Anthropocentrism, the standard Western ethic
First, Routley discusses the traditional anthropocentric ethical tradition, and identifies three different strands of this tradition: (1) despotism: this views humans as the rulers of nature, so that humans have dominion over nature and can with it whatever they please; (2) stewardship: humans are the custodians or protectors of nature; (3) cooperation: humans are the perfectors of nature, with a duty to transform it into a more perfect state.
(1) is clearly unacceptable, but (2) or (3) prima facie seem better suited to an environmental perspective. However, Routley objects that both (2) and (3) "imply policies of complete interference", and hence are incompatible with environmentalism. I'm not convinced of this, especially with the notion of stewardship. Whether or not stewardship implies interference depends on what we take to be valuable; it depends on what exactly it is that we're trying to protect. I assume it's true that historically, stewardship views have called for a transformation of nature: nature is wild, having been put there by God to be perfected and developed by man, and ideally all of nature will be so developed. Seen in this way, the stewardship view and the environmental view will come into conflict. But nothing in the basic idea of stewardship implies anything like this.
Stewardship emphasizes responsible use. Even if our only concern is humans, there's obviously nothing responsible in pursuing a policy of "complete interference". Complete interference is clearly a bad move because interfering with ecosystems, even with a goal to "improving" them, has all sorts of unforeseeable consequences. There are substantial parts of the natural world that should be protected and, importantly, largely left alone. So Routley's objection to (2) misses the mark (as we'll see in the next section, he later offers a more powerful objection to (2), and all other anthropocentric approaches).
We can identify the core principles of an ethic. Any ethic that rejects one or more of the core principles of the standard Western ethic is a new ethic. Routley suggests that one of the core principles of the standard Western ethic is the "liberal principle":
The liberal principle: "One should be able to do what he wishes, providing (1) that he does not harm others and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably" (where "other" is of course intended to mean "other human" or, on recent animal rights ethics, perhaps "other sentient being").Routley thinks that our moral judgements concerning the environment outstrip what can supported by the liberal principle. The liberal principle should be rejected, and that means that a new ethic is required.
Against anthropocentrism
Routley gives a number of examples that he takes to demonstrate the failure of the liberal principle:
(1) The last man: Imagine a man who has survived the collapse of society and the death of all other people. For some reason, perhaps just to pass the time until he dies or to take his mind off the loss of all his friends, he decides to go about destroying, as far as possible, every living thing and every item of value. On an environmental ethic such destructive behaviour is deplorable, but it's totally permissible on an anthropocentric ethic. Indeed, an anthropocentric ethic might even recommend it - for instance, if the Last Man finds his behaviour very satisfying and pleasurable, then an anthropocentric utilitarianism would recommend that he continue (since his pleasure is all that matters).
(2) The last people: Imagine a society who know that they're the last people, for instance because the effects of radiation have prevented any chance of reproduction. Since they're the last people, there's no longer any need to protect the environment for future generations, so they vastly accelerate production and consumption, putting all land under intensive cultivation, stripping away all the rainforests, farming all the fish out the seas, etc. Again, on an environmental ethic this destructive behaviour is deplorable, but it's totally permissible, perhaps even recommended, on an anthropocentric ethic. After all, they're simply doing what they can to improve their own lives before their inevitable extinction. If this vastly increased consumption spells disaster for the environment - well, who cares? No future people will be around to be negatively affected by it.
Routley also gives the examples of (3) the last man is an entrepreneur who damages the environment in pursuit of greater productivity and (4) the extermination of the blue whale to extract its oil and meat. I won't discuss these cases as (3) is a minor variation of (1) and (4) can, I think, be quite easily accommodated by standard ethical views. Even from an anthropocentric perspective the destruction of species is a bad idea for various reasons, including that they might be of significant scientific value, that they might play important roles in the ecosystems on which humans depend for their resources, etc. Also note that animal rights views would similarly condemn (4), but Routley wants to extend moral considerability not just to animals but also to nonsentient or even nonliving things. Scenarios (1) and (2) present the best case for this. Of course, animal rights views would similarly condemn the killing of sentient beings in (1) and (2), but we can simply modify the scenarios so that in (1) all other sentient beings save the Last Man are dead, and in (2) all other sentient species save humans are dead.
It's worth considering more carefully the structure of Routley's argument. First he identifies a moral principle that he takes to be at the core of Western ethics - the liberal principle. Then he offers a scenario in which this principle permits certain environmentally damaging actions that intuitively we consider morally impermissible on environmental grounds. Routley thinks that this necessitates the development of a new ethic that rejects the liberal principle and assigns intrinsic moral worth to various nonsentient or nonliving items. Let's try to formalize the argument:
(P1) The liberal principle is a core principle of standard Western ethics.
(P2) If the liberal principle is true, then forests have no intrinsic moral value.
(P3) If forests have no intrinsic moral value, then the Last Man's actions are morally permissible.
(P4) The Last Man's actions are not morally permissible.
(C1) Forests have intrinsic moral value.
(C2) The liberal principle is false.
(C3) Standard Western ethics must be rejected.
(Readers who, like myself, hold that moral claims aren't truth-apt can simply substitute e.g. "acceptable" and "unnacceptable" for "true" and "false".)
Responses
I will now consider three ways of defending the standard ethic. The first accepts Routley's conclusion about the worth of nature but rejects (P1), challenging his characterization of the standard Western ethic; the second attempts to show, contra (P3), that our condemnation of the Last Man's actions is compatible with an anthropocentric ethic; the third challenges (P4) and the underlying methodology of Routley's argument.
Reject (P1)
Routley claims to be offering a new ethic. But how new is it really? (We have already seen one form of this objection in my discussion of the stewardship position. Arguably, stewardship is not as inimical to environmentalism as Routley suggests. However, I think it would struggle to account for the judgement that the actions of the Last Man and the Last People are wrong.) According to Routley, one of the core principles of the Western ethic is the liberal principle: reject the liberal principle, and you reject Western ethics.
However, it's very questionable whether the liberal principle is in fact a core principle. Consider the traditional objections to homosexuality. For most of the history of Western society, homosexuals have been imprisoned or worse. This seems very much at odds with a principle allowing us to do as we wish providing we don't harm ourselves or others. Of course, perhaps some of the objections to homosexuality were based on this principle, since many people argued, indeed many people still argue, that homosexuality is harmful. There are physical harms of spreading disease (the association of homosexuality with AIDS) and "spiritual" harms in that God disapproves and will perhaps send you to a place of eternal punishment. However, I doubt that the persecution of homosexuals really had much to do with a worry that they might be harming themselves or others.
For a more modern example, consider incest. Incest is punishable by imprisonment in many enlightened Western nations. As with the persecution of homosexuals, this seems very difficult to reconcile with the liberal principle. Again, people do suggest that incest is harmful in various ways, but such arguments are clearly weak, ad hoc rationalizations. The real objection to incest, just like the real objection to homosexuality, has nothing to do with concerns about harm. The real objection is "ewwww, that's gross" (see this video for my arguments that incest is morally permissible).
A number of similar examples can be found in the work of Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues (e.g. Haidt, Koller, and Dias's article "Affect, Culture, and Morality"). Consider the following scenarios: (a) a woman cuts up her country's national flag and uses it to clean her bathroom; (b) a family's dog is killed in a car accident; the family hear that dog meat is tasty so decide to eat it; (c) a man who is about to hold a dinner party has sex with a dead chicken, which he then cleans thoroughly, cooks, and serves to his guests. Most people hold that these actions are morally wrong and perhaps even should be prevented if possible. Yet the scenarios are constructed to rule out the possibility of harm, and indeed people have great difficulty identifying a source of harm.
On the other hand, one notable thing about subjects who are then asked to justify their judgements is that they tend to search for harms (e.g., abusing the flag might erode respect for one's country, threatening social harmony; having sex with a dead chicken involves risks of disease; etc). This suggests that people's moral reasoning, if not their immediate moral intuitions, is guided by the liberal principle. But the point here is that our actual judgements, however we might try to justify those judgements, don't seem to conform to the liberal principle. In which case, it's very questionable whether this principle should be considered an essential core of Western ethics.
Reject (P3)
Can standard Western ethics condemn the Last Man? Must we attribute intrinsic moral value to e.g. forests to conclude that the Last Man's destruction of the forests is morally wrong? Here's an obvious response: what makes it wrong to destroy all life is that this destroys the potential for future sentient or rational life. There's nothing intrinsically valuable about a forest. But on a planet rich in life there's far more potential for a new sentient or rational species to emerge than there is on a barren planet. This kind of response would be especially attractive to classical utilitarians. If moral behaviour is simply a matter of doing what we can to maximize happiness or pleasure, it's easy to explain the wrongness of the Last Man's actions. The Last Man should try to promote the emergence of new sentient beings, or if there's nothing he can actively do to promote this, he should at least refrain from preventing it.
Our scenario can however be modified. Consider:
(1a) Imagine a man who has survived the death of all sentient beings. He decides to go about destroying, as far as possible, every living thing and every item of value. Furthermore, in 100,000 years, the Sun will die, so there's not enough time for new sentient life to evolve.
If we hold that the Last Man's actions are morally wrong in this case, we rule out the suggested response. Of course, one worry here is that with the scenario modified in this way, I expect that fewer people will be inclined to judge that his actions are wrong (we will return to this point when we consider rejecting (P4)).
A second response is to argue that the Last Man is in some sense harming himself. Virtue ethics might provide a basis for this. On traditional Aristotelian virtue ethics, for instance, the goal of human life is eudaimonia, which translates essentially to happiness or fulfillment or well-being, and we achieve eudaimonia by cultivating a virtuous character (classically, a virtuous character involves the virtues of temperance, practical wisdom, justice, and courage). Importantly for this context, virtues directly benefit the individual: the virtuous person has a better life, a more fulfilling life, than the vicious one, even if the virtuous has fewer possessions, fewer friends, achieves fewer goals, etc. Although ethics is usually taken to concern our behaviour towards others, on virtue ethics the good life is entirely in line with your own self-interest. Just because the Last Man is alone, it doesn't mean that no ethical questions arise for him.
Against this background, we might argue that the destructive behaviour of the Last Man evinces a vicious character. Following Robert Sparrow (see his "The Ethics of Terraforming"), two possible vices in the Last Man's character are: (1) aesthetic insensitivity, a kind of blindness to beauty; and (2) hubris, an excessive pride/arrogance or glorying in one's own powers, often exhibited when a person ignores their proper limits. The Last Man is both blind to the elegance and beauty in the world, and has a vastly inflated view of his own importance. He doesn't evince the appropriate respect and humility towards nature. From the perspective of virtue ethics, he's only harming himself; the wrongness of his actions lies in the fact that they evince a vicious character, a character incompatible with his achieving eudaimonia. Ask yourself: would you want to be the Last Man? Would you want to be the sort of person who chooses to spend his last days vandalizing everything of beauty? Regarding these points, I'm reminded of this lovely quote from Simon Blackburn:
If we visit the Grand Canyon and I am overawed by its grandeur, while you see it just as a good place for tourist concessions, then I may well think less of you. And if I learn that one day I shall become like you, I would be depressed and ashamed, just as I would if I learned that one day I might lose my love of my children, or my concern for truth. I may voice this by saying that the canyon demands the reaction of wonder. But of course it doesn't issue any demands - indeed its ageless, implacable, indifferent silence is part of what makes it sublime. It is we who demand these reactions from ourselves and others, and rightly so.However, I'm not convinced that this response works in the present context, for two reasons. First, arguably virtue ethics itself is simply incompatible with the liberal principle, which emerged out of deontological and consequentialist approaches to ethics (indeed, virtue ethics is often seen as providing an "anti-theoretical" approach to ethics, emphasizing the messiness and imprecision of our ethical lives and hence resistant to any strict ethical principles). So even if this response undermines Routley's argument against the liberal principle, it's far from clear that it's consistent with a defence of the liberal principle. Virtue ethics may itself represent a "new ethic".
Second, recall that the point of this response is to show how even if the natural world has no intrinsic value, the Last Man's behaviour might still be morally wrong. The problem is that I very much doubt that negative evaluations of the Last Man's character really make much sense without supposing the natural world to be of intrinsic value. Why, exactly, does his destruction of the forests exhibit an insensitivity to beauty, and an inappropriate hubris? If the natural world is only valuable insofar as it has uses for humans, the Last Man may well object that he's simply doing what any of us would: using the natural world in the ways he thinks are best. In his view, he says, barren landscapes are far more beautiful than lush rainforests. And there are no more humans to answer to, so what's the problem?
Reject (P4)
(P4) says that the Last Man's actions are not morally permissible. Routley doesn't bother to defend this claim; evidently, he assumes it's simply obvious that we should condemn the Last Man's actions. But is this obvious? Well, I suspect that such pointlessly destructive behaviour would make most people rather uneasy, although as far as I know no empirical studies testing the common person's reaction to Last Man scenarios have ever been done. But let's grant that, at least intuitively, the Last Man's behaviour is wrong.
Recall the broad structure of Routley's argument. It has essentially three parts: (a) the liberal principle permits action X; (b) but intuitively, X is impermissible; (c) so the liberal principle must be rejected. This kind of argument - attempting to demonstrate that particular moral principles entail unacceptable conclusions - is fairly standard in moral philosophy. But as the famous phrase goes, one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. Rather than rejecting the principle, we may reason as follows: (a) the liberal principle permits X; (b) intuitively, X is impermissible; (c) so, our intuitions about X are wrong.
What we have here is a clash of intuitions. Intuitively, X is wrong. But intuitively, the liberal principle is right, and the liberal principle permits X. From this point of view, it's at least as reasonable to reject (P4) as it is to accept it. In fact, the problem for Routley is even more serious than this, for two reasons. First, the liberal principle arguably has more to recommend it than mere intuitive support. It's part of the core of much of our moral reasoning (Routley surely wouldn't deny that; after all, he identifies the liberal principle as the core of Western ethics). It has the virtue of simplicity, and it provides us with a straightforward way of resolving moral and legal dilemmas. Furthermore, if we reject it, we face the question of what exactly we replace it with, and note that Routley doesn't offer any specific proposals in his article.
Second, basic moral principles tend to be fairly resistant to counterexamples. Consider the resistance of utilitarianism to apparently outrageous conclusions. Utilitarianism seems to entail that we must give enormous amounts of money to charity, perhaps even to the extent that we won't be able to afford any luxuries for ourselves. The good that would be done by buying yourself a luxury, say a Grateful Dead t-shirt or a nice meal restaurant, is vastly outweighed by the good that would be done by using that money to help save starving children. So, it's morally wrong to buy a Grateful Dead t-shirt. You should only buy clothes you really need, and send the money you save away. This conclusion is outrageous. But many people who are attracted to utilitarianism simply bite the bullet and reject the intuition that there's nothing wrong with spending your money on luxuries.
Why shouldn't the defender of the liberal principle simply reject the Last Man intuition? Indeed, this response seems especially plausible in the present case. The Last Man scenario is outlandish. It's an extreme case, totally removed from the normal context of moral judgement. How much weight should we place on our intuitions about a case like this? It's not surprising that we can develop extreme scenarios in which there's a mismatch between our general principles and our specific judgements. Bear in mind that Routley is, by his own admission, pushing for a radical change in our moral attitudes - not just a modification of existing ethics, but a wholesale revolution. A few troublesome intuitions about strange scenarios that are almost certainly never going to happen is a rather weak basis for such a lofty goal.
I should note that despite my critical comments, I largely agree with Routley. I think that forests, salt marshes, mountains, oceans, etc are intrinsically valuable; I completely reject human chauvinism. However, I'm not so sure about how to argue for this. These "deep green" commitments are simply part of the foundations, the core, of my worldview. There may be rhetorical value in Last Man examples, and if you're inclined to think that the Last Man's behaviour is morally wrong, then I'd encourage you to consider deep green ethics. But ultimately, for committed human chauvinists, I think there are very plausible responses to Last Man cases.
This concludes the main parts of the paper. I'll also make some comments about Routley's discussion of rights.
Rights
If we accept an environmental ethic, must we say that e.g. trees have rights? No, says Routley: the mere fact that there are moral prohibitions against acting a certain way towards an object doesn't entail that the object has rights; i.e. just because it's morally wrong to clear-cut a forest, doesn't entail that the forest has a right not to be clear-cut.
Of course, this depends on just how we're using the term "rights". But I agree with Routley that on many uses of that term, there's no reason why assigning intrinsic value to natural items would entail assigning rights to them. On one popular view of rights, noted by Routley, rights are coupled to responsibilities and obligations; obviously, it would be absurd to hold that trees, salt marshes, mountains etc have any responsibilities or obligations. It's clear that on this view, moral prohibitions extend beyond objects to which rights are assigned. For instance, there is a moral prohibitions against killing babies, but if rights entail responsibilities then babies don't strictly speaking have rights.
Another popular view is that rights are in some sense inviolable. If P has a right not to be killed, it would be wrong to kill P even if killing P would e.g. improve the general utility. Now evidently, we also have plenty of duties towards others that aren't inviolable. I should return the money you lent me, unless I discover that you intend to use the money to finance terrorism. I should not steal, unless my children are literally starving. It's easy to proliferate examples like this.
So it can be perfectly reasonable to say that it's morally wrong to clear-cut a forest, that we have certain obligations towards the forest, without the forest thereby having rights (perhaps because if the circumstances were different, it would be acceptable to clear-cut the forest).
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