Environmental Philosophy: An Introduction

197 Pages·2015·0.874 MB·English

by  Simon P. James

Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction: What is Environmental Philosophy?
Nature
Theory and practice
Outline of chapters
Notes
Further reading
1: Animal Suffering, and Why it Matters
Eating without pleasure, crying without pain
Singer’s utilitarian case for animal liberation
Vegetarianism
Summary
Notes
Further reading
2: Beyond Animal Liberation
Racism, sexism … speciesism?
The moral significance of killing
Regan’s case for animal rights
Flourishing
Duties to wild animals
Summary
Notes
Further reading
3: Biocentrism and Ecocentrism
Life
Ecosystems
Biological species
Summary
Notes
Further reading
4: Questions of Value
Ecosystem services and the value of places
Objectivity and subjectivity
Summary
Notes
Further reading
5: How Should One Live?
Environmental virtue ethics
Buddhism and compassion
Humility
Attention
Summary
Notes
Further reading
6: The Aesthetics of Nature
Disinterestedness and engagement
Form, knowledge and the beauty of clouds
Aesthetics and morality
Summary
Notes
Further reading
7: Nature, Wild and Restored
Nature, revisited
A very short history of the received wilderness idea
Sceptical responses
Wildness
Environmental restoration
Summary
Notes
Further reading
8: Climate Change
Climate change as a moral issue
Responses
‘My emissions make no difference’
Population
Obligations to future generations
Climate change and the natural world
Summary
Notes
Further reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement

Copyright © Simon P. James 2015
The right of Simon P. James to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in
accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and
review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4546-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4547-6 (pb)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9139-8 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8485-7 (mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
James, Simon P.
Environmental philosophy: an introduction / Simon P. James.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-4546-9 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-7456-4547-6 (paperback)
1. Environmental sciences – Philosophy. 2. Environmental ethics. I. Title.
GE40.J358 2015
363.7001–dc23
2014031199
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites
referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the
publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will
remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently
overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent
reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
For Helen
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following: Simon Summers, Leigh Mueller,
and two anonymous reviewers for the feedback they provided on a
draft of the manuscript; David E. Cooper, Ian J. Kidd, Wendy Parker
and Andy Hamilton for the very helpful comments they provided on
drafts of individual chapters; my wife, Helen, for all sorts of things,
including her devastating criticism (see chapter 4, note 5) of the first
draft of the Introduction; my students at Durham – particularly those
who have attended my lectures for ‘Ethics and Values’ and ‘Applied
Ethics’; Alex Newbrook for introducing me to Martha Nussbaum’s
capabilities approach and, in particular, for his helpful ‘lions versus
leopards’ example, which I have stolen and used in chapter 2; Mike
Hannis and Patrick Curry for making me think about place-attachment
and nonhuman valuers, respectively; and Liz McKinnell for (I think)
coming up with the metaphor of applying coloured ink to black-and-
white photographs, which I use in chapter 4. Chapter 5 draws on
material from my article ‘Finding – and Failing to Find – Meaning in
Nature’, which appeared in Environmental Values (22 (5), 2013).
Furthermore, my discussion of mountaineering ethics in that chapter
is loosely based on my article ‘Why Old Things Matter’. I am grateful to
Professor S. Matthew Liao, the editor of the Journal of Moral
Philosophy, for allowing me to use that material. Finally, I would like
to thank Emma Hutchinson, Clare Ansell and Pascal Porcheron of
Polity for their help – and, in particular, their patience.
Introduction: What is Environmental
Philosophy?
Scientists, economists, politicians and lawyers are not professionally
qualified to address all the questions raised by environmental issues.
Take the clearing of rainforest to provide open land for cattle ranching.
Ecologists can explain the effects of this practice on rainforest
ecosystems; economists, politicians and lawyers can assess its
financial, political and legal ramifications. But various questions
remain: are we morally obliged to protect the rainforests? If so, why
are we so obliged? Because they are more useful to us if they are left
unfelled? Because they are wild (or at least, wilder than urban parks
and botanic gardens)? Because they harbour so many endangered
species? Because we owe it to ourselves not to permit such
destruction?
These sorts of questions cannot be answered using the methods of
science or economics. They cannot be left to politicians and lawyers. It
might seem that they could be addressed using the research methods
of the social sciences, and it is true that one could use such methods to
find out how most people would answer them. But empirical
approaches are not enough. For although surveys and the like can tell
us what people believe to be right or wrong, they cannot tell us what
really is right or what really is wrong. To determine that – or at least to
do so in a systematic and critical way – one needs philosophy.
(Granted, one could object that when it comes to morality there are no
absolute standards and that rightness and wrongness in such contexts
are merely matters of opinion. But that is itself a philosophical claim –
a statement of moral subjectivism – and in order to assess whether it is
true one must, again, do some philosophy.)
So the questions set out above are philosophical questions. They are
the sorts of questions that moral philosophers – more precisely,
environmental ethicists – try to answer. Yet not all the philosophical
questions raised by environmental issues fall into the category of moral
philosophy. Just as people’s views about morality are to some extent a
function of their views about other aspects of the world, so reflections
on the subject of environmental ethics tend to raise issues that are also
of concern in other philosophical fields, such as aesthetics,
epistemology and metaphysics. Environmental ethics, that is, tends to
merge into the broader discipline of environmental philosophy. For
example, it has been argued that when people think it morally
permissible to use nature in any way they see fit, they often do so not
(or not just) because they have chosen to adopt certain moral
principles, but because they take an unjustifiably human-centred or
anthropocentric view of reality. Consider the belief that human beings
are distinguished from the rest of creation by virtue of their possession
of souls or minds. A number of writers have argued that this dualistic
belief encourages the notion that humans are essentially superior to
the rest of creation, and that this notion, when supplemented by
certain assumptions about the permissibility of lording it over ‘lower-
order’ entities, encourages the conclusion that humans are morally
entitled to use nature in any way they see fit (see, e.g., Warren 1990). If
these writers are correct – and we will assess whether they are later on
– then dualism, a thesis about the nature of reality, tends to encourage
a peculiarly anthropocentric conception of morality.
Assessing the plausibility of dualism and other philosophical theses
frequently requires one to consider the results of science. But one
cannot rely on science alone. The claim that minds are essentially
nonphysical, for example, can be neither proved nor disproved by the
methods of science. The same may be said of the proposition that
biological species are not real entities but merely artefacts of the
classificatory conventions of biologists. Such claims are to some extent
philosophical rather than scientific. So whether or not those who wish
to investigate them will need to consider the results of scientific
inquiries, they will certainly need to engage with philosophy.
Nature
Although environmental issues raise questions that are best addressed
using philosophical approaches, ‘environmental philosophy’ is an
unsatisfactory term in at least three respects. First, much of the
research in the discipline focuses not on environments so much as
their constituents. For instance, discussions of our moral duties to
nonhuman animals are typically grouped under the heading
‘environmental philosophy’. Yet it is often thought that if we have any
duties to nonhuman animals, then this will be because the animals in
question have certain morally relevant properties in themselves,
independently of their environments. Thus Peter Singer – a prominent
Australian moral philosopher of whom we will hear more below –
would argue that we have moral duties to giant pandas not because of
the roles they play in the environments they inhabit, but simply
because individual pandas have interests (notably, an interest in not
suffering) that we are morally obliged to consider when our actions are
likely to affect pandas.
Second, the term ‘environmental’ can encourage the notion that the
nonhuman world is merely the backdrop for the main show – the
drama of human life. However, as writers such as Patrick Curry (2011:
7–8) have argued, that peculiarly anthropocentric picture of reality is
hard to square with some sorts of moral concern for the nonhuman –
or, if you like, more-than-human – world. How, for example, could one
value forests, mountains and rivers for what they are in themselves, if
one sees them as nothing more than context?
A third problem with the phrase ‘environmental philosophy’ is that
‘environmental’ is too general and vague a word to convey what the
discipline is about. To what environments is it meant to refer? In one
sense, each and every organism – from wombats to hookworms – has
an environment, a milieu within which it operates. It may be replied
that environmental philosophers typically focus their attention on the
sorts of environments with which we human beings tend to be familiar
– woods, wetlands and rocky shores, rather than hydrothermal vents,
say, or the insides of mammalian intestines. Yet even talk of human
environments remains vague. To indicate just one problem: as I write,
my environment includes a sofa, a television set and a bookcase filled
with books, maps and DVDs. But of course environmental
philosophers are not primarily concerned with such mass-produced
artefacts. Their main concern is with nature or the natural world
(terms I shall use interchangeably).
‘Nature’, in this context, does not denote everything that falls outside
the realm of the supernatural (if any such realm exists). It is true that
environmental philosophers do not focus their attention on
supernatural entities such as angels and demons, yet in this respect
they are no different from the practitioners of most other academic
disciplines. To say that they are primarily concerned with nature is,
rather, to say that their main interest is in those parts of the world
whose current states are not, for the most part, the intended products
of human actions. Flicking through a journal dedicated to
environmental philosophy, one would not be surprised to find papers
devoted to the topics of wilderness preservation, the aesthetic qualities
of wetlands or our moral relations with biological species. But
discussions of, say, multi-storey car-parks and combustion engines will