ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

I	Old Business:  Reflective Equilibrium and the Treatment of Animals

A. Should we agree with Cohen or Carruthers?  RE or Complacent Smugness?
B. An argument for not eating mass-produced chicken
1. It is wrong to cause avoidable suffering simply for the purpose of personal 
pleasure or convenience.
2. The mass production of poultry products causes suffering to chickens.
3. Poultry wouldn’t be “produced” in this way but for chicken consumption.
4. Therefore, chicken consumption is a cause of practices that cause 
suffering.
5. Therefore, chicken consumption helps cause suffering.
6. A healthy diet is possible without meat consumption.
7. When, therefore, we consume chicken we do so, not because it is 
necessary for health, but for pleasure and convenience.
8. Therefore, chicken consumption causes suffering simply for the purpose 
of personal pleasure or convenience.
9. Therefore, chicken consumption is morally wrong.
C. So are your views about the treatment of animals in RE or not?

II	New Business: Deep Ecology and the Value of Nature.  

A. What sort of value does inanimate nature have?  
1. Uncontroversial: Nature has instrumental value, at least.  It is valuable for 
human (and other animal) purposes.
2. Is this all?  Might nature, or living things, have intrinsic value, which 
bears on how we may permissibly act with respect to it?
3. The moral principles (theories) so far considered give no basis for this 
thought.
a. Contractualism and Natural Rights Theories (only persons have 
intrinsic value—a dignity calling for respect)
b. Utilitarianism (the experiences of sentient beings have intrinsic 
value—pleasure is intrinsically valuable, pain is intrinsically 
disvaluable)
c. Regan’s Principle of Equal Inherent Value (all animate beings 
have intrinsic value)
d. According to none of these theories do non-conscious living 
beings have intrinsic value.
B. But is this right?  Deep Ecology says no.  It applies the principle of moral 
equality even farther to biocentric equality:  “all things in the biosphere have 
an equal right to live and blossom and to reach their own individual forms of 
unfolding and self-realization within the larger Self-realization.”
C. We may put this in terms of intrinsic value.  Deep ecology says that all living 
things equally have intrinsic value, whether they are conscious or not.  
D. It also asserts a principle of biocentric unity:  Nature is a unified whole.  
E. Since we too are part of this natural whole, this implies deep ecology’s 
distinctive principle of self-realization: As part of nature, we can realize 
ourselves only in relation to nature as a whole. 

III. An example.  Suppose you are walking in the Muir Woods in California and are 
struck with awe by the majesty of a one-thousand-year-old redwood.  What sort of 
value will the tree seem to you to have?  And how will you feel yourself, by 
virtue of your encounter with this marvelous tree?  Here are two guesses.

A. The tree will seem to you to be valuable in itself, something to which some 
valuing attitude like reverence or, at the minimum, appreciation will seem 
appropriate.
B. You will feel in some way, more “realized” or “completed” or inspired by 
your relation with the tree, as if it has caused some improvement in you—
some sort of spiritual growth or development.

IV. Deep ecology claims that these appearances are explained, respectively, by 
biocentric equality and biocentric unity.

A. The tree actually does have intrinsic value, and your experience is an 
appreciation of this value. (Biocentric Equality)
B. You and the tree are both parts or members of a natural whole, and you feel 
more whole, more completed, by virtue of your vivid awareness of this 
relation through your experience with the tree.  (Biocentric Unity)

V. If this is right, what sort of moral claim does this kind of value make on us? 
Suppose someone were to propose to set fire to the tree to create a really 
“awesome bonfire”?  What would be the appropriate response?   Of course, we 
would think it wrong, but that might be explained without any principle of deep 
ecology, since we are talking about a tree in a national monument.  But might it 
not seem wrong in itself to destroy such an ancient part of nature?

VI. Baxter disagrees: Redwoods, like penguins, “are important because people enjoy 
seeing them.”  Although these enjoyable experiences appear to be of intrinsically 
valuable things, the appearances are illusory.

VII. This seems to be an outright rejection of deep ecology, but when we consider 
Baxter’s position on the political question of how to treat the environment, his 
position may not be so far away.

A. Public goods, market failure, and why wilderness cannot be protected by 
unregulated free markets.
B. Consequently, wilderness will only be protected in a way that reflects even its 
instrumental value for us if it is done through democratic, collective political 
action.
C. To get the incentives right, it will be important also that landholders be 
compensated for public takings of land.
D. Would a deep ecologist differ on these political questions?