At World’s End: Ethics for saving the planet

THOUGHT CONFERENCE

York, 25th March 2008

Bob Bowie

Senior Lecturer in Religious Education

Canterbury Christ Church University

INTRODUCTATION

“Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth . . . home.” (Edgar Mitchell, NASA Astronaut)

  • I will explore some misconceptions
  • I will outline a view that environmental ethics offers an inter-connected approach to ethics
  • I will look at questions about animals and questions about James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis
  • I will explore how religions could be very helpful in responding to environmental ethics.

(i) Misconceptions

I will briefly discuss some misconceptions about environmental ethics which we need to dispense with first. We may think that environmental ethics is a title for a single issue, like abortion, or just war - This is a mistake. I am going to suggest it offers a holistic theoretical approach to doing ethics. We may think that environmental ethics refer to ethical issues to do with nature rather than human beings – this is also a mistake. I am going to suggest that environmental ethics require a holistic ethical approach that includes human beings and many dimensions of ethics.

(ii) Environmental Ethics – Interconnected and multi-dimensional ethics

From this starting point I am going to suggest that environmental ethics, rather than being focussed on how we treat the physical world, in a third place race in which animal ethics comes second and human ethics first. Environmental ethics provide a much more interconnected view of doing ethics which takes a holistic account of how we treat others, the development of characteristics within ourselves, and the ethics of the future, as well as the natural and geological world. I will therefore be making links with virtue theory, justice and other-centredness. What I think environmental ethics shows us is that ethics is far more inter-connected than we sometimes think when we see before us different ethical issues and theories. Environmental ethics is not an ethical issue or topic, but a way doing joined up ethical thinking. I will explore this though an examination of animals and the Gaia theory.

(iii) Religions – multi-dimensional toolkits

When we think of environmental issues in this way, we find many resources within religious traditions that make them more helpful that single ethical theories. Religions offer a range of ethical tools and are both multi-dimensional and interconnected. This is the kind of help we need if we are going to sort our some of these problems although religion is not always a help in these matters.

1: MISCONCEPTIONS

We may think that environmental ethics is a title for a single issue, like abortion, or just war. It is often listed as an ethical issue and we see it in a long list of other ethical issues. It is treated as an issue by exam boards and specifications. This is a mistake. There is no single issue about environmental ethics. Take the island of Tuvalu. Thinking about Tuvalu, we quickly reveal many ethical dimensions:

  • The poor island is in jeopardy because of the way the richer world is developing – this a question of justice, about how we live and how neighbourly we are to others in the world. The simple maxim, do unto others as you would have done unto you, the golden rule, suggests we should act in such a way that we would wish others to do to us. We should be empathetic towards others and treat others with compassion. So this is about the ethical principles we have and how we conduct ourselves towards others and the consequences it has. Principles, deontology and teleology.
  • The way in which we are living in the world can harden us to others. This is a question of character and virtue and vice. If we live in a way which shows a lack of consideration to others, we become more insensitive.
  • The people’s livelihoods and homes are being damaged by the increasing storms and rising sea levels. This is a question of human suffering – the loss of the things that matter most to human life.
  • A habitat is being lost – an island will be destroyed. This is about the destruction of habitate, living creatures, and a biological life system.

This is just an illustration but immediately we can see that the ethical issues surrounding Tuvalu are multidimensional – they raise different kinds of ethical questions that require us to start linking together different aspects of ethics. When we approach an environmental issue we are required to think about many different ethical elements. It is narrow sighted to focus on one part of it. Think about the different elements I have considered. We are called to think about the principles we follow: what being compassionate or neighbourly means. We are called to think about how we conduct ourselves, the behaviour traits or virtues that we hold. We are required to think deontologically about how our actions may be wrong in themselves. We are required to think teleologically - about the consequences of our actions. I think this is why thinking about environmental ethics is really quite difficult. Deploying one kind of theory may only reach one of the elements.

I am going to suggest it requires us to think holisticallyabout doing ethics. We may think that environmental ethics refer to ethical issues to do with nature rather than human beings – this is also a mistake. I am going to suggest that environmental ethics require a holistic ethical approach that includes human beings and many dimensions of ethics.

To recap then: Environmental ethics is not an ethical issue, certainly not a single issue, but actually it offers us an insight into how interconnected ethical issues are and how different theoretical questions need to be answered if we are to be ethical about the environment.

2. ANIMALS:

We can see how these different elements are revealed in the way we treat animals. Questions about how human beings should treat non-human life can get stuck in various quagmires.

We might try and answer the question whether some animals are sentient – capable of enough of the higher thinking and feeling functions that humans have (or usually have). This leaves us testing animals, observing them, trying to weigh them up in comparison with a human being. We try and match as many of their different capabilities with human ones and draw some kind of line of who is sentient (maybe the great apes, dolphins and whales) and who is out (frogs, birds and so on).

Once we have drawn up our groupings of who is morally important and who is not, we then would need to decide what rights we give each group, perhaps a few to many, and more for the higher group. In the past human beings have treated human beings in this way. People could be divided into groups that matter. So men mattered more than women, whites mattered more than blacks, adults mattered more than children, except for the first born son who tended to matter quite a lot and certainly more than all of his sisters, older or younger.

I am not sure this is a helpful way forward morally because I think there is a bigger issue behind this which we illuminate when we pursue the question, ‘Is there evidence linking animal cruelty to human cruelty?’

"A survey of pet-owning families with substantiated child abuse and neglect found that animals were abused in 88 percent of homes where child physical abuse was present (DeViney, Dickert, & Lockwood, 1983). A study of women seeking shelter at a safe house showed that 71 percent of those having pets affirmed that their partner had threatened, hurt or killed their companion animals, and 32 percent of mothers reported that their children had hurt or killed their pets (Ascione, 1998). Still another study showed that violent offenders incarcerated in a maximum security prison were significantly more likely than nonviolent offenders to have committed childhood acts of cruelty toward pets (Merz-Perez, Heide, & Silverman, 2001)." (

In otherwords, we can see that the way human beings treat non-human living creatures can be linked to the way human beings treat human beings. There is something about the behavior, or character traits which are common. If we cultivate animal cruelty we are more likely to cultivate human cruelty. What this evidence shows is that it is not helpful to get stuck in debates about whether or not an animal has the same status or rights as a human being. Whether or not I think that an animal has intrinsic moral worth is not really the point. What matters is that the kinds of attitudes we encourage people to have towards the natural world are not exclusively directed at one element of that natural world. Or put it another way, we need to encourage human beings to be gentle and kind to animals because kindness and gentleness are virtues that mark a good person. If we encourage a callous disregard for the small creatures – if we encourage children to torture insects, throw stones at cats, if we allow adolescents to maim horses, we should not be surprised if that behavior is also directed at humans. This is not a new observation:

"...the Custom of [children] Tormenting and Killing ... Beasts, will, by Degrees, harden their Minds even towards Men; and they who delight in the Suffering and Destruction of inferiour Creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate, or benign to those of their own kind." (Locke, 1705, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Section #1 16, italics added; Axtell, 1968)

Of course the link is not always there. Sometimes we do see people who show great care and love for animals but seem lacking in empathy for human beings. But I think that in these cases there are often other factors at play. I heard an interview on the radio with an owner of an illegal dog who was explaining that the dog was quite harmless and safe to run around off the lead, and that the reason the dog got anxious was that other people showed they were scared. This seemed to illustrate a real lack of empathy to human beings, and was chilling to hear. Any reasonable person could not blame a small child from being scared of a dog off the lead, and the idea that a potential attack could be caused by the fault of the child shows a different kind of failing. It shows a lack of understanding of animals, and the extent to which animals can control their behaviour.

The evidence of a correlation between animal cruelty and human cruelty does suggest that we need to have an interconnected understanding of human attitudes to the natural world. The question of animal rights, the question of whether or not an animal has moral significance in and of itself, and the question of animal intelligence and animal pain are important ethical questions, but there are others which I think treat the issue more holistically. Virtue theory is a really important ethical resource for this.

To review, the example of animal treatment shows that we should not think about separating out issues from each other in questions about the natural world. We need to approach these questions in a holistic manner. If we know that that the way in which we treat the animal helps show whether or not we are good people, then this may also be the case in the way in which we treat the natural world.

3. GAIA HYPOTHESIS

Some environmentalists have tried to draw our attention to the way in which we need to be holistic.‘The planet is sick, and humanity is to blame’according to James lovelock and hisGaia hypothesis (The revenge of Gaia - Penguin: Allen Lane, London 2006). Gaia represents the combination of geosphere and biosphere. The biosphere represents the living material of all kinds which exists on the surface of the planet. The geosphere is the non-living material that makes up all the rest of the material on, above and beneath the surface – the hard material of the planet along with the gases that make up our atmosphere. James Lovelock uses Gaia as a metaphor for these two spheres and considers them as a single entity, almost alive. Here he is building on classical associations coming from ancient ideas about the earth as a god. He links these to more geological associations made by James Hutton and T H Huxley in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It is important to note that Lovelock’s theory does not require a belief that earth is some sort of mystical being but a belief of this sort gives that kind of motivation for how we need to act. He argues that the only way in which human beings are likely to pay attention to the ethical obligations thrown up by the bio-geosphere, is by thinking of it in terms of and treating it as if it were such a being. Much ethical debate is either person centred or God centred. So thinking about planet earth in its totality as a quasi god-person is a tool more likely to bring about the kind of moral responses necessary.

The principle message in one of his latest books is that the earth has reached a tipping point. It is as if humankind was on a boat near the edge of a waterfall and the motor is about to fail. The actions of humankind have degraded the survival system upon which we depend. We need to live sympathetically with our surrounds but we have grown and polluted far beyond the stage which the planet can sustain us and itself and we are reaching a point where catastrophic change is inevitable. It will be much more difficult to get ourselves out of that situation once we are in it. That is the grim message of Lovelock’s new book, The revenge of Gaia (Penguin: Allen Lane, London 2006).

Lovelock writes as a planetary physician. Gaia’s health is declining and our lives depend upon an improvement in Gaia’s health. Lovelock argues that we need to think about the planet as a person because it is only then that we really appreciate the extent to which our activity harms the planet.

Lovelock is critical of two common positions. On the one hand is sustainable development, the idea that we can continue more or less as we are if we change the way we develop and the way in which we develop. Lovelock argues that this does not account for the real fundamental nature of the crises we face and that continuing development is simply not possible. Sustainable development might have been an option a century or two back but not now – managed, sustained retreat is more realistic.

Humanity has become so obsessed with the idea of progress and betterment of society that it rarely looks beyond human beings to consider anything else. The love affair with the city, or the city as we know it, must end and the love affair with nature must be rekindled. While there are one or two sceptics, the vast majority of all scientists are now convinced. There is virtual unanimity. The extent of change required will demand a massive investment. Windfarms and using clean forms of transport are only tinkering at the edges. The degree of change is far more fundamental and will require going nuclear, at least temporarily, while other methods of a controlled reduction in our rate of development is found.

There is the view that morality should be focussed on people not the environment. Traditionally ethics has been focussed on people, rather than the natural world, and this remains prominent in some Christian thinking though there has been a considerable shift in recent years. But we have to see that it is wrong to think that environmental ethics excludes human beings. We have seen that it is about justice and concern for the other. This makes a powerful claim for the centrality of environmental ethics. It is at the centre of all ethics, if not the only ethic that really matters; it is the totality of all ethics. If Gaia is not allowed to recover, and sustain the human civilisation, there may be no more ethics of any kind because human civilisation as we know it may no longer exist. It is as if any ethical system or issue which does not account for GAIA is no ethical system at all.

This environmental ethic then situates itself on a scientific and historic premise. The human species is dependent on planet earth. Unchecked, humanity will bring about events which will lead to the diminishment or destruction of human civilization, if not the species itself. The Gaia ethic is the ultimate ethical trump card that displaces all other considerations. The possibility of goodness and rightness cannot exist without sentient moral creatures. The revenge of Gaia and the destruction of a habitat that humanity can survive in, destroys those moral creatures, excepting the possibility of intelligent moral life elsewhere within or beyond the confines of our universe, and excepting the possible existence of angels or human beings beyond this world.

Were everyone in the world to live as we do in Europe, we would need three planets to provide enough for everyone to consume as much as we do currently. We do not have the resources to live as we do, without consigning the bulk of the population to an even more horrifically impoverished life than the one many of the poorest have now.