Does Environmental Ethics Have a Future?

Dale JamiesonNYU

The Environmental Humanities in a Changing WorldPrinceton Environment Institute

Princeton UniversityMarch 8, 2013

In one sense Sure!

There is an ethics regarding everything we use

that affects what we care about

My Interest is in

• The centrality of ethics in the American environmental movement

• The question of whether the environmental crisis requires a new ethic

• The viability of environmental ethics as an academic field

The Centrality of Ethicsin the Environmental Movement

Henry David Thoreau1817-1862

Thoreau’s Ethics and Philosophy

• Civil disobedience• Abolitionism• Anti-war• Anti-corporal punishment• Respect for animals• Simplicity• Ethics of perception• Transcendentalism

Thoreau is “squarely in the virtue ethics tradition” (Cafaro 2004, 127)

John Muir1838-1914

Preservationism based on nature’s• spiritual and aesthetic value• intrinsic value

“We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.” –June 9, 1872 letter to Miss Catharine Merrill, from New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley, in Badè’s Life and Letters of John Muir

Gifford Pinchot1865-1946

“Conservation Ethics”

Progressive Republican

“The greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time”—W.J. McGee

Equity and scientific management

“There are just two things on this material Earth--people and natural resources.” (1947, p. 325)

Aldo Leopold1887-1948

Image Source: http://www.news.wisc.edu/21058

The “Land Ethic” rejected both sides of Pinchot’s dichotomy

“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and

animals, or collectively: the land. . . . In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from

conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow

members, and also respect for the community as such.” (p.20)

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the bioethic community. It is wrong

with it tends otherwise (p. 262).

“No important change in ethics was every accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis,

loyalties, affections, and convictions.”

Leopold as a Moralist

Silent Spring, p. 297

The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modem and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.

Silent Spring is dedicated to Albert Schweitzer

–organist, theologian, medical missionary, winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize–"Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for

Life.”

Carson wrote the Forward to Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines (1964)

Lynn White Jr.“The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”

(1967)

“What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.”

Richard Routley “Is There a Need for a New, an

Environmental Ethic?” (1973)

Two Possibilities

• Mind-independent value – (Rolston III)

• Holism– (Callicott)

The Current (Rough) Consensus

Strong environmentalist arguments do not require the metaphysical and normative baggage of mind-independence and holism

There is no special kind of value that environmentalists can appeal to that will make their opponents drop dead

A Challenge to Environmental Ethics

What is distinctive about the field if the environmental crisis does not require a new ethic?

In addition it suffers from

The double curse of being perceived as a new,

applied subfield within philosophy

Slow acceptance by philosophy departments

in elite institutions means lack of graduate

training and agreed standards of competence

Environmental Ethics risks being

• Exiled from Philosophy

• Lost in Environmental Studies

Where Are We Now With Respect to My Three Questions?

• The centrality of ethics in the American environmental movement

• The question of whether the environmental crisis requires a new ethic

• The viability of environmental ethics as an academic field

Moral and managerial approaches to environmental problems ebb, flow, conflict

and complementBUT

The trend across many issues is towards the dominance of the managerial though

desperation often leads to the reassertion of the moral

Environmental problems such as climate change do require revisions in our morality, especially around concepts of responsibility

“Today we face the possibility that the global environment may be destroyed, yet no one will be

responsible. This is a new problem.”Jamieson 1992

Rather than being in crisis, environmental ethics may be shape-shifting as environmental issues are taken up as subfields or dimensions

of problems in a wide range of fields

But if soit is against the background

of a larger

crisis in our universities

and

systems of knowledge production

These are topics for another day