Doing Environmental Ethics
Doing Environmental Ethics
Second edition
Robert Traer
Dominican University of California
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Contents
Contents
Preface 00
Acknowledgments 00
I Ethics and Science 00
1 Moral Philosophy: An Adventure in Reasoning 00
Right and Good, 00
Reasoning About Our Feelings, 00
Environmental Ethics, 00
Learning from Diverse Theories, 00
Doing Ethics Together, 00
Questions, 00
2 Ethics and Science: Moral Consideration 00
What We Know and Can’t Know, 00
An Evolving Theory of Evolution, 00
Ecosystems and Emergent Properties, 00
Ascribing Value to Nature, 00
Questions, 00
3 Ethics and Economics: The Common Good 00
Invisible Hand? 00
Economic and Ethical Issues, 00
Globalization and Economic Growth, 00
Green Economics, 00
Questions, 00
II Constructing and Testing Ethical Presumptions 00
4 Duty: Nature and Future Generations 00
Doing Our Duty, 00
Right Action, 00
Commanded by God: Jews and Muslims, 00
Government, Land, and Property, 00
Applying the Golden Rule, 00
Animals, Species, Ecosystems, and Landscapes, 00
Questions, 00
5 Character: Ecological Virtues 00
Being Good, 00
Children’s Stories, 00
Christian Stewardship, 00
Virtues: Integrity, Gratitude, and Frugality, 00
Respecting and Appreciating Nature, 00
Questions, 00
6 Relationships: Empathy and Integrity 00
Empathy Is Natural, 00
Culture and Human Nature, 00
Deep Ecology, 00
Ecofeminism: A Social Ecology, 00
Ecological Integrity, 00
Questions, 00
7 Rights: Humans and Animals? 00
Human Rights Law, 00
Environmental Rights, 00
Animal Rights? 00
A Rights Strategy, 00
Questions, 00
8 Consequences: Predicting the Future 00
Utilitarianism, 00
Animal Suffering, 00
Cost-Benefit Analysis, 00
Biocentric Consequentialism, 00
Scientific Consequences, 00
Questions, 00
[[Comp: Set “Worksheet” below like it was in the previous edition’s TOC, please]]
Worksheet, 00
III Learning from Nature 00
9 Ecological Living: Sustainable Consumption 00
Duty: To Reduce Our Consumption, 00
Character: Consumer Choices, 00
Relationships: Our Natural Community, 00
Rights: To a Healthy Environment, 00
Consequences: Sustainable Consumption, 00
Questions, 00
10 Environmental Policy: Governments, Corporations, NGOs 00
Governments: International and US Policies, 00
Corporations: Sustainable Practices, 00
Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs): Advocacy and Action, 00
Ethical Reasoning: Analysis, 00
Questions, 00
11 Air and Water: A Healthy Environment 00
The Earth’s Atmosphere, 00
Air: Pollution and Greenhouse Gases, 00
Water: Quality and Scarcity, 00
Economic Predictions: Shortsighted, 00
Questions, 00
12 Agriculture: Land and Food 00
Nature’s Cycles, 00
Industrial Agriculture, 00
Poor Farmers, 00
Sustainable Farming, 00
Questions, 00
13 Public Land: Adaptive Management 00
Conservationists Versus Preservationists, 00
National Forests and Parks, 00
Restoring Deserts and Wetlands, 00
Rainforests, 00
Wildlife Reserves in Asia and Africa, 00
Ethical and Legal Presumptions, 00
Questions, 00
14 Urban Ecology: Building Green 00
The Built Environment, 00
Transportation, 00
Water and Waste, 00
Sustainable Cities, 00
Environmental Justice, 00
Consequences, 00
Questions, 00
15 Climate Change: Global Warming 00
The Carbon Cycle, 00
Responsibility, 00
Predicting Consequences, 00
Taking Action, 00
Questions, 00
Notes 00
Bibliography 00
Index 00
Preface
Preface
What you do matters, and the person you are matters. In ethics we look for reasons to explain why this is so. Ethics is about what we do, who we are, and why it matters.
Ethics is always a conversation. Ethical reasoning takes place in a community and not simply inside our heads. What follows is my part of our conversation, and I have tried to write and think as clearly as I can. Only you, however, can make sense of what you read, as we are each responsible for ourselves and for what we think and do.
When I say “we” I am either referring to the discussion we are having as you read or am stating a conclusion that is strongly supported by reasons and facts. I only say “I” to let you know that I am speaking for myself. Moral philosophers disagree about many ethical issues, and my responsibility to you is to explain this diversity of thought. At times, however, I will affirm my own convictions.
The topic of environmental ethics has, like a coin, two sides. One side is the discipline of ethics, and parts I and II offer ways of understanding what this discipline involves. The other side is our environmental crisis, which we consider primarily in part III.
The noun crisis comes from the Greek krisis, meaning decision. To say that we are facing an environmental crisis is to assert that we are at a decisive moment in human history and in the natural history of our planet, and that our decisions now are crucial. Also, by identifying the environmental crisis as our crisis, I am affirming that we are the crisis, not the environment.
Part I presents reasons for this conclusion. The first chapter locates our conversation about environmental ethics within the traditions of moral philosophy. The second and third chapters consider how scientific and economic reasoning affect ethical reasoning, especially arguments about our responsibility for the environment. Chapters in part III address particular aspects of our environmental crisis.
Most scientists agree that the impact of human civilization on the earth now constitutes an environmental crisis. Yet public awareness and support for this conclusion in the United States is much lower than in Europe, Japan, and China. Americans have a responsibility to understand why this is so.
Our challenge is to see how we are involved in the environmental crisis and how, individually and together, we can live more ecologically. To address this challenge we consider:
• Our place in nature as well as our use of natural resources.
• Four ways of reasoning about doing what is right and being good persons.
• Predicting likely consequences as a way of testing ethical presumptions.
• Environmental laws, philosophical arguments, and religious teachings.
As ethical beings, we are responsible for understanding the ecology of the earth and for evolving a sustainable way of life. This may be the greatest moral and social challenge of our time.
To address our environmental crisis, we must see more clearly our place in nature. We are ethical primates. We are creatures of the earth and depend on its natural cycles, habitats, and other species. It is also our human nature to create a world of culture that sets us apart from the natural world.
Therefore, to make ethical decisions about the environment, we must understand the lessons of nature. We look to the scientific theory of evolution and the discipline of ecology to learn what being fit for survival means and how human life relies on the ecosystems of the earth. Then we consider what these facts and insights mean for doing ethics.
Our knowledge is limited, yet we know that the environmental crisis is of our own making. We know that our use of natural resources has disrupted the natural cycles of nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon, with consequences that include the loss of forests and topsoil, as well as global warming. We know that our industrial way of life has also disturbed the earth’s water cycle, resulting in acid rain, falling water levels in underground aquifers, a loss of fertile land due to salts deposited by irrigation, more intense storms, and devastating drought, as well as a scarcity of water for many. We know that economists have ignored the environmental costs of extracting and using natural resources and of leaving waste products in the air, water, and soil.
Resolving these environmental problems will require a new awareness of our place in nature, as well as careful actions (acting with care) based on our moral convictions.
We bring to this crisis from the history of our cultures four patterns of reasoning about doing what is right and being good persons. These ethical arguments concern duty, character, relationships, and rights. We find these ways of reasoning about what is intrinsically right and good mainly in environmental laws, philosophical arguments, and religious teachings, but also in children’s stories, human history, and our own experience. We will draw on these diverse sources to help us construct ethical presumptions about how we may live with greater ecological awareness and responsibility.
Also, humans have evolved the capacity to estimate outcomes, and modern culture requires that ethical decisions about public policy consider the projections of science and economics. Therefore, we predict the likely consequences of acting on our ethical presumptions as a way of testing our reasoning. When we predict that the likely consequences of acting on our presumptions will be more beneficial than adverse, our ethical presumptions are confirmed. If this is not the case, we should review our options.
Some moral philosophers assert that all ethical issues should be resolved simply by predicting the foreseeable consequences of taking an action. I argue, instead, that this way of reasoning is necessary but not sufficient for ethics. Not long ago, few foresaw our present environmental crisis. It seems unwise, therefore, to rely solely on our ability to predict the likely consequences of actions we might now take.
What can we learn from the mistakes of the past? From the history of the last century we need to learn that our way of life is unsustainable. From evolution we can see that natural history is “heading” toward greater complexity and diversity, and that empathy is natural as well as crucial for moral reasoning. From ecology we should learn that our well-being depends on restoring and maintaining the integrity of the natural habitats we share with other species.
Doing Environmental Ethics offers an inclusive and practical way of addressing our ecological crisis. It builds on our commonsense understanding of doing what is right and being good persons; suggests how we might live more sustainably; and explores how governments, corporations, and citizens can work together to address environmental problems. To protect the natural cycles of the earth’s biosphere, Doing Environmental Ethics supports public policies that would reduce air and water pollution, transform industrial agriculture, preserve endangered species, promote urban ecology, and counter global warming. Questions after each chapter and a worksheet aid readers in deciding how to live more responsibly as consumers and as citizens.
Our way of living—our dependence on fossil fuels, our polluted cities, our global economy, our industrial agriculture, our consumer society—is the environmental crisis. At issue, therefore, is not only what we must do to reverse our devastating impact on the environment, but who we may become as members of the only ethical species to evolve on Earth.
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
This book relies on the insightful arguments of many environmental advocates, moral philosophers, and contemporary scientists. I am especially grateful to Mary Midgley and Holmes Rolston III for guiding me along the tangled trails of environmental philosophy, and to scientists Menas Kafatos, Lynn Margulis, Robert Nadeau, and Henry P. Stapp for helping me sort out what we know and cannot know about the natural world. I also want to recognize economists Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley and designers William McDonough and Michael Braungart for providing creative and practical alternatives to our unsustainable growth economy.
Also, a word of thanks to my grandson Noah Traer, who at age five accompanied me on many walks while I was working on this book. “I’m always wondering about things,” he once said to me. Then, wanting to be more precise, he qualified this statement. “Well, I’m not always wondering about things. But mostly I’m wondering.”
Together we wondered about intricate flowers, brightly colored fallen leaves, sprouting mushrooms, spiders spinning fantastic webs, butterfly acrobatics, birds pulling up worms, tumbling clouds in the sky, and rain plunking on our umbrellas.
This second edition is dedicated to all my grandchildren: Christian, Quanisha, Cassandra, Noah, Rashaan, Arwyn, Willow, and Liliana. They keep me wondering about the ethical choices we all need to make for the sake of those who are young today and for future generations as well.