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Environmental Ethics
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Anthropocentric ethics → humanist ethics — human
centered ethics.
— Human beings are superior beings because they
possess reason.
— According to this view mountains and animals
possess no moral standing beyond their capacity
to serve human ends.
— Anthropocentricism denies our obligations to enhance good
of environment or good of animal kingdom.
— Anthropocentricism holds a dualism between humanity and
nature.
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Descartes’ View
• Animals have no souls, therefore, they are not
morally considerable.
• Animals are machines or automata.
• Human beings possess souls, animals do not.
• Consciousness is the distinctive trait of the
soul according to Descartes.
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• Consciousness is necessary element for
thinking, understanding and mental
experiences.
• Another distinction between human beings and
animals is said to be the ability to use language.
• Animals have no language.
• Since human beings are superior, they have no
moral duties to the animals.
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Kant’s view
• Kant proposes that we have indirect
responsibilities to animals.
• Animals are not self-conscious beings.
• Animals are worthwhile because they can be used
as instruments to human welfare, e.g., for the
inventions of medicines.
• Kant discourages cruelty to animals but holds that
human beings have only indirect duties to animals.
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Criticisms against Descartes’ view
• Animals have sensations, but no language to
express sensations of pleasure and pain.
• Animals’ behavior, movement and dispositions
show animals’ sensations of pleasure and pain
which should be taken into ethical consideration.
• Animals are sentient beings and they deserve
moral consideration.
• Thus Descartes’ view can be criticized.
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• Criticisms against Kant’s view
• There are severely retarded or mentally
retarded human beings who are not self-
conscious beings whereas there are evidences
showing existence of self-consciousness to a
certain degree in animals.
• This way we can refute Kant’s view.
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Non-anthropocentricism holds that animals and
nature are intrinsically worthy.
• This view rejects differences between species on the
ground of superiority of one species to another.
• Human beings have distinctive properties, like, rationality,
aesthetic sense or creativity and morality yet these are
not the signs of their superiority.
• Some animals also do have certain distinctive properties
which as human beings we do not possess.
• Therefore, superiority scale should be avoided in order to
treat animal beings morally.
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Holism
• Holism holds that the interests of the individual
should be sacrificed for the greater interests of
the whole.
• Duties are to the collections or wholes (species,
ecosystems etc.) not only to the individual living
beings or things.
• The whole is the community.
• The interests of the community should govern
our moral standpoint.
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• Nature has moral worth not primarily because
of what it has done for mankind but because
of its relation to us.
• The relations between humans and nature is
reciprocal and complementary.
• Nature has intrinsic value meaning that values
are independent of any human evaluation.
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Conservation
• This attitude recognizes that resources are
limited and that we have obligations to pass
these resources on to posterity. It seeks
frugality to nonrenewable resources, such as
water, air and animal species.
• According to conservationism nature has no
objective value, only subjective extrinsic value
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Preservation
• The attitude of saving the wilderness or
species for their own sake. Nature has
objective value, so deserves to be protected
for its own sake.