Human Values as a Source for Sustaining the Environment

Published on Medium, 2019

Right from the 70s that environmental ethics gained its academic status, there had been two predominant contrary modes of thinking about the environment; viz: on the one hand, what obligations and responsibilities do humans have towards the environment in order to ensure the well-being of humans inhabiting it? And on the other hand, what moral obligations do humans have towards environmental entities themselves? This ideological division can be captured as a fight between anthropocentric environmentalists and their 'extensionist' counterparts. With regard to the ideological divides between the cohorts of anthropocentrism and extensionism therefore, and in particular response to the issue on whether humans have moral obligations to nature and non-human living beings, I argue that humans have ‘moral obligations’ only to beings in their own moral community (i.e. humans), and are required to extend ‘moral empathy’ to beings in other moral communities. The separation between ‘moral obligation’ and ‘moral empathy’ here was established by challenging two age-long views in environmental ethics; viz: that only humans have intrinsic worth, and that all intrinsically worthy beings demand equal moral worship.

International Journal of Philosophy

Classical utilitarianism is very demanding and entails some counter-intuitive implications in moral dilemmas such as the trolley problem in deontological ethics and the repugnant conclusion in population ethics. This article presents how one specific modification of utilitarianism can avoid these counter-intuitive implications. In this modified utilitarian theory, called 'discounted' or 'mild' utilitarianism, people have a right to discount the utilities of others, under the condition that people whose utility is discounted cannot validly complain against such discounting. A complaint made by a utility discounted person is not valid if either the existence of the discounting people in that option is in a specific sense necessary or the existence of the discounted person is in a sense not necessary. According to mild utilitarianism, we should choose the option that maximizes the total validly discounted or complaint-free discounted utility, i e. the sum of everyone's utility minus the complaint-free discounts. As there are two conditions that make a complaint invalid, this right to discount can be translated into two versions: the right to bodily autonomy and the right to procreation autonomy. The former right relates to the mere means principle in deontological ethics, the latter right is useful in avoiding the repugnant conclusion problem in population ethics. The possibility of democratically imposing an upper bound on the permissible amount of discounting is discussed.

Journal of Economic Methodology

Biological Conservation, 2022

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has become influential in biodiversity conservation. Its research is published widely and has been adopted by the United Nations and the Convention for Biological Diversity. This platform includes discussion about how values relate to biodiversity conservation. The IPBES emphasizes "relational values", connecting these with living a "good life," and "nature's contributions to people" (NCP); building upon ecosystem services (ES), which have dominated nature valuation for 15+ years. Although the IPBES acknowledges instrumental and intrinsic natural values, they purport that by adopting relational values, conservation will become more socially-and culturally-inclusive, moving beyond the "unhelpful dichotomy" between instrumental and intrinsic values. We wholeheartedly agree that conservation should become more inclusiveit should, in fact, morally include nonhuman nature. We argue that far from being half of an unhelpful dichotomy, intrinsic natural values are incontrovertible elements of any honest effort to sustain Earth's biodiversity. We find NCP to be mainly anthropocentric, and relational values to be largely instrumental. The "good life" they support is a good life for humans, and not for nonhuman beings or collectives. While passingly acknowledging intrinsic natural values, the current IPBES platform gives little attention to these, and to corresponding ecocentric worldviews. In this paper we demonstrate the important practical implications of operationalizing intrinsic values for conservation, such as ecological justice, i.e., "peoples' obligations to nature". We urge the IPBES platform, in their future values work, to become much more inclusive of intrinsic values and ecocentrism.

Journal of Philosophy