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by Benjamin Hale
Chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics
Edited by S. M. Gardiner and A. Thompson (2016)
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199941339.013.19
For years, many people have believed that the only reasonable way to approach a problem of environmental concern is to evaluate the eventuating state of affairs. Since environmental matters are primarily about states of affairs, these ‘consequentialist’ approaches appear to make sense. More recently, however, others have looked to different branches of philosophy for guidance. These non- or anti-consequentialist theorists typically fall into two camps: act-oriented camps and character-oriented camps. This chapter aims to defend nonconsequentialist act-oriented ethics, and in particular, a deontological justificatory liberalism, as at least one plausible route forward for environmental ethics. It does so by suggesting that more traditional consequentialist approaches to environmental problems are subject to potentially devastating criticisms that can more adequately be handled by some deontological approaches.
Though estimates vary, experts believe that nearly 80,000 acres of rainforest are destroyed daily; a further 150 to 200 species of plants, insects, birds and/or mammals go extinct every day; and approximately 85% of global fish stocks have already been destroyed or depleted. It is tempting to assess these findings and suppose that the salient ethical problem is that nature has been degraded or devalued, that the ensuing state of affairs is less valuable or desirable than it otherwise might have been. According to this way of thinking, what makes an action right is whether it promotes or produces the good. In this respect, a preponderance of views about environmental wrongdoing are expressly consequentialist.
Such a view is quite reasonable. When talking about the environment, are we not first and foremost concerned with states of affairs? Certainly one cannot believe that mountains have rights, or that one has duties to streams. But consequentialist approaches to environmental wrongdoing are subject to many of the classical concerns that have otherwise plagued non-environmental consequentialism. That is, they are subject to concerns about welfarism, aggregationism, responsibility, demandingness, and applicability.
In this chapter I would like to defend a variant view of environmental deontology that strikes me as at least less problematic than other environmental positions. I shall approach the topic first by assessing the most prevalent environmental standpoint: consequentialism. My strategy here will be primarily negative, in that I will offer five complications for environmental consequentialism, suggesting that a nonconsequentialist account may be better equipped to address environmental concerns. I will then touch on three complications for nonconsequentialist accounts with the objective of zeroing in on a plausible deontological view. At the end, I offer a few reasons as to why the account that I favor—roughly a deontological account—may be better suited to deal with environmental issues than a consequentialist account. I have little space in an essay of this length to cover the full breadth of objections to the consequentialist account, but it is important to note that consequentialist arguments of various stripes have been offered across an enormous range of environmental subfields and that very often the chink in the armor for the environmental position rests with one of the weaknesses I will adumbrate. Read more …
