Climate change and the environment
For Lapifors
This was what I could find on the environment. There's a very in-depth Dialogue article here, and I've typed it up in full so you can make your own notes (and because this is my first time reading it, too - I'm making an educated guess and ignoring environment for the sake of my sanity). I hope it helps. Apologies for any typos - I'm rubbish at touch-typing, but I wanted to get this done as quickly as possible for you.
This took SO LONG. I really hope you can understand it, because it didn't make much sense to me. I kinda cut off bits at the end because my brain was exploding. And I'll type up the religious language article I found when my vision goes back to normal :P
Can Morality Save the Planet?
In the Bible, God sent the Flood which Noah floated on because "the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and ... every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evinl continually". Always rather irascible, God simply lost patience on this famous occasion: "And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creepiong things, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them." (Genesis 6, vv.5,7). Perhaps if humanity had behaved itself better up to that point, it might have escaped inundation - at least until God lost patience over something else. Meanwhile, it was Noah's moral fibre which we all have to thank for our being still around.
Most of us don't any longer believe that morality can save the planet in that kind of way. Sea-level rise threatens hundreds of millions of people directly by the end of the century, and many more through the knock-on effects of economic disruption and population displacement. But this isn't some divine chastisement, avoidable maybe if we cut back on the thieving, hedge-fund promotion and casual sex. Rather, it is being caused by the melting of polar ice, caused in turn by global warming, and there is now overwhelming evidence that global warming is being caused by human-produced atmospheric carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases". Similarly, all the other environmental problems of which we are now increasingly aware - the pollution, the desertification, the loss of habitats and biodiversity in general - are ultimately down to rapidly growing human populations and the nature of their economic activities, which require resources and energy and generate wastes. And these economic activities aren't themselves sinful, along the sort of lines that would have infuriated the God of Genesis. On the contrary, they can be seen as humanity trying hard to do its best - trying, over several centuries in the advanced societies, to eliminate poverty, hunger, disease, unemployment and inequality through the application of our increasing technological know-how in industrialised production.
So isn't all this, we might well ask, essentially a prudential and techncal rather than a moral issue? Don't we simply need to use our ingenuity to find ways of getting the material, social and health benefits of modern life without causing environmental consequences wihich outweigh these benefits?
Morality, however, does seem to force its way back into this picture. Environmental problems arise through slow, cumulative processes. The adverse effects build up as gradual changes in the balance of ecosystems, the chemical composition of the atmosphere and so on. Such cumulative alteration can lead to decisive step-changes and pattern-shifts as thresholds are crossed, but only over considerable time-spans. It is therefore a characteristic of all these processes that their benefits tend to accrue to us, that is, to human beings presently alive, while their disbenefits are either for the future, or for other species trying with increasing difficulty to go on living around us. It is certainly the case, so rapidly have things been moving since these problems were fist identified, that many of the human downsides will be starting to emerge in the lifetimes of people now living. But the really serious disbenefits are thse which wither afflict the non-human creatures and species now being harried, stressed and eliminated, or are going to accrue to human beings (as well as other creatures) not yet born, who risk inheriting a global desert.
So crudely speaking, this is a situation in which, overall, we get the fun, and various others have to pick up the pieces. There is a very strong tendency - basic selfishness - to go for this kind of situation where we can, and it is precisely this tendency which morality exists to confront. Motality, on the most common interpretation of it, is about making the likely harms to others at least as effective in my motivation as the likely benefits to me.
Once we acknowledge this, it can start to seem as if morality is actually the only thing that could save the planet. This is because, as long as we are thinking just prudentially - that is, about how to get the most benefirt from our activities at the least environmentat cost to our later selves - it is merely human nature to emphasise the benfits (to be enjoyed now) abd downplay the costs (to be met a whole lot later). Think about how this works in your own case, when there is something you are keen on doing now that you know you may come in due course to regret. Our anticipated furture wants don't press on us as vividly as our present wants, and the only reality which they have is our representing them to ourselves now - something which we are always doing under the impulse of the wants which this consideration is supposed to be restraining, so that the temptation to say "Well, it won't be so bad" is always there. We are good at translating this tacit favouring of our present wants into whatever system of quantifying the costs we choose, in part because putting numbers on changes in highly complex systems a long way into the future - say, for icebergs likely to melt or species to be destroyed - involves a lot of guesstimating, despite its going under the name of science. Thus, on the prudential model, the tendency to treat the biosphere and the future as mattering less than our present wants is built into our attempts to correct that very tendency. Clearly, such "correction" is going nowhere fast - and ever faster, as ecological pressures build up. Only morality, it would appear, can give the environmental costs any chance of robustly counting against the present benefits.
That emphasis on morality certainly reflects some quite deep intuitions which people have in this field. Most of us (on paper, probably all of us) would agree with former US Vice-President Al Gore that "it is wrong to destroy the hibitability of our planet, and ruin the prospects of every generation that follows ours". Even apart from the prospects of future human generations, we may well feel that we morally ought not to do things like destroying rainforests, which results in reducing biodiversity and extinguishing other species.
It is in recognition of this apparently fundamental role of morality in relation to saving the planet that the philosophical discipline of environmental ethics has grown up, separating itself out from the broader field of philosophical ethics over roughly the last forty years. This is the same period, since the publication of Rachel Carson's groundbreaking Silent Spring, as has seen the emergence of the worldwide green movement and the progress of its concerns from the fringes to the political and social mainstream.
But why should a specifically philosophical discipline be so important here? After all, we don't typically call on philosophy in making normal, close-up moral decisions. What we need when confronting our ordinary, everyday temptations to do harm are things like strength of character, frankness of disposition, sympathetic feeling for others and a bit of imagination, rather than philosophical reflection. Why should philosophy be of any greater practical significance in the environmental connection?
The reason is that bringing morality to bear on saving the planet involves difficulties which it needs philosophy to address. In fact, it needs philosophy even to spell them out. If it is wrong to warm up the world, damage the biosphere and destroy the habitability of the planet, whom or what do we wrong? It isn't possible to do wrong without wronging something or someone. That's already a philosophical point, about what is conceptually required by the the idea of "doing wrong". So if, in respect of the environment, we have duties and obligations which we do wrong in failing to fulfil, to whom or to what do we owe these duties and how far do they extend?
This kind of question isn't a serious theoretical problem in ordinary moral relations. In the standard person-to-person case we can see and interact directly with those to whom we may have moral obligations - and obligations reaching over greater distances can still be mediated by communication and dialogue, in a variety of forms. Where these obligations clash, as so often they do, we have a host of moral institutions, in which everyone can in principle participate, to help us decide which moral claims should take precedence and how to handle the conflict between them These intricately-networked forms of mutual accountability range from the habit of unforced face-to-face discussion, through the informal arbitration of third parties, all the way to ethics committees, tribunals and law courts.
But the question of whom or what we might be wronging and how to adjudicate our obligations is a big theoretical problem in relation to the environment, and for the very same reasons that we need morality in this domain at all. As we have seen, that is because present humans are "exporting" significant harm unto the future and across the species boundary. The objects of our putative duties and obligations in this arena are therefore not going to be entities with whom we are able to communicate, as in the standard situaltions for which morality seems evolutionarily and culturally designed. Rather they will be new kinds of object, with whom, or with which, it looks as if our moral interaction will have to be differently configured. Potential future people, other individual creatures, other living things in general and other species have all been proposed as such objects of moral consieration or obligation - as having, in the favoured terminology, moral standing.
In brief, something S has moral standing if S has a claim to be treated in a certain way. It is important to distinguish this from someone's having a claim that S be treated in a certain way. Thus for example, a stone doesn't have a claim to not be dropped into the gears of a piece of expensive machinery, but the owner of the machinery might have a claim that the stone be not dropped. Or perhaps, the living things whose habitat the machinery was about to be used to vandalise might have a countervailing claim that someone should drop the stone... Similarly, if we have a general obligation to reject doing injury to things, that can only make sense in respect of things which, unlike stones, can be injured or harmed.
What we find here is a challenge to morality to extend its ordinary scope. In this respect, environmental ethics, which is esssentially the business of trying to find rational grounds for this extension, is characteristic of other kinds of ethcial consideration which have lately emerged and come to be associated in the broad filed of bioethics. This deals with ethical issues raised by the rapid recent development of our technological capacities in a variety of different directions. All of the difficult questions in these various areas raise the underlying meta-ethical issue of what kind of object of our concern can count as having moral standing.
For something to be wronged is for it to be deprived of a good, to which it is entitled. (The latter qualification is important - a burglar required to restore stolen property to its righful owner is plausibly deprived of a good, but not thereby wronged.) So what do we wrong environmentally? How has environmental ethics risen to its challenge?
If we could say we were wronging natural species in this fashion, that would perhaps be the most straightforward way to extend moral consideration beyond present humans. Our technologies have changed the natural world almost out of recognition over the past two centuries. Can the destructive aspects of that process be represented directly as a wrong to all the many thousands of other species affected? If so, the implications for our way of life would be system-wide.
The trouble here is that a species does not seem to be the kind of thing which can be wronged, because it is not the kind of thing which can have a good of its own of which it can be deprived. It thus can't have a claim, on its own behalf, to be treated in such a way that its good is respected. It can be put under pressure, brought to the brink of extinction or even actually extinguished, without thereby being harmed. (And, on the other hand, it can be saved from extinction without being benefitted)
Philosophical attempts have been made to portray species and natural systems as things which have a natural good of their own. Accounts advocating this approach include Aldo Leopold's land ethic (at least on one construal of it) and Lawrence Johnson's "morally deep world". But this is really as unpersuasive as saying that a company, for instance, can have a good of its own. A species is a biological-classificatory entity as a company is a legal-classificatory entity. If you wrong all the individuals (workers and shareholders) comprising a company, say by defrauding them collectively, you don't also wrong the company - to suppose you do is just a category mistake, like supposing that the team is on the field alongside the eleven players. We can certainly give species a legal entitlement to protection (as does much conservation law and international regulation), just as we can construct legal entitlements and obligations for companies as "legal persons". But species could only be morally entitled to this legal entitlement if they themselves could be harmed or benefitted. And this seems to extend the concept beyond breaking-point.
If not species, then perhaps it is the indicidual organisms comprising them that we wtong? Certainly, if that were the case, we should be wronging living others on a vast and utterly unprecendeted scale. Here, the key idea is that anything which can flourish can be wronged. Paul Taylor, a well-known proponent of this approach, calls such things "teleological centres of life" - entities which just by virtue of being alive have a "project" as it were, of living as fully as possible in the way that is naturally given to them.
This, just so far, would include non-sentient organisms - those with no feeling, awareness or consciousness - as well as sentient ones. So, for instance, a plant would flourish in this sense by living its natural span, getting adequate nutrition from soil and sunlight and not becoming stunted or diseased. Things which can flourish, it might seem, are harmed if prevented from doing so. We might say that it is good for a tree to flourish because when it does so, it is healthier, better developed, and so on, than if it hadn't. There is an important sense in which its own individual organic life goes better, which is not something that we can say about a classification-entity like a species.
But can this give rise to any claim from the tree, as it were? The argument that its life goes better seems to come down to saying that flourishing is good for it because it will then be displaying various features of...flourishing! This is no doubt true, but then, how does it benefit a tree to flourish? If the response is only that the tree benfits by flourishing, the question is not being answered but side-stepped. We can bring this out if we ask, by contrast, how it benefits a person to flourish. It does so because he or she feels better, enjoys life more, can do more things. What constitutes flourishing for a person can be expressed in terms of the added value which these things supply in an experienced life. There is no analogy for anything non-sentient - flourishing doesn't add value to its life for a tree (though it may well add value to the tree's life, providing we can fins dome other way of giving content to that idea). But then a corollary of this is that the tree is not harmed by failure to flourish, in any sense which goes with a wrong committed in prevnting it from flourishing.
It is also important that, in this connection, the key issue of prioritising starts to emerge. If we say that anything which lives (and is thereby capable of flourishing) has some kind of right or entitlement to flourish, we hit the problem that all life proceeds only by preying on other life. This is true, not only of animals eating one another and feeding on vegetable matter, but even of plants stranging other plants in the competition for life-space. How can we get any viable sense of right and wrong in this context? Priority principles like Paul Taylor's (where an organism's basic project of living is supposed to take precedence over anything else's non-basic projects or interests) lead to counterintuitive results. Can it really be the case that I morally shouldn't weed the garden?
But there are even deeper difficulties lurking here. They become dramatically more prominent when we narrow down the field of indicidual non-human living things which might be wronged to include only sentient organisms: that is, animals - or at least, those with nervous systems sophisticated enough to make them conscious of their surroundings and of what happens to them.
It seems clear that such beings can be wronged by way of harm. It is not just that, from a utilitarian point of view, they are obviously capable of suffering and enjoyment (a point made by Peter Singer). The underlying point is that, because of this experiential dimension, it makes sense to think of their lives not just as going better or worse, but as going berrer or worse for them. They are thus, unlike species or non-sentient organisms, in a position to be deprived of life-goods to which they are naturally entitled. This is why a lot of philosophers talk about "animal rights" and think that our respecting these rights is an important way in which improved morality would tend towards saving the planet.
The crunch comes, however, when - having acknowledged such prima facie moral standing - we start to register how much prioritising is nevertheless going to have to be involved. Though both a human being and, say, a mouse are sentient creatures, each with a good of its own, it is just utterly implausable to say that wronging a mouse by harming it matters as much as doing so to a human. But maybe harmin (by squeezing the habitats and livelihoods of) badgers, or black rhino, or Bengal tigers, matters more? So perhaps some complex hierarchy of moral standing among environmentally threatened sentient creatures is going to have to be constructed. This might be a challenge to which we could hope to rise - with the help of ethology and animal psychology and neuroscience, perhaps. But the real trouble is that constraints which operate on us through such a hierarchy will have ceased to be genuinely moral constraints.
Peter Singer, for instance, as a utilitarian, suggests a general principle of interspecies impartiality: "No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering - insofar as rough comparisons can be made - of any other being". We are being impartial when we give equal consideration to the like suffering of every being capable of suffering. But to apply that criterion, we have also to make a judgement about what is to count as suffering. Such equivalences are not simply a given. Singer half-acknowledges this with his "insofare as rough comparisons can be made". The point is, however, not that the comparisons are only rough, but that which comparisons are not too rough to serve is very typically not something we discover but something we have to decide. Maybe the interest of any complex sentient being in avoiding excruciating pain is roughly comparable to that of any other complex sentient being. But it is not evident that, for instance, being in a fair degree of chronic distress would matter as much to a creature which lacked the capacity for self-pity, apprehension and regret as it would to a human. Whether this is so, and if it is, how much less it would matter, and in which cases, are things which humans must adjudicate - not of course causally, but after weighing up the evidence.
This, however, is just the problem. The impartiality necessary to a morality of dealing with others requires that the other's interests matter independently of your preferences. That must include independence of your agenda-setting preferences as to which interests are to matter most. That in turn must mean that each party involved has a claim, not just to be treated impartially, but to be heard impartially in claims about what should count as impartial treatment, and to have an equitable role in the process of adjudicating these claims. This condition can sometimes be met in relations between people, but it is never met, because it can't be, in the arena of our relations with non-humans. Morality in this arena is therefore only ever shadow-morality. It offers the appearance of a constraint on human behaviour, but one which in practice humans can always fudge to their own advantage - so that whatever kind of creature it is that stands in the way of our most strongly favoured projects is liable to be found - surprise, surprise - to matter just not quite enough to make us abandon them.
Once we see this, however, we are brought up hard against the major problem with this whole "extensionist" approach. For we then can't avoid recognising that just the same kind of argument applies in respect of our supposed moral duties to future human generations as well.
If morality, rather that prudential concern, is needed to save the planet, and an "extended" morality is required for this, but no extension of morality beyond real-life interpersonal engagement really works, aren't we... well, doomed?
This was what I could find on the environment. There's a very in-depth Dialogue article here, and I've typed it up in full so you can make your own notes (and because this is my first time reading it, too - I'm making an educated guess and ignoring environment for the sake of my sanity). I hope it helps. Apologies for any typos - I'm rubbish at touch-typing, but I wanted to get this done as quickly as possible for you.
This took SO LONG. I really hope you can understand it, because it didn't make much sense to me. I kinda cut off bits at the end because my brain was exploding. And I'll type up the religious language article I found when my vision goes back to normal :P
Can Morality Save the Planet?
In the Bible, God sent the Flood which Noah floated on because "the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and ... every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evinl continually". Always rather irascible, God simply lost patience on this famous occasion: "And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creepiong things, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them." (Genesis 6, vv.5,7). Perhaps if humanity had behaved itself better up to that point, it might have escaped inundation - at least until God lost patience over something else. Meanwhile, it was Noah's moral fibre which we all have to thank for our being still around.
Most of us don't any longer believe that morality can save the planet in that kind of way. Sea-level rise threatens hundreds of millions of people directly by the end of the century, and many more through the knock-on effects of economic disruption and population displacement. But this isn't some divine chastisement, avoidable maybe if we cut back on the thieving, hedge-fund promotion and casual sex. Rather, it is being caused by the melting of polar ice, caused in turn by global warming, and there is now overwhelming evidence that global warming is being caused by human-produced atmospheric carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases". Similarly, all the other environmental problems of which we are now increasingly aware - the pollution, the desertification, the loss of habitats and biodiversity in general - are ultimately down to rapidly growing human populations and the nature of their economic activities, which require resources and energy and generate wastes. And these economic activities aren't themselves sinful, along the sort of lines that would have infuriated the God of Genesis. On the contrary, they can be seen as humanity trying hard to do its best - trying, over several centuries in the advanced societies, to eliminate poverty, hunger, disease, unemployment and inequality through the application of our increasing technological know-how in industrialised production.
So isn't all this, we might well ask, essentially a prudential and techncal rather than a moral issue? Don't we simply need to use our ingenuity to find ways of getting the material, social and health benefits of modern life without causing environmental consequences wihich outweigh these benefits?
Morality, however, does seem to force its way back into this picture. Environmental problems arise through slow, cumulative processes. The adverse effects build up as gradual changes in the balance of ecosystems, the chemical composition of the atmosphere and so on. Such cumulative alteration can lead to decisive step-changes and pattern-shifts as thresholds are crossed, but only over considerable time-spans. It is therefore a characteristic of all these processes that their benefits tend to accrue to us, that is, to human beings presently alive, while their disbenefits are either for the future, or for other species trying with increasing difficulty to go on living around us. It is certainly the case, so rapidly have things been moving since these problems were fist identified, that many of the human downsides will be starting to emerge in the lifetimes of people now living. But the really serious disbenefits are thse which wither afflict the non-human creatures and species now being harried, stressed and eliminated, or are going to accrue to human beings (as well as other creatures) not yet born, who risk inheriting a global desert.
So crudely speaking, this is a situation in which, overall, we get the fun, and various others have to pick up the pieces. There is a very strong tendency - basic selfishness - to go for this kind of situation where we can, and it is precisely this tendency which morality exists to confront. Motality, on the most common interpretation of it, is about making the likely harms to others at least as effective in my motivation as the likely benefits to me.
Once we acknowledge this, it can start to seem as if morality is actually the only thing that could save the planet. This is because, as long as we are thinking just prudentially - that is, about how to get the most benefirt from our activities at the least environmentat cost to our later selves - it is merely human nature to emphasise the benfits (to be enjoyed now) abd downplay the costs (to be met a whole lot later). Think about how this works in your own case, when there is something you are keen on doing now that you know you may come in due course to regret. Our anticipated furture wants don't press on us as vividly as our present wants, and the only reality which they have is our representing them to ourselves now - something which we are always doing under the impulse of the wants which this consideration is supposed to be restraining, so that the temptation to say "Well, it won't be so bad" is always there. We are good at translating this tacit favouring of our present wants into whatever system of quantifying the costs we choose, in part because putting numbers on changes in highly complex systems a long way into the future - say, for icebergs likely to melt or species to be destroyed - involves a lot of guesstimating, despite its going under the name of science. Thus, on the prudential model, the tendency to treat the biosphere and the future as mattering less than our present wants is built into our attempts to correct that very tendency. Clearly, such "correction" is going nowhere fast - and ever faster, as ecological pressures build up. Only morality, it would appear, can give the environmental costs any chance of robustly counting against the present benefits.
That emphasis on morality certainly reflects some quite deep intuitions which people have in this field. Most of us (on paper, probably all of us) would agree with former US Vice-President Al Gore that "it is wrong to destroy the hibitability of our planet, and ruin the prospects of every generation that follows ours". Even apart from the prospects of future human generations, we may well feel that we morally ought not to do things like destroying rainforests, which results in reducing biodiversity and extinguishing other species.
It is in recognition of this apparently fundamental role of morality in relation to saving the planet that the philosophical discipline of environmental ethics has grown up, separating itself out from the broader field of philosophical ethics over roughly the last forty years. This is the same period, since the publication of Rachel Carson's groundbreaking Silent Spring, as has seen the emergence of the worldwide green movement and the progress of its concerns from the fringes to the political and social mainstream.
But why should a specifically philosophical discipline be so important here? After all, we don't typically call on philosophy in making normal, close-up moral decisions. What we need when confronting our ordinary, everyday temptations to do harm are things like strength of character, frankness of disposition, sympathetic feeling for others and a bit of imagination, rather than philosophical reflection. Why should philosophy be of any greater practical significance in the environmental connection?
The reason is that bringing morality to bear on saving the planet involves difficulties which it needs philosophy to address. In fact, it needs philosophy even to spell them out. If it is wrong to warm up the world, damage the biosphere and destroy the habitability of the planet, whom or what do we wrong? It isn't possible to do wrong without wronging something or someone. That's already a philosophical point, about what is conceptually required by the the idea of "doing wrong". So if, in respect of the environment, we have duties and obligations which we do wrong in failing to fulfil, to whom or to what do we owe these duties and how far do they extend?
This kind of question isn't a serious theoretical problem in ordinary moral relations. In the standard person-to-person case we can see and interact directly with those to whom we may have moral obligations - and obligations reaching over greater distances can still be mediated by communication and dialogue, in a variety of forms. Where these obligations clash, as so often they do, we have a host of moral institutions, in which everyone can in principle participate, to help us decide which moral claims should take precedence and how to handle the conflict between them These intricately-networked forms of mutual accountability range from the habit of unforced face-to-face discussion, through the informal arbitration of third parties, all the way to ethics committees, tribunals and law courts.
But the question of whom or what we might be wronging and how to adjudicate our obligations is a big theoretical problem in relation to the environment, and for the very same reasons that we need morality in this domain at all. As we have seen, that is because present humans are "exporting" significant harm unto the future and across the species boundary. The objects of our putative duties and obligations in this arena are therefore not going to be entities with whom we are able to communicate, as in the standard situaltions for which morality seems evolutionarily and culturally designed. Rather they will be new kinds of object, with whom, or with which, it looks as if our moral interaction will have to be differently configured. Potential future people, other individual creatures, other living things in general and other species have all been proposed as such objects of moral consieration or obligation - as having, in the favoured terminology, moral standing.
In brief, something S has moral standing if S has a claim to be treated in a certain way. It is important to distinguish this from someone's having a claim that S be treated in a certain way. Thus for example, a stone doesn't have a claim to not be dropped into the gears of a piece of expensive machinery, but the owner of the machinery might have a claim that the stone be not dropped. Or perhaps, the living things whose habitat the machinery was about to be used to vandalise might have a countervailing claim that someone should drop the stone... Similarly, if we have a general obligation to reject doing injury to things, that can only make sense in respect of things which, unlike stones, can be injured or harmed.
What we find here is a challenge to morality to extend its ordinary scope. In this respect, environmental ethics, which is esssentially the business of trying to find rational grounds for this extension, is characteristic of other kinds of ethcial consideration which have lately emerged and come to be associated in the broad filed of bioethics. This deals with ethical issues raised by the rapid recent development of our technological capacities in a variety of different directions. All of the difficult questions in these various areas raise the underlying meta-ethical issue of what kind of object of our concern can count as having moral standing.
For something to be wronged is for it to be deprived of a good, to which it is entitled. (The latter qualification is important - a burglar required to restore stolen property to its righful owner is plausibly deprived of a good, but not thereby wronged.) So what do we wrong environmentally? How has environmental ethics risen to its challenge?
If we could say we were wronging natural species in this fashion, that would perhaps be the most straightforward way to extend moral consideration beyond present humans. Our technologies have changed the natural world almost out of recognition over the past two centuries. Can the destructive aspects of that process be represented directly as a wrong to all the many thousands of other species affected? If so, the implications for our way of life would be system-wide.
The trouble here is that a species does not seem to be the kind of thing which can be wronged, because it is not the kind of thing which can have a good of its own of which it can be deprived. It thus can't have a claim, on its own behalf, to be treated in such a way that its good is respected. It can be put under pressure, brought to the brink of extinction or even actually extinguished, without thereby being harmed. (And, on the other hand, it can be saved from extinction without being benefitted)
Philosophical attempts have been made to portray species and natural systems as things which have a natural good of their own. Accounts advocating this approach include Aldo Leopold's land ethic (at least on one construal of it) and Lawrence Johnson's "morally deep world". But this is really as unpersuasive as saying that a company, for instance, can have a good of its own. A species is a biological-classificatory entity as a company is a legal-classificatory entity. If you wrong all the individuals (workers and shareholders) comprising a company, say by defrauding them collectively, you don't also wrong the company - to suppose you do is just a category mistake, like supposing that the team is on the field alongside the eleven players. We can certainly give species a legal entitlement to protection (as does much conservation law and international regulation), just as we can construct legal entitlements and obligations for companies as "legal persons". But species could only be morally entitled to this legal entitlement if they themselves could be harmed or benefitted. And this seems to extend the concept beyond breaking-point.
If not species, then perhaps it is the indicidual organisms comprising them that we wtong? Certainly, if that were the case, we should be wronging living others on a vast and utterly unprecendeted scale. Here, the key idea is that anything which can flourish can be wronged. Paul Taylor, a well-known proponent of this approach, calls such things "teleological centres of life" - entities which just by virtue of being alive have a "project" as it were, of living as fully as possible in the way that is naturally given to them.
This, just so far, would include non-sentient organisms - those with no feeling, awareness or consciousness - as well as sentient ones. So, for instance, a plant would flourish in this sense by living its natural span, getting adequate nutrition from soil and sunlight and not becoming stunted or diseased. Things which can flourish, it might seem, are harmed if prevented from doing so. We might say that it is good for a tree to flourish because when it does so, it is healthier, better developed, and so on, than if it hadn't. There is an important sense in which its own individual organic life goes better, which is not something that we can say about a classification-entity like a species.
But can this give rise to any claim from the tree, as it were? The argument that its life goes better seems to come down to saying that flourishing is good for it because it will then be displaying various features of...flourishing! This is no doubt true, but then, how does it benefit a tree to flourish? If the response is only that the tree benfits by flourishing, the question is not being answered but side-stepped. We can bring this out if we ask, by contrast, how it benefits a person to flourish. It does so because he or she feels better, enjoys life more, can do more things. What constitutes flourishing for a person can be expressed in terms of the added value which these things supply in an experienced life. There is no analogy for anything non-sentient - flourishing doesn't add value to its life for a tree (though it may well add value to the tree's life, providing we can fins dome other way of giving content to that idea). But then a corollary of this is that the tree is not harmed by failure to flourish, in any sense which goes with a wrong committed in prevnting it from flourishing.
It is also important that, in this connection, the key issue of prioritising starts to emerge. If we say that anything which lives (and is thereby capable of flourishing) has some kind of right or entitlement to flourish, we hit the problem that all life proceeds only by preying on other life. This is true, not only of animals eating one another and feeding on vegetable matter, but even of plants stranging other plants in the competition for life-space. How can we get any viable sense of right and wrong in this context? Priority principles like Paul Taylor's (where an organism's basic project of living is supposed to take precedence over anything else's non-basic projects or interests) lead to counterintuitive results. Can it really be the case that I morally shouldn't weed the garden?
But there are even deeper difficulties lurking here. They become dramatically more prominent when we narrow down the field of indicidual non-human living things which might be wronged to include only sentient organisms: that is, animals - or at least, those with nervous systems sophisticated enough to make them conscious of their surroundings and of what happens to them.
It seems clear that such beings can be wronged by way of harm. It is not just that, from a utilitarian point of view, they are obviously capable of suffering and enjoyment (a point made by Peter Singer). The underlying point is that, because of this experiential dimension, it makes sense to think of their lives not just as going better or worse, but as going berrer or worse for them. They are thus, unlike species or non-sentient organisms, in a position to be deprived of life-goods to which they are naturally entitled. This is why a lot of philosophers talk about "animal rights" and think that our respecting these rights is an important way in which improved morality would tend towards saving the planet.
The crunch comes, however, when - having acknowledged such prima facie moral standing - we start to register how much prioritising is nevertheless going to have to be involved. Though both a human being and, say, a mouse are sentient creatures, each with a good of its own, it is just utterly implausable to say that wronging a mouse by harming it matters as much as doing so to a human. But maybe harmin (by squeezing the habitats and livelihoods of) badgers, or black rhino, or Bengal tigers, matters more? So perhaps some complex hierarchy of moral standing among environmentally threatened sentient creatures is going to have to be constructed. This might be a challenge to which we could hope to rise - with the help of ethology and animal psychology and neuroscience, perhaps. But the real trouble is that constraints which operate on us through such a hierarchy will have ceased to be genuinely moral constraints.
Peter Singer, for instance, as a utilitarian, suggests a general principle of interspecies impartiality: "No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering - insofar as rough comparisons can be made - of any other being". We are being impartial when we give equal consideration to the like suffering of every being capable of suffering. But to apply that criterion, we have also to make a judgement about what is to count as suffering. Such equivalences are not simply a given. Singer half-acknowledges this with his "insofare as rough comparisons can be made". The point is, however, not that the comparisons are only rough, but that which comparisons are not too rough to serve is very typically not something we discover but something we have to decide. Maybe the interest of any complex sentient being in avoiding excruciating pain is roughly comparable to that of any other complex sentient being. But it is not evident that, for instance, being in a fair degree of chronic distress would matter as much to a creature which lacked the capacity for self-pity, apprehension and regret as it would to a human. Whether this is so, and if it is, how much less it would matter, and in which cases, are things which humans must adjudicate - not of course causally, but after weighing up the evidence.
This, however, is just the problem. The impartiality necessary to a morality of dealing with others requires that the other's interests matter independently of your preferences. That must include independence of your agenda-setting preferences as to which interests are to matter most. That in turn must mean that each party involved has a claim, not just to be treated impartially, but to be heard impartially in claims about what should count as impartial treatment, and to have an equitable role in the process of adjudicating these claims. This condition can sometimes be met in relations between people, but it is never met, because it can't be, in the arena of our relations with non-humans. Morality in this arena is therefore only ever shadow-morality. It offers the appearance of a constraint on human behaviour, but one which in practice humans can always fudge to their own advantage - so that whatever kind of creature it is that stands in the way of our most strongly favoured projects is liable to be found - surprise, surprise - to matter just not quite enough to make us abandon them.
Once we see this, however, we are brought up hard against the major problem with this whole "extensionist" approach. For we then can't avoid recognising that just the same kind of argument applies in respect of our supposed moral duties to future human generations as well.
If morality, rather that prudential concern, is needed to save the planet, and an "extended" morality is required for this, but no extension of morality beyond real-life interpersonal engagement really works, aren't we... well, doomed?