Introduction to Environmental Ethics

1
Introduction to Environmental Ethics
2
Technological solutions to environmental problems

• Silent Spring DDT
• Invented by Paul Müller in 1939
• Introduced during the 1940s
• Responsible for eradicating malaria from Europe
  and North America
• Used as an agricultural insecticide after 1945
• How DDT kills
• Opens sodium channels in insect neurons
• Neuron fires spontaneously
• Leads to uncontrolled spasming and death

3
DDT
Short-Term Benefits Elimination of undesirable
pests Cut crop loss Hold prices down for
consumers

• Long-Term Effects
• Little effectiveness
• Health hazard
• Biological
• Amplification

4
Ethics, Science, and Environmental Problems

• Environmental Problems
• We live in a period of unprecedented
  environmental challenges.
• How do we start making the right decisions when
  decisions made by our ancestors have had
  devastating consequences?
• Science as the answer
• Issues are often highly technical
• The promise of objective and factual answers

5
Concerns about Sciencethe Myth of Objectivity

• Beliefs are mere opinion, subjective, while
  science provides a true objective account of the
  world
• Science is neither purely objective nor
  value-neutral

6
Concerns about ScienceAnalytic Reductionism

• Nature of complex things explained by (reduced
  to) simpler or more fundamental things.
• objects, phenomena, explanations, theories,
  meanings
• Examples
• WaterH2O
• Heatvibration of molecules
• Religionpsychological phenomenon (Freud)
• Lifegenetic mechanisms (Dawkins)
• Criticism
• reductionist approach is inappropriate in other
  fields distorts subject matter.
• Things have properties as a whole that are not
  explainable from the sum of their parts

7
Concerns about Science Mechanistic Explanation

• Purely mechanistic explanations distort
  understanding of natural phenomena ecological
  relationships

8
Concerns About ScienceSciences Limit in Asking
Questions

• Answers depend on questions
• Is our energy problem a supply problem or a
  demand problem?
• Two sets of facts lead to different policy
  recommendations. Scientific facts alone tell us
  nothing about which alternative to choose.
• Where do scientific questions come from?
• Formed by people who pay for scientific research

9
Ethics, Science, Environmental ProblemsRedux

• Science cant be the answer
• Environmental challenges not problems of science
  technology
• Environmental issues raise fundamental ethical
  questions
• Ethics cant be the answer
• Abstract ethical theory alone cant resolve
  concrete problems
• Ethics and science
• working together to resolve environmental
  challenges.

10
Basics
11
Key Questions

• What should we understand as environment?
• What should we understand as nature?
• How should we as think of our relationship to the
  rest of nature?
• What kinds of things, besides normal adult human
  beings, might we have moral duties towards?
• What kind of value should we attribute to these
  things?

12
Environmental Ethics

• A systematic account of the moral relations
  between humans and their nonhuman natural
  environment
• An adequate theory must explain
• moral norms that govern our behavior towards the
  natural world
• to whom or what humans have a responsibility
  towards
• The basis of these responsibilities

13
Anthropocentric EthicsLight Green
Environmentalism

• Definition
• Only humans have moral value
• Characteristics
• Environmental problems pose a danger to humans
• We should act in ways that will help avert the
  threatened harm
• Nonhuman things have value only insofar as they
  are useful to us or because we care about them
• Non-human things are protected by actions
  designed to secure human well-being
• Sub-problem
• Responsibilities to Future Generations

14
Nonanthropocentric EthicsMid-Green
Environmentalism

• Some natural objects themselves have moral
  standing
• Sub-problems
• Ethical treatment of animals
• Mass extinction

15
Holistic EthicsDeep Green Environmentalism

• Definition
• our moral responsibilities lie with collections
  ofor relationships betweenindividuals, not the
  individuals themselves.
• Focus is shifted to
• Species
• Populations
• Ecosystems
• Characteristics
• Problems pose danger to anything within this
  unrestricted field
• Humans have duties far beyond those recognized by
  traditional moralities
• Living things and natural systems have moral value

16
Social Ethics
17
Thought ExperimentThe Last Man
18
(No Transcript)