Fundamentals of Normative Ethics

Fundamentals of Normative Ethics

Examining the study of normative ethics in more detail will better help us recognize different ethical viewpoints, and their impact on sustainability, as we move through the course.

Ethical Action

Normative ethics has three major subfields: virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. We will focus on deontology and consequentialism because these two subfields are concerned with how to determine what makes ethical actions. Deontology and Consequentialism are two different approaches for determining the moral correctness of an action. Deontology considers the action in and of itself, regardless of the outcome. In many ways, deontological ethics focus on rules for right behavior. Consequentialism is an ethical framework that focuses on the end result of behavior and can justify acts such as lying, stealing, or even violence if the end result brings the most benefit to all those with moral standing.

Look back at the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon from the previous section. It's a funny illustration of the fundamental debate between deontology and consequentialism. Let's consider an example that falls within the scope of this course. Is the act of clearing forest cover fundamentally unethical? Is it acceptable to do so if the end result is more beneficial, such as preventing the spread of forest fire, or providing needed resources to humans? It is not an easy question to answer. And you've hopefully noticed that it raises an equally important ethical question: do trees (or forests) have intrinsic value? We will consider this last question in more detail in a moment.

Justice

Justice is a core concept for the study of sustainability and human-environment relations. Justice is essentially a concept of fairness, but in ethical terms, it refers to the fair treatment due to all things that have intrinsic value (and thus moral standing). In many cases, justice is defined by legal systems, but regardless of how just treatment is defined, the concept is closely related to ethics. For this course, we will focus on two particular forms of justice: distributive and procedural.

Distributive justice emphasizes the fair distribution of gains and losses across populations. Distributive justice is thus closely related to consequentialist ethics, and particularly utilitarianism. Sustainability and other environmental policies often impact different segments of a population differently. The decision to locate a mine, for instance, will have a very different (and often negative) impact on the people living and working at the selected location than those living farther away. All the people in this situation may equally benefit from the copper produced by the mine, but only those that live nearby will have to deal with pollution, or degraded drinking water often associated with mineral extraction. Often, the distribution of these positive and negative impacts closely mirrors divisions of race and class, which adds a complex but important layer to discussions of ethics and justice. The field of research and activism that focuses on the unequal impact of environmental pollution and degradation on the poor and people of color is known as environmental justice. This is an important area of distributive justice research in the field of geography.

Procedural justice is closely related to distributive justice but emphasizes how decisions are made. Procedural justice is thus mainly interested in the process of deciding which actions to take and has some overlap with deontological ethics. A core procedural justice principle is that everyone who is affected by a decision should have some say in how the decision is made. There are many ways to implement procedural justice. Democracy is one of them and we'll explore the concept in depth later in this module.

Environmental change is very challenging for procedural justice because it is very difficult to include everyone's opinions in a decision. The following reading develops this challenge further.

The excerpt from O'Neil's paper raises an important question for considerations of justice, and ethics in general: what would it mean to have justice for environments? Thus far, our discussion of ethics has focused on humans, particularly human individuals. What would it mean, in ethical terms, to extend moral consideration to non-humans and ecosystems? That is one of the primary concerns of the field of environmental ethics.

Anthropocentrism, Biocentrism, and Ecocentrism

As you can imagine, there is much debate among environmental ethicists as to incorporate non-humans and environments into normative ethical considerations. Many of these debates contrast several ethical viewpoints that differ in regard to what things possess intrinsic value. In this course, an important contrast is between ethical viewpoints known as anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism.

Anthropocentrism is an ethical perspective that holds that only humans - particularly individual humans - possess intrinsic value. And anthropocentric ethical argument considers all non-human individuals (wolves, chickens, trees, etc.), as well as collective entities like ecosystems, possess only instrumental value in so far as they are a benefit to humans. This is not to say that anthropocentrists do not advocate for conservation or environmental sustainability. Quite the contrary. But they pursue environmental protection because it maintains or expands those instrumental values for humans.

Biocentrism and ecocentrism are ethical perspectives that also afford intrinsic value to non-human things. Biocentrism, as the name implies, expands intrinsic value and moral consideration to non-human living things (animals, and sometimes plants). Like anthropocentrism, biocentrism in most cases only gives moral consideration to human and non-human individuals, and it is sometimes called moral extensionalism because it simply extends traditional anthropocentric ethics to non-humans. Ecocentrism also affords intrinsic value to non-humans, but as a collectivist ethic, it also extends moral standing to holistic entities like ecosystems or species. From an ecocentric perspective, then, both the living and non-living members of ecosystems have intrinsic value.

Keep in mind that in both of these perspectives humans also have intrinsic value, and in most cases, biocentric and ecocentric ethical perspectives do not place non-humans of ecosystems above humans. But humans are no longer morally exceptional. That means that when considering issues of distributive or procedural justice from a biocentric or ecocentric viewpoint, non-humans and ecosystems must also receive fair treatment in the decision-making process and the distribution of positive and negative environmental impacts. This brief exploration of ethics makes it clear why environmental issues that bring groups of people with anthropocentric and ecocentric ethical viewpoints into conflict can produce seemingly intractable disagreements. These ethical issues are a critical component of effective sustainability policy and action.

Speciesism

The expansion of moral standing and consideration that comes with biocentrism and ecocentrism often introduces the concept of speciesism: the practice of giving greater moral consideration to one species over others. Speciesism is similar to racism, or sexism, but it is often much more difficult to detect. This is partly because what many call speciesism is usually humans giving greater moral consideration to other humans over non-humans. This is classic anthropocentrism, and it is very common - even instinctive. But there are many people that consider the practice of putting humans first as unethical as racial discrimination.

The concept of speciesism raises major questions. Should any species – human or otherwise – be given greater intrinsic value than any other species? On what grounds could this be? People have argued that humans are exceptional because of language and human reasoning (a position made famous by the philosopher René Descartes), emotional capacity, and other abilities. But biologists consistently find that, while humans are relatively strong in these ways, they are not unique: other animals can use language and reason or feel emotions. Thus many people argue that we should care about non-human animals similarly to how we care about humans. (We say "other animals" and "non-human animals" because (obviously) humans are classified as animals, too.)

For example, if we care about human welfare – about human happiness and suffering and life flourishing – then perhaps we should care about the welfare of non-human animals as well. Such considerations are especially important in discussions about food and agriculture, given the vast numbers of livestock animals that are alive in our food system.

You might feel like the notion of speciesism creates some intractable problems. Would a rejection of speciesism require equal legal rights and protections for all non-human animals? For trees? Must we all become vegetarians? Some ethicists and activists say yes. Others argue that there are distinctions. Philosopher Paul Taylor, for example, argues that it is immoral for a human to kill a wild animal when it is not necessary for subsistence, but in cases where the human would otherwise starve, it is permissible. He also argues that so long as livestock animals do not suffer while alive, there is no moral difference between eating that animal and eating a plant (since both possess intrinsic value). Taylor does argue for vegetarianism in most cases, however, because plant based diets allow more land to be devoted to nature (a point that is debatable). What moral consideration do we owe, then, to a living animal that is destined to be our food?
 

Moving Forward

These last few sections offer up quite a few profound ideas to ponder. As we move through the course, keep a critical eye open for the ways that differing ethical perspectives, even unconscious positions, influence debates about human uses of the environment.