Электронный учебно-методический комплекс по учебной дисциплине Философия и методология науки для студентов, слушателей, осваивающих содержание образовательной программы высшего образования 2 ступени

there are disputes about whether the ethics of animal liberation is a proper branch of environmental ethics.

Criticizing the individualistic approach in general for failing to accommodate conservation concerns for ecological wholes, J. Baird Callicott 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 whitetailed 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, Kheel, Ferré, and ShraderFrechette. Tom Regan, in particular, condemned the holistic land ethic‘s disregard of the rights of the individual as ―environmental fascism‖.

Under pressure from the charge of ecofascism and misanthropy, Callicott later revised his position and now maintains that the biotic 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 communitiestake precedence over these generated in more recently-emerged and impersonal communities. The second second-order principle is that stronger interests generate duties that take precedence over duties generated by weaker interests.

Lo provides an overview and critique of Callicott‘s changing position over two decades, while Ouderkirk and Hill 2002 gives an overview of debates between Callicott and others concerning the metaethical and

561

metaphysical foundations for the land ethic and also its historical antecedents. As Lo pointed 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 secondorder principle generally countermands the first one when they come into conflict. In his most recent work, Callicott follows Lo‘s suggestion, while cautioning against aiming for too much precision in specifying the demands of the land ethic.

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 Næss‘s relational account of value, Warwick Fox has championed a theory of ―responsive cohesion‖ which apparently gives supreme moral priority to the maintenance of ecosystems and the biophysical world. 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, Andrew Brennan argues, are not designed by anyone to fulfill any purpose and therefore lack ―intrinsic function‖.

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 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 Ellio 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 reduc-

562

tion 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 is about the value of those parts of nature that have been interfered with 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‖, 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 merely instrumental.

However, some critics have pointed out that advocates of moral dualism 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 relevant qualities other than pure naturalness. Two other issues central to this debate are that the key concept ―natural‖ seems ambiguous in many different ways, 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‖ or to some degree ―not under human control‖ is intrinsically valuable. Yet, as Bernard Williams points out, 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, raising a question over the extent to which national parks and wilderness areas are free from our control. An important message underlying the debate, perhaps, is that even if ecological restoration is achievable, it might have been better to have left nature intact in the first place.

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 num-

563

ber of different conceptions of the natural. 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.

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‖. 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 al- ways-changing questions of sustainability and environmental care. 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 or the consequentialist reason.

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

564

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.

Despite the variety of positions in environmental ethics developed over the last thirty years, they have focused mainly on issues concerned with wilderness and the reasons for its preservation. The importance of wilderness experience to the human psyche has been emphasized by many environmental philosophers. Næss, 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. 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.

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

565

objects have potential to be extended to cover built environments and non-natural objects of several sorts.

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 also appear in the parallel context of restoring human-made objects.

The focus on the value of wilderness and the importance of its preservation has overlooked another important problem – namely that lifestyles in which enthusiasms for nature rambles, woodland meditations or mountaineering can be indulged demand a standard of living that is far beyond the dreams of most of the world‘s population. Moreover, mass access to wild places would likely destroy the very values held in high esteem by the ―natural aristocrats‖, a term used by Hugh Stretton to characterize the environmentalists ―driven chiefly by love of the wilderness‖. Thus, a new range of moral and political problems open up, including the environmental cost of tourist access to wilderness areas, and ways in which limited access could be arranged to areas of natural beauty and diversity, while maintaining the individual freedoms central to liberal democracies.

Lovers of wilderness sometimes consider the high human populations in some developing countries as a key problem underlying the environmental crisis. Rolston, for instance, claims that 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.

The empirical basis of Rolston‘s claims has been queried by work showing that poor people are often extremely good environmental managers. 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. 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 Calcutta or São Paolo? These questions so far lack convincing answers.

566

Furthermore, the economic conditions which support the kind of enjoyment of wilderness by Stretton‘s ―natural aristocrats‖, and more generally the lifestyles of many people in the affluent countries, seem implicated in the destruction and pollution which has provoked the environmental turn in the first place. For those in the richer countries, for instance, engaging in outdoor recreations usually involves the motor car. Car dependency, however, is at the heart of many environmental problems, a key factor in urban pollution, while at the same time central to the economic and military activities of many nations and corporations, for example securing and exploiting oil reserves. In an increasingly crowded industrialised world, the answers to such problems are pressing. Any adequate study of this intertwined set of problems must involve interdisciplinary collaboration among philosophers and theorists in the social as well as the natural sciences.

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, 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. If Sagoff is right, costbenefit analysis of the kind mentioned in section 5 above cannot be a basis for an ethic of sustainability any more than for an ethic of biodi-

567

versity. 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. 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.

Other interdisciplinary approaches link environmental ethics with biology, policy studies, public administration, political theory, cultural history, post-colonial theory, literature, geography, and human ecology. 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. The future development of environmental ethics depend on these, and other interdisciplinary synergies, as much as on its anchorage within philosophy.

The Convention on Biological Diversity discussed in section 5 was influenced by Our Common Future, an earlier United Nations document on sustainability produced by the World Commission on Environment and Development. 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‖. 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.

568

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. 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‖. 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

There are clear philosophical, political and economic precursors to the Brundtland concept of sustainability. For example, John Stuart Mill distinguished between the ―stationary state‖ and the ―progressive state‖

569

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 inevitably outstrip the supply. 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.

Such warnings resonate with more recent 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. 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‖. It was also in 1968 that Garrett Hardin published his much cited article on the ―tragedy of the commons‖ showing that common resources are always 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‖. The problem may be analysed from the perspective of the socalled prisoner‘s dilemma. 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 but also among those who champion the move to a steady state

570