Why the Environment Can Be an Ethical Issue
title: "Why the Environment Can Be an Ethical Issue" slug: "fanchunping-why-environment-is-ethics-2010.en" date: "2010-10-01" category: "ecology" author: "Fan Chunping" excerpt: "How did the environment become an object of ethical concern—ethics, a domain once reserved solely for regulating relationships between people? Leopold's 'Land Ethic' reveals: humanity needs to think from the perspective of the 'family elite' and design better plans for the development of the entire Earth."
Why the Environment Can Be an Ethical Issue
Author: Fan Chunping (Senior Editor, Academic Journal Office, Beijing Institute of Technology)
Originally published in Green Leaf, Issue 10, 2010
One day, sometime in the second half of the 1940s, the Leopold family was having a meal on a cliff. It was then that he saw, below the cliff, a wolf swimming ashore from the rushing river. Six wolf pups emerged from the thicket, joyfully wagging their tails, playfully greeting and clustering around the mother wolf.
In those days, the wolf was humanity's enemy. No one would pass up an opportunity to kill a wolf.
Leopold—never a particularly good shot—opened fire. When the chamber of his rifle was empty, he saw the mother wolf had fallen. One cub, dragging an injured leg, fled into the indifferent silence of the rocks...
Leopold approached the mother wolf and saw, precisely in that moment, the dying green fire flickering in her eyes, unbearably poignant. In the shock and unease within those eyes, Leopold perceived something new—something he felt "was known only to the wolf herself and to the mountain."
Leopold later wrote: "I was young then and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, no wolves would mean a hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view."
From that moment onward, and after witnessing "one state after another extirpate all its wolves," after seeing how many mountains denuded of wolves were ravaged by deer, after seeing the mountains strewn with the corpses of deer that had overbred without their natural predator... Leopold began his ecological reflection—a reflection on humans, mountains, deer, and wolves. He sought to comprehend that "which was known only to the wolf herself and to the mountain." He sought to "think like a mountain."
Leopold brought his family to an abandoned farm, attempting to restore the ecology with shovel, pickaxe, and hatchet... He wanted to restore it "to the point where restoration was no longer necessary."
Leopold became one of humanity's earliest environmental conservationists, founding the field of environmental ethics.
As Leopold himself noted when introducing what he called the "Land Ethic," he drew on a story from the Odyssey: "When godlike Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his household whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence. The hanging involved no question of propriety. The girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong."
In those times, ethics did not extend to slaves—though they, too, were human beings.
In slave societies, slaves could not share the same human rights as aristocrats. No ethics applied between aristocrat and slave; the morality observed among aristocrats did not extend to slaves. The same was once true between ethnic groups: during World War II, in the eyes of Hitler and the Nazis, the Aryan race was supreme, while Jews were less than pigs—fit to be killed arbitrarily, without even the pretense of moral restraint.
Yet with the development of society, relationships between people and between individuals and society have changed. Today's social ethics hold: all people are born equal, none noble and none base; all possess fundamental human rights. To violate human rights is immoral and intolerable.
In an age when species were still abundant, when humanity was still competing with other species for survival in the natural world, nature was a powerful antagonist, and human beings were the most precious element between heaven and earth. As a species, humanity was the paragon of all creation, the noble. But now? All things wither; species go extinct—and this extinction has already begun to endanger humanity itself. Humanity has alienated itself into its own antagonist. Humanity and other species, humanity and all things in nature, have become a community, bound together by life and death.
So now: is there still a distinction of nobility between species? Must human compassion, human ethics, extend to animals possessing only rudimentary consciousness? Must it extend to other natural entities devoid of consciousness altogether?
This is the logical trajectory of the expansion of ethical consciousness as the relationship between humanity and nature has evolved. Its fundamental idea: animals and other natural entities are creations of nature, possessing the right to exist just as humanity does.
Before, the land and all upon it were human wealth, disposable by economic logic. Afterward, they became bearers of a certain ethical standing, possessing intrinsic value, possessing an ethical identity. In dealing with them, humanity must be constrained by environmental ethics—must act with morality.
Today, as countless people struggle amid ever-degrading, ever-deteriorating environments, as one ecological disaster after another assaults humanity in succession, few still deny that destroying the environment is immoral. Few still deny the validity of environmental ethics.
But in what sense is this "immorality" immoral? In what sense has the environment become an ethical issue? To put it another way: why should we extend toward the environment a morality once reserved exclusively for relationships between people? How is it that the environment became an object of ethical concern—ethics, a domain once solely for regulating relationships between people?
The logical expansion described above is far from universally accepted. The legitimacy of environmental ethics remains, to this day, a matter of persistent debate.
Today, no one still claims that the environment is merely wealth, possessing only instrumental value. The proposition of environmental ethics has gained near-universal recognition. Yet why the environment is a matter of ethics, and how environmental ethics is legitimate at the level of academic principle—on these questions, no consensus has emerged.
Clarifying this question is no less important than condemning environmentally destructive behavior as immoral. For until this question is clarified, our environmental ethics lack legitimacy. Our environmental protection, our environmental cultural construction—none of these can truly proceed. Ultimately, this will determine the survival of humanity as a whole.
Only by acknowledging the intrinsic value of the environment can the environment and humanity belong to a single community. Only then can the environment possess substantive ethical standing.
The various positions on this question can be broadly divided into two camps: "Environmental problems are, in the final analysis, problems of relationships between people"—the anthropocentric camp; and "The environment itself, along with non-human natural entities within it, possesses intrinsic value"—the non-anthropocentric camp.
Those who argue that "environmental problems are, in the final analysis, problems of relationships between people" do not endorse the claim that "the environment possesses only instrumental value." They too acknowledge environmental ethics, regarding it as a manifestation of the evolving character of ethics in our times. Yet they do not recognize the intrinsic value of the environment. They maintain that ethics is solely a set of moral norms for regulating relationships between people; that so-called "environmental ethics" is merely ethics between people as mediated by the environment; that "non-anthropocentrism" is unimaginable.
To support this position, this camp distinguishes between "traditional anthropocentrism" and "modern anthropocentrism"—the former centered on the "individual" or "collective," the latter on "humanity as a whole." They argue that simply shifting the "center" resolves the problem.
Consider: so long as one holds that the environment, in itself, has no value—that it is essentially for humans—then one will arrange environmental matters according to human purposes. But how should they be arranged? The answer: not centered on the individual or the collective, but centered on humanity as a whole. Yet "the whole" is an abstraction. At what scope of deliberation does one escape "collective" interests? To what breadth of concern does one truly consider "humanity as a whole"?
Currently, the general definition of ethics is: norms regulating moral relationships between people. But ethics is an evolving category. In ancient times, it served only to regulate relationships between individuals, or between small groups and small tribes. Later, it developed to also regulate relationships between individuals and society—primarily because society had developed, and small groups and tribes had interconnected into larger societies, into a global village, whose inhabitants form a community of shared destiny. In the contemporary era, the scope of ethical regulation has expanded once more—now regulating not only relationships between people and between individuals and society, but also the relationship between humanity and nature. At the same time, the subjects of ethics are also expanding.
Of course, the expansion of ethical categories—especially the permeation and integration of this expansion into mainstream social culture, and the genuine efficacy of ethical norms—requires a process of conceptual transformation and practical experimentation. For example: extending ethics first to wild animals and domestic pets, then to all animals including livestock and poultry, then to plants and all natural entities. One day, humanity will cease to consume animals as complete living beings.
Only by truly recognizing the ethical standing of these non-human "family members," by essentially shedding the logical shackle that non-human natural entities are "in essence, still for humans," can humanity truly respect and protect them—can we refrain from injuring nature for the sake of our own economic interests, or short-sighted "developmental" interests, or even, in a desperate drink of poison to quench thirst, for the sake of a single meal, a bowl of soup, a bundle of firewood. They are our kin.
Today, we find it utterly unacceptable—as in slave societies—that certain human beings should exist solely to serve other human beings. Just so, as environmental culture and environmental ethics sink deep into popular consciousness, we will also cease to accept that non-human organisms and other natural entities lack intrinsic value, that their existence is merely for us.
Only in this way—proceeding from the interests of our "extended family," with humanity as the "family elite," designing better plans for the development of the entire Earth, not merely the development of humanity—can there arise a genuine environmental culture, an ecological culture, a genuine scientific development.
Originally published in Green Leaf, Issue 10, 2010