolution, to help maintain
complexity and diversity, diminish suffering and reduce pollution.
Bookchin's social ecology recommends that we use our gifts of
sociability, communication and intelligence as if we were
"nature rendered conscious", instead of turning them
against the very source and origin from which such gifts derive.
Exploitation of nature should be replaced by a richer form of life
devoted to nature's preservation.



John Clark has argued that social ecology is heir to a historical,
communitarian tradition of thought that includes not only the
anarchist Peter Kropotkin, but also the nineteenth century socialist
geographer Elisee Reclus, the eccentric Scottish thinker
Patrick Geddes and the latter's disciple, Lewis Mumford (Clark
1998). Ramachandra Guha has described Mumford as "the pioneer
American social ecologist" (Guha 1996, 210). Mumford adopted a
regionalist perspective, arguing that strong regional centres of
culture are the basis of "active and securely grounded local
life" (Mumford 1944, 403). Like the pessimists in critical
theory, Mumford was worried about the emergence under industrialised
capitalism of a "megamachine", one that would oppress and
dominate human creativity and freedom, and one that--despite
being a human product--operates in a way that is out of our
control. While Bookchin is more of a technological optimist than
Mumford, both writers have inspired a regional turn in environmental
thinking. Bioregionalism gives regionalism an environmental twist.
This is the view that natural features should provide the defining
conditions for places of community, and that secure and satisfying
local lives are led by those who know a place, have learned its lore
and who adapt their lifestyle to its affordances by developing its
potential within ecological limits. Such a life, the bioregionalists
argue, will enable people to enjoy the fruits of self-liberation and
self-development (see the essays in List 1993, and the book-length
treatment in Thayer 2003, for an introduction to bioregional
thought).



However, critics have asked why natural features should be significant
in defining the places in which communities are to be built, and have
puzzled over exactly which natural features these should
be--geological, ecological, climatic, hydrological, and so on
(see Brennan 1998b). If relatively small, bioregional communities are
to be home to flourishing human societies, then a question also arises
over the nature of the laws and punishments that will prevail in them,
and also of their integration into larger regional and global legal,
political and economic groupings. For anarchists and other critics of
the predominant social order, a return to self-governing and
self-sufficient regional communities is often depicted as liberating
and refreshing. But for the skeptics, the worry remains that the
bioregional vision is politically over-optimistic and is open to the
establishment of illiberal, stifling and undemocratic communities.
Further, given its emphasis on local self-sufficiency and the virtue
of life in small communities, a question arises over whether
bioregionalism is workable in an overcrowded planet. Later bioregional
proposals have identified ways of connecting with nature by showing
stewardship for green infrastructure within cities (Andersson et al.
2014).



Deep ecology, feminism, and social ecology had a considerable impact
on the development of political positions in regard to the
environment. Feminist analyses have often been welcomed for the
psychological insight they bring to several social, moral and
political problems. There is, however, considerable unease about the
implications of critical theory, social ecology and some varieties of
deep ecology and animism. Some writers have argued, for example, that
critical theory is bound to be ethically anthropocentric, with nature
as no more than a "social construction" whose value
ultimately depends on human determinations (see Vogel 1996). Others
have argued that the demands of "deep" green theorists and
activists cannot be accommodated within contemporary theories of
liberal politics and social justice (see Ferry 1998). A further
suggestion is that there is a need to reassess traditional theories
such as virtue ethics, which has its origins in ancient Greek
philosophy (see the following section) within the context of a form of
stewardship similar to that earlier endorsed by Passmore (see Barry
1999). If this last claim is correct, then the radical activist need
not, after all, look for philosophical support in radical, or
countercultural, theories of the sort deep ecology, feminism,
bioregionalism and social ecology claim to be (but see Zimmerman
1994).


## 4. Traditional Ethical Theories and Contemporary Environment Ethics



Although environmental ethicists often try to distance themselves from
the anthropocentrism embedded in traditional ethical views (Passmore
1974, Norton 1991 are exceptions), they also quite often draw their
theoretical resources from traditional ethical systems and theories.
Consider the following two basic moral questions: (1) What kinds of
thing are intrinsically valuable, good or bad? (2) What makes an
action right or wrong?



*Consequentialist* ethical theories consider intrinsic
"value" / "disvalue" or "goodness"
/ "badness" to be more fundamental moral notions than
"rightness" / "wrongness", and maintain that
whether an action is right/wrong is determined by whether its
consequences are good/bad. From this perspective, answers to question
(2) are informed by answers to question (1). For instance,
utilitarianism, a paradigm case of consequentialism, regards pleasure
(or, more broadly construed, the satisfaction of interest, desire,
and/or preference) as the only intrinsic value in the world, whereas
pain (or the frustration of desire, interest, and/or preference) is
the only intrinsic disvalue, and maintains that right actions are
those that would produce the greatest balance of pleasure over pain
(see the entry on
 consequentialism).



As the utilitarian focus is the balance of pleasure and pain as such,
the question of to whom a pleasure or pain belongs is irrelevant to
the calculation and assessment of the rightness or wrongness of
actions. Hence, the eighteenth century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham
(1789), and later Peter Singer (1993), have argued that the interests
of all the sentient beings (i.e., beings who are capable of
experiencing pleasure or pain)--including non-human
ones--affected by an action should be taken equally into
consideration in assessing the action. Furthermore, rather like
Routley (see section 2 above), Singer argues that the anthropocentric
privileging of members of the species Homo sapiens is arbitrary, and
that it is a kind of "speciesism" as unjustifiable as
sexism and racism. Singer regards the animal liberation movement as
comparable to the liberation movements of women and people of colour.
Unlike the environmental philosophers who attribute intrinsic value to
the natural environment and its inhabitants, Singer and utilitarians
in general attribute intrinsic value to the experience of pleasure or
interest satisfaction as such, not to the beings who have the
experience. Similarly, for the utilitarian, non-sentient objects in
the environment such as plant species, rivers, mountains, and
landscapes, all of which are the objects of moral concern for
environmentalists, are of no intrinsic but at most instrumental value
to the satisfaction of sentient beings (see Singer 1993, Ch. 10).
Furthermore, because right actions, for the utilitarian, are those
that maximize the overall balance of interest satisfaction over
frustration, practices such as whale-hunting and the killing of an
elephant for ivory, which cause suffering to non-human animals, might
turn out to be right after all: such practices might produce
considerable amounts of interest-satisfaction for human beings, which,
on the utilitarian calculation, outweigh the non-human
interest-frustration involved. As the result of all the above
considerations, it is unclear to what extent a utilitarian ethic can
also be an environmental ethic. This point may not so readily apply to
a wider consequentialist approach, which attributes intrinsic value
not only to pleasure or satisfaction, but also to various objects and
processes in the natural environment.



*Deontological* ethical theories, in contrast, maintain that
whether an action is right or wrong is for the most part independent
of whether its consequences are good or bad (see the entry on
 deontological ethics).
 From the deontologist perspective, there are several distinct moral
rules or duties (e.g., "not to kill or otherwise harm the
innocent", "not to lie", "to respect the
rights of others", "to keep promises"), the
observance/violation of which is intrinsically right/wrong; i.e.,
right/wrong in itself regardless of consequences. When asked to
justify an alleged moral rule, duty or its corresponding right,
deontologists may appeal to the intrinsic value of those beings to
whom it applies. For instance, "animal rights" advocate
Tom Regan (1983) argues that those animals with intrinsic value (or
what he calls "inherent value") have the moral right to
respectful treatment, which then generates a general moral duty on our
part not to treat them as mere means to other ends. We have, in
particular, a prima facie moral duty not to harm them. Regan maintains
that certain practices (such as sport or commercial hunting, and
experimentation on animals) violate the moral right of intrinsically
valuable animals to respectful treatment. Such practices, he argues,
are intrinsically wrong regardless of whether or not some better
consequences ever flow from them. Exactly which animals have intrinsic
value and therefore the moral right to respectful treatment?
Regan's answer is: those that meet the criterion of being the
"subject-of-a-life". To be such a subject is a sufficient
(though not necessary) condition for having intrinsic value, and to be
a subject-of-a-life involves, among other things, having
sense-perceptions, beliefs, desires, motives, memory, a sense of the
future, and a psychological identity over time.



Some authors have extended concern for individual well-being further,
arguing for the intrinsic value of organisms achieving their own good,
whether those organisms are capable of consciousness or not. Paul
Taylor's version of this view (1981 and 1986), which we might
call *biocentrism*, is a somewhat deontological example. He
argues that each individual living thing in nature--whether it is
an animal, a plant, or a micro-organism--is a
"teleological-center-of-life" having a good or well-being
of its own which can be enhanced or damaged, and that all individuals
who are teleological-centers-of life have equal intrinsic value (or
what he calls "inherent worth") which entitles them to
moral respect. Furthermore, Taylor maintains that the intrinsic value
of wild living things generates a prima facie moral duty on our part
to preserve or promote their goods as ends in themselves, and that any
practices which treat those beings as mere means and thus display a
lack of respect for them are intrinsically wrong. For a summary and
overview of Taylor's biocentric ethic, see Brennan and Lo 2010,
69--86. A biologically detailed defence of the idea that living
things have representations and goals and hence have moral worth is
found in Agar 2001. Unlike Taylor's egalitarian and
deontological biocentrism, Robin Attfield (1987) argues for a
hierarchical view that while all beings having a good of their own
have intrinsic value, some of them (e.g., persons) have intrinsic
value to a greater extent. Attfield also endorses a form of
consequentialism which takes into consideration, and attempts to
balance, the many and possibly conflicting goods of different living
things (see also Varner 1998 for a defense of biocentric individualism
with affinities to both consequentialist and deontological
approaches). However, some critics have pointed out that the notion of
biological good or well-being is only descriptive not prescriptive
(see Williams 1992 and O'Neill 1993, Ch. 2). For instance, even
if HIV has a good of its own this does not mean that we ought to
assign any positive moral weight to the realization of that good.



Subsequently the distinction between these two traditional approaches
has taken its own specific form of development in environmental
philosophy. Instead of pitting conceptions of value against
conceptions of rights, it has been suggested that there may be two
different conceptions of intrinsic value in play in discussion about
environmental good and evil. One the one side, there is the intrinsic
value of states of affairs that are to be promoted--and this is
the focus of the consequentialist thinkers. On the other
(deontological) hand there is the intrinsic values of entities to be
respected (see Bradley 2006, McShane 2014). These two different foci
for the notion of intrinsic value still provide room for fundamental
argument between deontologists and consequentialist to continue,
albeit in a somewhat modified form.



Note that the ethics of animal liberation or animal rights and
biocentrism are both *individualistic* in that their various
moral concerns are directed towards individuals only--not
ecological wholes such as species, populations, biotic communities,
and ecosystems. None of these is sentient, a subject-of-a-life, or a
teleological-center-of-life, but the preservation of these collective
entities is a major concern for many environmentalists. Moreover, the
goals of animal liberationists, such as the reduction of animal
suffering and death, may conflict with the goals of environmentalists.
For example, the preservation of the integrity of an ecosystem may
require the culling of feral animals or of some indigenous animal
populations that threaten to destroy fragile habitats. So there are
disputes about whether the ethics of animal liberation is a proper
branch of environmental ethics (see Callicott 1980, 1988, Sagoff 1984,
Jamieson 1998, Crisp 1998 and Varner 2000).



Criticizing the individualistic approach in general for failing to
accommodate conservation concerns for ecological wholes, J. Baird
Callicott (1980) once advocated a version of land-ethical
*holism* which takes Leopold's statement "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" to be the supreme deontological principle. In this
theory, the earth's biotic community *per se* is the sole
locus of intrinsic value, whereas the value of its individual members
is merely instrumental and dependent on their contribution to the
"integrity, stability, and beauty" of the larger
community. A straightforward implication of this version of the land
ethic is that an individual member of the biotic community ought to be
sacrificed whenever that is needed for the protection of the holistic
good of the community. For instance, Callicott maintains that if
culling a white-tailed deer is necessary for the protection of the
holistic biotic good, then it is a land-ethical requirement to do so.
But, to be consistent, the same point also applies to human
individuals because they are also members of the biotic community. Not
surprisingly, the misanthropy implied by Callicott's
land-ethical holism was widely criticized and regarded as a
*reductio* of the position (see Aiken (1984), Kheel (1985),
Ferre (1996), and Shrader-Frechette (1996)). Tom Regan (1983,
p.362), in particular, condemned the holistic land ethic's
disregard of the rights of the individual as "environmental
fascism". Since then commentators have noted the links between
fascism and conservation thinking (Biehl and Staudenmaier 2011). The
subsequent emergence of explicitly ecofascist on-line movements and
terrorist acts that claim to be ecologically-inspired (Lawton 2019)
lead one writer to declare that there is a danger the world will enter
an age of "climate barbarism"(Klein 2019).



Under pressure from the charge of ecofascism and misanthropy,
Callicott (1989 Ch. 5, and 1999, Ch. 4) later revises his
neo-Leopodian position to maintain that the biotic community (indeed,
any community to which humans belong) as well as its individual
members (indeed, any individual who shares with us membership in some
common community) all have intrinsic value. To further distance
himself from the charge of ecofascism, Callicott introduced explicit
principles which prioritize obligations to human communities over
those to natural ones. He called these "second-order"
principles for specifying the conditions under which the land
ethic's holistic and individualistic obligations were to be
ranked. As he put it:



> 
> ... obligations generated by membership in more *venerable and
> intimate communities* take precedence over these generated in more
> recently-emerged and impersonal communities... The second second-order
> principle is that stronger *interests* (for lack of a better
> word) generate duties that take precedence over duties generated by
> weaker interests. (Callicott 1999, 76)
> 



Lo 2001 provides an overview and critique of Callicott's
changing position over two decades, while Ouderkirk and Hill (eds.)
2002 gives an overview of debates between Callicott and others
concerning the metaethical and metaphysical foundations for the land
ethic and also its historical antecedents. As Lo points out, the final
modified version of the land ethic needs more than two second-order
principles, since a third-order principle is needed to specify
Callicott's implicit view that the second second-order principle
generally countermands the first one when they come into conflict (Lo
2001, 345). In later work, Callicott follows Lo's suggestion,
while cautioning against aiming for too much precision in specifying
the demands of the land ethic (Callicott 2013, 66-7). While
Callicott's reading of Leopold is widely regarded as authoritative,
later writers have queried whether Leopold might be better interpreted
a a moral pluralist (Dixon 2017) and have also raised doubts about the
form of Darwinism that Leopold is supposed to have espoused (Millstein
2015). For further critique of Callicott on Leopold, see also Newman,
Varner and Linquist 2017, ch.10. 



The controversy surrounding Callicott's original position,
however, has inspired efforts in environmental ethics to investigate
possibilities of attributing intrinsic value to ecological wholes, not
just their individual constituent parts. Following in
Callicott's footsteps, and inspired by Naess's
relational account of value, Warwick Fox has championed a theory of
"responsive cohesion" which aims to give supreme moral
priority to the maintenance of ecosystems and the biophysical world
(Fox 2007). It remains to be seen if this position escapes the charges
of misanthropy and totalitarianism laid against earlier holistic and
relational theories of value.



Individual natural entities (whether sentient or not, living or not),
Andrew Brennan (1984, 2014) argues, are not designed by anyone to
fulfill any purpose and therefore lack "intrinsic
function" (i.e., the function of a thing that constitutes part
of its essence or identity conditions). This, he proposes, is a reason
for thinking that individual natural entities should not be treated as
mere instruments, and thus a reason for assigning them intrinsic
value. Furthermore, he argues that the same moral point applies to the
case of natural ecosystems, to the extent that they lack intrinsic
function. In the light of Brennan's proposal, Eric Katz (1991
and 1997) argues that all natural entities, whether individuals or
wholes, have intrinsic value in virtue of their ontological
independence from human purpose, activity, and interest, and maintains
the deontological principle that nature as a whole is an
"autonomous subject" which deserves moral respect and must
not be treated as a mere means to human ends. Carrying the project of
attributing intrinsic value to nature to its ultimate form, Robert
Elliot (1997) argues that naturalness itself is a property in virtue
of possessing which all natural things, events, and states of affairs,
attain intrinsic value. Furthermore, Elliot argues that even a
consequentialist, who in principle allows the possibility of trading
off intrinsic value from naturalness for intrinsic value from other
sources, could no longer justify such kind of trade-off in reality.
This is because the reduction of intrinsic value due to the depletion
of naturalness on earth, according to him, has reached such a level
that any further reduction of it could not be compensated by any
amount of intrinsic value generated in other ways, no matter how great
it is.



As the notion of "natural" is understood in terms of the
lack of human contrivance and is often opposed to the notion of
"artifactual", one much contested issue concerns the value
of those parts of nature that have been touched by human
artifice--for instance, previously degraded natural environments
which have been humanly restored. Based on the premise that the
properties of being naturally evolved and having a natural continuity
with the remote past are "value adding" (i.e., adding
intrinsic value to those things which possess those two properties),
Elliot argues that even a perfectly restored environment would
necessarily lack those two value-adding properties and therefore be
less valuable than the originally undegraded natural environment.
Katz, on the other hand, argues that a restored nature is really just
an artifact designed and created for the satisfaction of human ends,
and that the value of restored environments is instrumental. He
further argues that restoration is a form of the "domination of
reality" and controversially compares such domination to Nazi
policies of xenophobia, nativism and eliminationsm (Katz 2021).
Critics have pointed out that advocates of a moral dichotomy between
the natural and the artifactual run the risk of diminishing the value
of human life and culture, and fail to recognize that the natural
environments interfered with by humans may still have morally
important qualities other than pure naturalness (see Lo 1999, and
Katz's response in Katz 2012).



Two other issues central to this debate are that the key concept
"natural" seems ambiguous in many different ways (see Hume
1751, App. 3; Mill 1874; Brennan [1988] 2014; Ch. 6; Elliot 1997, Ch.
4), and that those who argue that human interference reduces the
intrinsic value of nature seem to have simply assumed the crucial
premise that naturalness is a source of intrinsic value. Some thinkers
maintain that the natural, or the "wild" construed as that
which "is not humanized" (Hettinger and Throop 1999, p.
12) or to some degree "not under human control" (ibid., p.
13) is intrinsically valuable. Yet, as Bernard Williams points out
(Williams 1992), we may, paradoxically, need to use our technological
powers to retain a sense of something not being in our power. The
retention of wild areas may thus involve planetary and ecological
management to maintain, or even "imprison" such areas
(Birch 1990), raising a question over the extent to which national
parks and wilderness areas are free from our control. An anlogy with
gardening has sometimes been used to explore the nature of restoration
(Allison 2004).



Given the significance of the concept of naturalness in these debates,
it is perhaps surprising that there has been relatively little
analysis of that concept itself in environmental thought. In his
pioneering work on the ethics of the environment, Holmes Rolston has
worked with a number of different conceptions of the natural (see
Brennan and Lo 2010, pp.116-23, for an analysis of three senses
of the term "natural" that may be found in Rolston's
work). An explicit attempt to provide a conceptual analysis of a
different sort is found in Siipi 2008, while an account of naturalness
linking this to historical narratives of place is given in
O'Neill, Holland and Light 2008, ch. 8 (compare the response to
this in Siipi 2011). For reflections on how to protect "one
nature with several representations" from the perspective of
science policy see Ducarme and Couvet 2020.



Finally, as an alternative to consequentialism and deontology both of
which consider "thin" concepts such as
"goodness" and "rightness" as essential to
morality, *virtue ethics* proposes to understand
morality--and assess the ethical quality of actions--in
terms of "thick" concepts such as "kindness",
"honesty", "sincerity" and
"justice". These, and other excellent traits of character
are virtues (see the entry on
 virtue ethics).
 As virtue ethics speaks quite a different language from the other two
kinds of ethical theory, its theoretical focus is not so much on what
kinds of things are good/bad, or what makes an action right/wrong.
Indeed, the richness of the language of virtues, and the emphasis on
moral character, is sometimes cited as a reason for exploring a
virtues-based approach to the complex and always-changing questions of
sustainability and environmental care (Hill 1983, Wensveen 2000,
Sandler 2007). One question central to virtue ethics is what the moral
reasons are for acting one way or another. For instance, from the
perspective of virtue ethics, kindness and loyalty would be moral
reasons for helping a friend in hardship. These are quite different
from the deontologist's reason (that the action is demanded by a
moral rule) or the consequentialist reason (that the action will lead
to a better over-all balance of good over evil in the world). From the
perspective of virtue ethics, the motivation and justification of
actions are both inseparable from the character traits of the acting
agent. Furthermore, unlike deontology or consequentialism the moral
focus of which is other people or states of the world, one central
issue for virtue ethics is how to live a flourishing human life, this
being a central concern of the moral agent himself or herself.
"Living virtuously" is Aristotle's recipe for
flourishing. Versions of virtue ethics advocating virtues such as
"benevolence", "piety",
"filiality", and "courage", have also been
held by thinkers in the Chinese Confucian tradition. The connection
between morality and psychology is another core subject of
investigation for virtue ethics. It is sometimes suggested that human
virtues, which constitute an important aspect of a flourishing human
life, must be compatible with human needs and desires, and perhaps
also sensitive to individual affection and temperaments. As its
central focus is human flourishing as such, virtue ethics may seem
unavoidably anthropocentric and unable to support a genuine moral
concern for the non-human environment. But just as Aristotle has
argued that a flourishing human life requires friendships and one can
have genuine friendships only if one genuinely values, loves,
respects, and cares for one's friends for their own sake, not
merely for the benefits that they may bring to oneself, some have
argued that a flourishing human life requires the moral capacities to
value, love, respect, and care for the non-human natural world as an
end in itself (see O'Neill 1992, O'Neill 1993, Barry
1999). Not only Aristotle, but also Kant can be used in support of
such a position. Toby Svoboda argues, for example, that even indirect
duties to protect nature can be the basis of good moral reasons to
promote the flourishing of natural things, regardless of whether doing
so promotes human interests (Svoboda 2019). Other virtue ethicists
claim to be able to provie an account of what it is to feel guilt
about damage people have done to the environment and to make sense of
the idea of a genuine feeling of gratitude toward nature "for
being what it is" (Wood 2019).



> 
> Supplementary Document:
>   
> 
> Biodiversity Preservation
> 


## 5. Wilderness, the Built Environment, Poverty and Politics



Despite the variety of positions in environmental ethics developed
over the last thirty years, they have often focused on issues
concerned with wilderness and the reasons for its preservation (see
Callicott and Nelson 1998 for a collection of essays on the ideas and
moral significance of wilderness). The importance of wilderness
experience to the human psyche has been emphasized by many
environmental philosophers. Naess, for instance, urges us to
ensure we spend time dwelling in situations of intrinsic value,
whereas Rolston seeks "re-creation" of the human soul by
meditating in the wilderness. Likewise, the critical theorists believe
that aesthetic appreciation of nature has the power to re-enchant
human life. As wilderness becomes increasingly rare, people's
exposure to wild things in their natural state has become reduced, and
according to some authors this may reduce the chance of our lives and
other values being transformed as a result of interactions with
nature. An argument by Bryan Norton draws attention to an analogy with
music. Someone exposed for the first time to a new musical genre may
undergo a transformation in musical preferences, tastes and values as
a result of the experience (Norton 1987. Such a transformation can
affect their other preferences and desires too, in both direct and
indirect ways (see Sarkar 2005, ch. 4, esp. pp. 82-7). In the
attempt to preserve opportunities for experiences that can change or
enhance people's valuations of nature, there has been a move
since the early 2000s to find ways of rewilding degraded environments,
and even parts of cities (Fraser 2009, Monbiot 2013). Note that such
rewilding is distinct from more traditional forms of restoration,
since it need not be pursued with the intention of re-creating some
original landscape or biological system (duToit and Pettorelli 2019).
A spectacular form of rewilding may be associated with efforts to
resurrect some long-dead species by using genetic technology to
combine the DNA of an extinct species with the DNA of some
closely-related contemporary species. For a review of some of the
issues about de-extinction see Minteer 2015, and also Siipi and
Finkelman 2017. Cautions about thinking of de-extinction as radically
different from more conventional conservation and restoration
practices are expressed in Novak 2018.



By contrast to the focus on wild places, relatively little attention
has been paid to the built environment, although this is the one in
which most people spend most of their time. In post-war Britain, for
example, cheaply constructed new housing developments were often poor
replacements for traditional communities. They have been associated
with lower amounts of social interaction and increased crime compared
with the earlier situation. The destruction of highly functional
high-density traditional housing, indeed, might be compared with the
destruction of highly diverse ecosystems and biotic communities.
Likewise, the loss of the world's huge diversity of natural
languages has been mourned by many, not just professionals with an
interest in linguistics. Urban and linguistic environments are just
two of the many "places" inhabited by humans. Some
philosophical theories about natural environments and objects have
potential to be extended to cover built environments and non-natural
objects of several sorts (see King 2000, Light 2001, Palmer 2003,
while Fox 2007 aims to include both built and natural environments in
the scope of a single ethical theory). Certainly there are many
parallels between natural and artificial domains: for example, many of
the conceptual problems involved in discussing the restoration of
natural objects such as landscapes and ecosystems also appear in the
parallel context of restoring human-made objects such as buildings and
works of art (Vogel 2015).



Lovers of wilderness sometimes consider the high human populations in
some developing countries as a key problem underlying the
environmental crisis. Rolston (1996), for instance, claims that (some)
humans are a kind of planetary "cancer". He maintains that
while "feeding people always seems humane, ... when we face up
to what is really going on, by just feeding people, without attention
to the larger social results, we could be feeding a kind of
cancer." This remark is meant to justify the view that saving
nature should, in some circumstances, have a higher priority than
feeding people. But such a view has been criticized for seeming to
reveal a degree of misanthropy, directed at those human beings least
able to protect and defend themselves (see Attfield 1998, Brennan
1998a). The empirical basis of Rolston's claims has been queried
by work showing that poor people are often extremely good
environmental managers (Martinez-Alier 2002). Guha's worries
about the elitist and "missionary" tendencies of some
kinds of deep green environmentalism in certain rich western countries
can be quite readily extended to theorists such as Rolston (Guha
1999). Can such an apparently elitist sort of wilderness ethics ever
be democratised? How can the psychically-reviving power of the wild
become available to those living in the slums of Kolkata or Sao
Paolo? These questions so far lack convincing answers.



Connections between environmental destruction, unequal resource
consumption, poverty and the global economic order have been discussed
by political scientists, development theorists, geographers and
economists as well as by philosophers. Links between economics and
environmental ethics are particularly well established. Work by Mark
Sagoff (1988), for instance, has played a major part in bringing the
two fields together. He argues that "as citizens rather than
consumers" people are concerned about values, which cannot
plausibly be reduced to mere ordered preferences or quantified in
monetary terms. Sagoff's distinction between people as consumers
and people as citizens was intended to blunt the use of cost-benefit
analysis as the final arbiter in discussions about nature's
value. Of course, spouses take out insurance on each others'
lives. We pay extra for travel insurance to cover the cost of
cancellation, illness, or lost baggage. Such actions are economically
rational. They provide us with some compensation in case of loss.
No-one, however, would regard insurance payments as replacing lost
limbs, a loved one or even the joys of a cancelled vacation. So it is
for nature, according to Sagoff. We can put dollar values on a stand
of timber, a reef, a beach, a national park. We can measure the travel
costs, the money spent by visitors, the real estate values, the park
fees and all the rest. But these dollar measures do not tell us the
value of nature any more than my insurance premiums tell you the value
of a human life (also see Shrader-Frechette 1987, O'Neill 1993,
and Brennan 1995). If Sagoff is right, cost-benefit analysis cannot be
a basis for an ethic of sustainability any more than for an ethic of
biodiversity. The potentially misleading appeal to economic reason
used to justify the expansion of the corporate sector has also come
under critical scrutiny by globalisation theorists (see Korten 1999).
These critiques do not aim to eliminate economics from environmental
thinking; rather, they resist any reductive, and strongly
anthropocentric, tendency to believe that all social and environmental
problems are fundamentally or essentially economic. The development of
ecological economics explores the scope for common ground between
economists and environmental policy-makers, and also the role of
environmental ethics in such discussions (Washington and Maloney
2020).



Other interdisciplinary approaches link environmental ethics with
biology, policy studies, public administration, political theory,
cultural history, post-colonial theory, literature, geography, and
human ecology (for some examples, see Norton, Hutchins, Stevens, Maple
1995, Shrader-Frechette 1984, Gruen and Jamieson (eds.) 1994, Karliner
1997, Diesendorf and Hamilton 1997, Schmidtz and Willott 2002). Many
assessments of issues concerned with biodiversity, ecosystem health,
poverty, environmental justice and sustainability look at both human
and environmental issues, eschewing in the process commitment either
to a purely anthropocentric or purely ecocentric perspective (see
Hayward and O'Neill 1997, and Dobson 1999 for collections of
essays looking at the links between sustainability, justice, welfare
and the distribution of environmental goods). The future development
of environmental ethics depends on these, and other interdisciplinary
synergies, as much as on its anchorage within philosophy (Dereniowska
and Matzke 2014).


## 6. Sustainability and Climate Change



The Convention on Biological Diversity discussed in the supplementary
document on
 Biodiversity Preservation
 was influenced by
 *Our Common Future*,
 an earlier United Nations document on sustainability produced by the
World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987). The
commission was chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of
Norway at the time, and the report is sometimes known as the
Brundtland Report. This report noted the increasing tide of evidence
that planetary systems vital to supporting life on earth were under
strain. The key question it raised is whether it is equitable to
sacrifice options for future well-being in favour of supporting
current lifestyles, especially the comfortable, and sometimes lavish,
forms of life enjoyed in the rich countries. As Bryan Norton puts it,
the world faces a global challenge to see whether different human
groups, with widely varying perspectives, can perhaps "accept
responsibility to maintain a non-declining set of opportunities based
on possible uses of the environment". The preservation of
options for the future can be readily linked to notions of equity if
it is agreed that "the future ought not to face, as a result of
our actions today, a seriously reduced range of options and choices,
as they try to adapt to the environment that they face" (Norton
2001: 419). Note that references to "the future" need not
be limited to the future of human beings only. In keeping with the
non-anthropocentric focus of much environmental philosophy, a care for
sustainability and biodiversity can embrace a care for opportunities
available to non-human living things.



However, when the concept "sustainable development" was
first articulated in the Brundtland Report, the emphasis was clearly
anthropocentric. In face of increasing evidence that planetary systems
vital to life-support were under strain, the concept of sustainable
development is constructed in the report to encourage certain globally
coordinated directions and types of economic and social development.
The report defines "sustainable development" in the
following way:



> 
> 
> Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the
> present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
> their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:
> 
> 
> * the concept of "needs", in particular the essential
> needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should
> be given; and
> * the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and
> social organization on the environment's ability to meet present
> and future needs.
> 
> 
> 
> Thus the goals of economic and social development must be defined in
> terms of sustainability in all countries--developed or
> developing, market-oriented or centrally planned. Interpretations will
> vary, but must share certain general features and must flow from a
> consensus on the basic concept of sustainable development and on a
> broad strategic framework for achieving it. (WCED 1987, Ch. 2,
> paragraphs 1-2)
> 
> 
> 



The report goes on to argue that "the industrial world has
already used much of the planet's ecological capital. This
inequality is the planet's main 'environmental'
problem; it is also its main 'development' problem"
(WCED 1987, Overview, paragraph 17). In the concept of sustainable
development the report combines the resource economist's notion
of "sustainable yield" with the recognition that
developing countries of the world are entitled to economic growth and
prosperity. The notion of sustainable yield involves thinking of
forests, rivers, oceans and other ecosystems, including the natural
species living in them, as a stock of "ecological capital"
from which all kinds of goods and services flow. Provided the flow of
such goods and services does not reduce the capacity of the capital
itself to maintain its productivity, the use of the systems in
question is regarded as sustainable. Thus, the report argues that
"maximum sustainable yield must be defined after taking into
account system-wide effects of exploitation" of ecological
capital (WCED 1987, Ch. 2, paragraph 11).



There are clear philosophical, political and economic precursors to
the Brundtland concept of sustainability. For example, John Stuart
Mill (1848, IV. 6. 1) distinguished between the "stationary
state" and the "progressive state" and argued that
at the end of the progressive state lies the stationary state, since
"the increase of wealth is not boundless". Mill also
recognized a debt to the gloomy prognostications of Thomas Malthus,
who had conjectured that population tends to increase geometrically
while food resources at best increase only arithmetically, so that
demand for food will ultimately outstrip the supply (see Milgate and
Stimson 2009, Ch. 7, and the discussion of Malthus in the Political
Economy section of the Spring 2016 version of the entry on
 Mill).
 Reflection on Malthus led Mill to argue for restraining human
population growth:



> 
> Even in a progressive state of capital, in old countries, a
> conscientious or prudential restraint on population is indispensable,
> to prevent the increase of numbers from outstripping the increase of
> capital, and the condition of the classes who are at the bottom of
> society from being deteriorated (Mill 1848, IV. 6. 1).
> 



Such warnings resonate with pessimism about increasing human
population and its impact on the poorest people, as well as on loss of
biodiversity, fresh water scarcity, overconsumption and climate
change. In their controversial work *The Population Bomb*, Paul
and Anne Ehrlich, argue that without restrictions on population
growth, including the imposition of mandatory birth control, the world
faced "mass starvation" in the short term (Ehrlich 1968).
This prediction was not fulfilled. In a subsequent defence of their
early work, the Ehrlichs declared that the most serious flaw in their
original analysis "was that it was much too optimistic about the
future", and comment that "Since The Bomb was written,
increases in greenhouse gas flows into the atmosphere, a consequence
of the near doubling of the human population and the near tripling of
global consumption, indicate that the results will likely be
catastrophic climate disruption caused by greenhouse heating"
(Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2009, 66). It was also in 1968 that Garrett
Hardin published his much cited article on the "tragedy of the
commons" arguing that common resources can always be subject to
degradation and extinction in the face of the rational pursuit of
self-interest. For Hardin, the increasing pressure on shared
resources, and increasing pollution, are inevitable results of the
fact that "there is no technical solution to the population
problem" (Hardin 1968). The problem may be analysed from the
perspective of the so-called
 prisoner's dilemma
 (also see the entry on the
 free rider problem).
 Despite the pessimism of writers at the time, and the advocacy of
setting limits to population growth, there was also an optimism that
echoes Mill's own view that a "stationary state"
would not be one of misery and decline, but rather one in which humans
could aspire to more equitable distribution of available and limited
resources. This is clear not only among those who recognize limits to
economic growth (Meadows et al. 1972) but also among those who
champion the move to a steady state economy (Daly 1991) or at least
want to see more account taken of ecology in economics (Norgaard 1994,
Rees 2020).



The Brundtland report puts less emphasis on limits than do Mill,
Malthus and later writers. It depicts sustainability as a challenge
and opportunity for the world to become more socially, politically and
environmentally fair. In pursuit of
 intergenerational justice,
 it suggests that there should be new human rights added to the
standard list, for example, that "All human beings have the
fundamental right to an environment adequate for their health and well
being" (WCED 1987, Annexe 1, paragraph 1). The report also
argues that "The enjoyment of any right requires respect for the
similar rights of others, and recognition of reciprocal and even joint
responsibilities. States have a responsibility towards their own
citizens and other states" (ibid., chapter 12, paragraph 83).
Since the report's publication, many writers have supported and
defended the view that global and
 economics [normative] and economic justice
 require that nations which had become wealthy through earlier
industrialization and environmental exploitation should allow less
developed nations similar or equivalent opportunities for development
especially in term of access to environmental resources (Redclift
2005). As intended by the report the idea of sustainable development
has become strongly integrated into the notion of environmental
conservation. The report has also set the scene for a range of
subsequent international conferences, declarations, and protocols many
of them maintaining the emphasis on the prospects for the future of
humanity, rather than considering sustainability in any wider
sense.



Some non-anthropocentric environmental thinkers have found the
language of economics used in the report unsatisfactory in its
implications since it already appears to assume a largely instrumental
view of nature. The use of notions such as "asset",
"capital" and also the word "resources" in
connection with natural objects and systems has been identified by
some writers as instrumentalizing natural things which are in essence
wild and free. The objection is that such language promotes the
tendency to think of natural things as mere resources for humans or as
raw materials with which human labour could be mixed, not only to
produce consumable goods, but also to generate human ownership
(Plumwood 1993, Sagoff 2004). If natural objects and systems have
intrinsic value independent of their possible use for humans, as many
environmental philosophers have argued, then a policy approach to
sustainability needs to consider the environment and natural things
not only in instrumental and but also in intrinsic terms to do justice
to the moral standing that many people believe such items possess.
Despite its acknowledgment of there being "moral, ethical,
cultural, aesthetic, and purely scientific reasons for conserving wild
beings" (WCED 1987, Overview, paragraph 53), the strongly
anthropocentric and instrumental language used throughout the
Brundtland report in articulating the notion of sustainable
development can be criticised for defining the notion too narrowly,
leaving little room for addressing sustainability questions directly
concerning the Earth's environment and its non-human
inhabitants: should, and if so, how should, human beings reorganise
their ways of life and the social-political structures of their
communities to allow sustainability and equity not only for all humans
but also for the other species on the planet?



The concern for preserving nature and non-human species is addressed
to some extent by making a distinction between weaker and stronger
conceptions of sustainability (Beckerman 1995). Proponents of weak
sustainability argue that it is acceptable to replace natural capital
with human-made capital provided that the latter has equivalent
functions. If, for example, plastic trees could produce oxygen, absorb
carbon and support animal and insect communities, then they could
replace the real thing, and a world with functionally equivalent
artificial trees would seem just as good--from an economic
perpective--as one with real or natural trees in it. For weak
sustainability theorists, the aim of future development should be to
maintain a consistently productive stock of capital on which to draw,
while not insisting that some portion of that capital be natural.
Strong sustainability theorists, by contrast, generally resist the
substitution of human for natural capital, insisting that a critical
stock of natural things and processes be preserved. By so doing, they
argue, rivers, forests and biodiverse systems are maintained, hence
providing maximum options--options in terms of experience,
appreciation, values, and ways of life--for the future human
inhabitants of the planet (Norton 2005). The Brundtland report can
also be seen as advocating a form of strong sustainability in so far
as it recommends that a "first priority is to establish the
problem of disappearing species and threatened ecosystems on political
agendas as a major resource issue" (*ibid*., chapter 6,
paragraph 57). Furthermore, despite its instrumental and economic
language, the report in fact endorses a wider moral perspective on the
status of and our relation to nature and non-human species, evidenced
by its statement that "the case for the conservation of nature
should not rest only with development goals. It is part of our moral
obligation to other living beings and future generations" (WCED
1987, chapter 2, paragraph 55). Implicit in the statement is not only
a strong conception of sustainability but also a non-anthropocentric
conception of the notion. Over time, strong sustainability came to be
focused not only on the needs of human and other living things but
also on their rights (Redclift 2004, 218). In a further development,
the discourses on forms of sustainability have generally given way to
a more ambiguous usage, in which the term "sustainability"
functions to bring people into a debate rather than setting out a
clear definition of the terms of the debate itself. As globalization
leads to greater integration of world economies, the world after the
Brundtland report has seen greater fragmentation among viewpoints,
where critics of globalization have generally used the concept of
sustainability in a plurality of different ways (Sneddon, Howarth and
Norgaard 2006). Some have argued that "sustainability",
just like the word "nature" itself, has come to mean very
different things, carrying different symbolic meanings for different
groups, and reflecting very different interests (Redclift 2004, 220).
For better or for worse, such ambiguity can on occasion allow
different parties in negotiations to claim a measure of agreement. For
example, commenting on the connections between agricultural systems,
sustainability and climate change, one writer has argued that there is
exciting scope for negotiation across different world views in working
out the conditions for a future sustainable form of agriculture
(Thompson 2017).



Meadows' and Daly's arguments about the need to recognize
that planetary resources are limited have continued to resonate with
thinkers, especially those working in ecological economics (Daly and
Farley 2011). As one author puts it, "the overriding aim [of
ecological economics] ... is to seek viable responses to the biggest
dilemma of our times: reconciling our aspirations for the good life
with the limitations and constraints of a finite planet"
(Jackson 2017, 3). While economic growth is a central focus of
neoclassical economic theory (see the entry on
 philosophy of economics)
 a minority of thinkers have joined in supporting an agenda of
"de-growth" (or "degrowth") as an alternative
to what is sometimes called "growthism" (for a popular
overview see Hickel 2020). From small beginnings in the late 20th
century, the idea of de-growth developed from "a political
slogan with theoretical implications" to become a significant
challenge to the idea of sustainable development considered as a kind
of sustainable *growth* (Martinez-Alier *et al*. 2010).
Advocates of de-growth advocate that the transition to sustainability
will be aided by pursuing de-growth instead of economic growth
(D'Alisa et al. 2015, Khamara and Kronenbeg 2020). At the same
time some ecological economists argue for a rejection of the
anthropocentrism they claim is central to neoclassical economics and
support embracing a new ecological economics that explicitly
incorporates an ecological ethic (Washington and Maloney 2020). Having
drawn attention to the huge impact of the human ecological footprint,
Rees has gone on to gloomily ponder the kind of economics needed to
deal with a situation in which "we are currently
'financing' economic growth by liquidating the biophysical
systems upon which humanity ultimately depends" (Rees 2020, 1).
He concludes that "the mainstream fantasy......this
obsession with growth, cannot end well" (*ibid.*, 6).
Assuming that some forms of consumption are important to a satisfying
human life, some writers have explored the idea that developing more
modes of virtual consumption, while reducing physical forms of
consumption, might be a significant contribution to sustainable
lifestyles (Pike and DesRoches 2020).



The preservation of opportunities to live well, or at least to have a
minimally acceptable level of well being, is at the heart of
 population ethics
 and many contemporary conceptions of sustainability. Many people
believe such opportunities for the existing younger generations, and
also for the yet to arrive future generations, to be under threat from
continuing environmental destruction, including loss of fresh water
resources, continued clearing of wild areas, decreasing biodiversity
and a changing climate thus raising questions not only about
sustainability but also about environmental justice (see Gonzalez,
Atapattu, and Seck 2021). Of these, climate change has come to
prominence as an area of intense policy and political debate, to which
applied philosophers and ethicists were slow to contribute (Heath
2021). An early exploration of the topic by John Broome shows how the
economics of climate change could not be divorced from considerations
of intergenerational justice and ethics (Broome 1992), and this has
set the scene for subsequent discussions and analyses (see the entry
on
 climate justice).
 More than a decade later, when Stephen Gardiner analyses the state of
affairs surrounding climate change in an article entitled "A
Perfect Moral Storm" (Gardiner 2006), his starting point is also
that ethics plays a fundamental role in all discussions of climate
policy. But he argues that even if difficult ethical and conceptual
questions facing climate change (such as the so-called
 "non-identity problem"
 along with the notion of
 historic injustices)
 could be answered, it would still be close to politically and
socially impossible to formulate, let alone to enforce, policies and
action plans to deal effectively with climate change. This is due to
the multi-faceted nature of a problem that involves vast numbers of
agents and players. At a global level, there is first of all the
practical problem of motivating shared responsibilities (see the entry
on
 moral motivation)
 in part due to the dispersed nature of greenhouse gas emissions which
makes the effects of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon and
methane not always felt most strongly in the regions where they
originate. Add to this the fact that there is an un-coordinated and
also dispersed network of agents--both individual and
corporate--responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, and that
there are no effective institutions that can control and limit them.
But this tangle of issues constitutes, Gardiner argues, only one
strand in the skein of quandaries that confronts us. There is also the
fact that by and large only the future (and perhaps the current
younger) generations will carry the brunt of the impacts of climate
change, explaining why so many people in the current generations seem
not to have strong enough incentive to act. Finally, he argues it is
evident that mainstream political, economic, and ethical models are
not up to the task of reaching global consensus, and in many cases not
even national consensus, on how best to design and implement fair
climate policies. Some consequentialist theorists, however, have
argued that a form of
 rule consequentialism
 can take account of the interests of future generations who may be
inhabiting a "broken world" (Mulgan 2011, 2017). Mulgan argues that by
imagining a broken world of limited resources and precarious human
survival, it may be possible to devise an ideal moral ooutlook that
differs from the ideal code of many rule consequentialists who usually
presuppose that the future will be just like the present.



However, Gardiner takes a pessimistic view of the prospects for
progress on climate issues. His view includes pessimism about
technical solutions, such as geoengineering as the antidote to climate
problems, echoing the concerns of others that large scale
interventions in--and further domination of--nature may turn
out to be an even worse climate catastrophe (Gardiner 2011, ch 11,
Jamieson 1996 and see also the papers in Gardiner and McKinnon 2020).
A key point in Gardiner's analysis is that the problem of
climate change involves a tangle of issues, the complexity of which
conspires to encourage buck-passing, weakness of will, distraction and
procrastination, "mak[ing] us extremely vulnerable to moral
corruption" (*ibid*., 397; cf. Gardiner 2011; see also
the concept of "wicked problem" in Brennan 2004). Because
of the grave risk of serious harm to current and future generations of
people and other living things, our failure to take timely mitigating
actions on climate issues can be seen as a major moral failing,
especially in the light of our current knowledge and understanding of
the problem (IPCC 2021).



In a related reinterpretation of a classic study in psychology,
Russell and Bolton re-examine Milgram's classic "obedience
studies" (see the entry on
 the concept of evil,
 section 4.5). In these experiments, Milgram explored the conditions
under which ordinary people would be disposed to perform evil actions
(such as administering electric shocks to strangers). Russell and
Bolton argue that, when properly interpreted, Milgram's studies
show that political, administrative and bureaucratic structures can
lead to a general and tacit agreement for those in an advantaged
situation to harm the interests of those less powerful. In Russell and
Bolton's new interpretation of the Milgram experiments, those
who are in the advantaged situation are those living comfortably in
wealthy countries, while the powerless are distant strangers and
members of future generations. Corporate structures and long
organizational chains, Russell and Bolton argue, encourage inaction,
denial and diffusion of responsibility that typifies both the common
responses to climate change and also the behaviour of participants in
Milgram's experiments. They conjecture that Milgram's work
thus explains the phenomenon of what they call "responsibility
ambiguity" that underlies hesitancy to take action on climate
change (Russell and Bolton 2019, and see also Rees 2020). While they
make no mention of the work of Hannah Arendt, their analysis recalls
some of Arendt's analysis of the banality of evil (see the entry
on
 the concept of evil,
 section 2.3). There appears to be scope for more empirical research
and interdisciplinary study on topics such as the diffusion of
responsibility and denialism. A similar analysis might also apply to
inaction in the face of declining biodiversity.



John Broome tries to show some of the ways that one form of climate
denialism takes, when it uses ingenious but, Broome claims, flawed
reasoning to depict individuals as making no significant contribution
to climate change (Broome 2019, see also McKinnon 2014). A stronger
form of denialism refuses to acknowledge the fact of anthropogenic
climate change at all. A puzzle remains over why much ingenuity is
expended on such denial in the face of the urgent problems that now
confront the world (see the entry on
 science and pseudo-science).
 In response, some argue that the persisting denialism over the
reality of the environmental and climate crises may be a product of
shame or guilt over the human treatment of natural things and systems
(Aaltola 2021). These emotions may interfere with and block a
much-needed and honest confrontation of a frightening
situation--even if it is one humans have brought upon themselves.
There is also a well-known psychological phenomenon of "knowing
but not knowing" which can contribute, along with other factors,
to denialism (Norgaard 2011, 404, and compare the classic studyof this
in Cohen 2001, ch. 2). Many countries' initial and ongoing
response to the 2020s COVID-19 pandemic, for example, appears to show
that denialism, typically accompanied by widespread misinformation and
unfounded hypotheses about conspiracies, may be a very human way to
react in the face of a global catastrophe. Using factor analysis
studies, some psychologists have claimed to demonstrate that
anti-scientific views have close association with beliefs in
creationism and animism. Further, they conjecture that purposive or
teleological thinking is the gateway to such associations
(Wagner-Egger *et al.* 2018). Note that the role of
 teleological notions in biology
 remains contested and subject to further research. Other research
claims to show that people simply reject scientific findings that make
them uncomfortable and threaten their worldviews (see Lewandowsky and
Oberauer 2016).



Writers have also tried to make sense of why so much misinformation
about climate change and other catastrophes is so widespread. On the
part of some theorists (see McIntyre 2018), the blame for the evils of
a "post-truth" era has been laid at the feet of some
postmodern thinkers who endorse
 social epistemology.
 But social constructionist writers have their own diagnosis of the
social forces that have given rise to the "new climatic
regime" (Latour 2017), which combines science denialism and what
has be called "out-of-this-world"--fanciful and
over-optimistic--thinking about the human prospects for escaping
climate catastrophe. One suggested remedy for these cognitve failings
is to encourage the recognition that natural systems respond to human
action and are not merely the material resources for economic
development. It has been proposed that awareness that humans and the
natural systems that support them share a dwelling place might pave
the way to a new kind of "terrestrial politics" (Lenton
and Latour 2018, Latour 2018). The shape of such a politics is still
under-theorized, and could take many forms (Mann and Wainwright 2018).
Meanwhile, some animal ethicists blame "speciesist
anthropocentrism" (see the entry on
 the moral status of animals)
 for blinding humanity to the evils of its overpopulation and
denialism (Almiron and Tafalla 2019). Whatever the future holds, many
thinkers insist that solving the problem of climate change is an
essential ingredient of sustainability and that the alternative to
decisive action may result in the degrading not only of nature and
natural systems, but also of human dignity itself (see Nanda (ed.)
2011, especially chapters by Heyd, Balafrej, Gutrich and Brennan and
Lo, see also section 3.4 of the entry on
 human rights).
 As humanity faces an uncertain future of declining biodiversity and
increasing extreme weather events driven by escalating planetary
heating--causing suffering and alienation for humans and
non-humans alike--the moral challenges listed at the start of
this entry seem more pressing than ever.



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> Supplementary Document:
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> Pathologies of Environmental Crisis: Theories and Empirical Research
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