Finding a Future for Environmental Ethics

In its roughly 40 year history, an ample number of gems of individual work in environmental ethics have emerged which have expanded our understanding of the moral responsibilities humans may have to non-human natural entities. But in that same time, with a few noteworthy exceptions, the field as a whole has largely failed to capture the attention of the broader philosophical world, and, more surprisingly, its counterpart non-philosophical disciplines such as natural resource management, forestry or ocean science. This essay will identify two tendencies in the field that have led to this state of affairs and stand in the way of a more productive future for environmental ethics. The first tendency is the insistence that an adequate account of natural value requires the formulation of an entirely new form of ethics. The second tendency is found in the assumption that the proper aspiration of environmental ethics is nothing less than to fundamentally change human worldviews. While the roots of environmental ethics as an academic discipline are much older, we can date its origins to the early 1970s when philosophers such as Arne Naess and Richard Routley (later Sylvan) published some of their first articles arguing that traditional conceptions of ethics and values in relation to the non-human natural environment were in need of radical rethinking (see Naess 1973 and Routley 1973). By “environment” here, they primarily meant non-human natural collective entities such as species and ecosystems, as opposed to individual animals. Questions about the moral status of individual animals inspired the evolution of the parallel literature in animal ethics led at about the same time by philosophers such as Tom Reagan and Peter Singer. Naess and Routley, and following closely on their heels figures such as Robin Attfield, Andrew Brennan, J. Baird Callicott, Val Plumwood, Holmes Rolston III, and Karen Warren, had in common two principle concerns: 1) Most conceptions of natural value tended to reduce it to instrumental economic value and, as such, 2) These conceptions were anthropocentric and so did not consider the idea that nature has value in and of itself that should be respected by humans. All of these figures, and many others since, have proposed different ideas about how to build a positive philosophical account that nature has some kind of value deserving of direct moral consideration. The details of their accounts need not concern us at the moment. What was common in most of them however was that they generally argued, in opposition to the dominant understanding of natural value found, for example, in environmental policy, that nature has non-anthropocentric intrinsic (or inherent) value. The argument was that if we step away from looking at nature only from our human centered view of the world, and instead accept that things other than humans are the proper objects of moral consideration, then we can see that nature too has value independent of the instrumental ends to which it is used to advance human interests. There have of course been strong minority views in environmental ethics that have grown louder and more influential over the years. In 1974 John Passmore published Man’s Responsibility for Nature, arguing that there were in fact traditional anthropocentric schools of thought in the Western tradition that could be used to argue that humans have a moral responsibility to take better care of the Earth and its non-human inhabitants. While this book made little impact at the time of its publication on the emerging academic field, a decade later Bryan Norton (1984) began arguing for a form of anthropocentrism (which he has called variously “weak” or “broad” anthropocentrism) that could serve …