Environmental ethics (midterm 2)

PHIL 2280

Minobimaatisiiwin

• Ethical framework for living well, for anishinaabe people

• Happiness, the good life, well-being

• Connection to the land/place 

• Scope - relationships with all beings (humans, and nonhumans)

• long-term/intergenerational - “good life” and “continuous rebirth”

• Where we are, and where we go from here

• Ontology, metaphysics, cosmology, epistemology

• Ethical code in line with natural law (In line with natural law (ex: time is cyclical))

• Connectedness, sharing, respect etc. are central 

• No difference in a good life vs enviro ethics - they are the same (a good life involves harmonious relationships with the land)

• 1000s of yrs

• Human and nonhuman realm (one of the big differences between indigenous vs western enviro ethics)

Anishinaabe peoples

• The word Anishinaabe describes a group of people

• Anishinaabe = original person

Minobimaatisiiwin - key components (list them)

1. Wholeness

2. Balance

3. Relationships

4. Harmony 

5. Growth 

6. Healing 

Medicine wheel - the quadrants

• Directions

• 4 dimensions of true learning

• 4 races

• Aspects of humanness

• Cycles of life

• Elements

• Seasons

• Time = cyclical

• Each phase of life/season has its own place in a whole

1. Wholeness

• Incorporation of all aspects of life - by paying attention to each part, and the relation therein

• Thereby creating balance

• (Like understanding each part of the medicine wheel, while also acknowledging the whole)

2. Balance 

• Each part of the whole requires attention in a manner where one part is not focused upon to the detriment of the other parts

• Occurs when a person is at peace and harmony within and with all other beings - living and natural world

• Paying attention to positive and negative aspects of people

• Never fully achieved; a constant pursuit

• Imbalance is disease or problem - re-attaining balance is medicine

• Balance is necessary for one’s full potential 

3. Relationships *

• Balance involves (at least) two entities - paying attention to both → relationship 

• Giving attention to what connects each part of the medicine wheel - relationships

• Interconnectedness - to each other, the land, and all living beings

• Central aspect of well-being

• Key to attaining harmony

• Central to one’s purpose in life

• All encompassing - influence and influenced by relationships 

• Determination to place - relation to land 

• Accommodating and coexistence rather than dominating 

• Not interfering in or not judging another’s self-determination 

  • Non-interference is key

• Guided by good conduct, leads to a good life

• Intergenerational and metaphysical - relationships with beings that we do not yet cognize

4. Harmony

• Key aspect of a good life

• With oneself, others, the world, all other beings

• Respect for relationships - with self, with others

• Relationships with powers, energies, and beings - metaphysical aspect 

• Fulfilling obligations (collaborating, cooperating, sharing with others)

• Collaboration

• Cooperation

• Sharing

• Leads to growth

• Peace

5. Growth

• Developing the body, mind, heart, spirit

• In a harmonious manner

• Based on will - volition

• Movement through life-cycles towards wholeness, balance, interdependence, connectedness, and harmony

• Feeling of centeredness: “when one is centered, one is balanced and in harmony with creation, connected, and whole; this is the place of optimum growth and healing

6. Healing

• Not a response to disease or a problem

• Understood as a journey

• Practiced daily

• Healing is the transition that restores the person, community, and nation to wholeness, connectedness, and balance

• Means to develop centeredness

• Not meant for individual alone but also for the community - interconnectedness

• In healing it is essential for people to know their innermost self, their innermost strength - introspective

• Then taking responsibility for their action/situation, learning, and growth

• Role of the will is central

How do Indigenous people view the land?

• “We are the land … that is the fundamental idea embedded in Native American life … the Earth is the mind of the people as we are the mind of the earth. The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act our the drama of our isolate destinies. It is not a means of survival, a setting for our affairs … It is rather a part of our being, dynamic, significant, real. It is our self …” (pg 329)

All beings are animate and self-conscious

(bacteria, rocks, water, etc. And they all have will)

Reciprocal, responsible, and caring relationships with and nature

Ex: seal is hunted on fresh snow. Hunter puts snow in his mouth, then spits it into the seal’s mouth. So that the seal is not thirsty when traveling to next world. This action equates human and seal. Gratitude for seal because it allowed itself to be hunted so the human can live

Relating to land includes

• All beings are animates and self-conscious 

• Reciprocal, responsible, and caring relationships with nature 

• Respect 

• Balance

• Ethic permeates all ares of life

• Tend to preserve ecological integrity - over time

• Stories, songs, and oral traditions

• Maintained via ceremony

• Land is not wilderness

• Community includes several species, not humans alone

• Land as history, culture, and religion

• Land as self

Inuit

• Inuit = word means ‘people’

• Inuit people live in different regions, spread out. Live in arctic 

What is seal hunting?

Seal hunting or sealing is simply the killing of seals

List the 2 types of seal hunting

Commercial & personal

Commercial seal hunting

large numbers, primarily a “fur hunt”

Personal seal hunting

meat, fur, bones, oil, mittens, boots, coats etc., sustainability, balance

Seal hunting: what are the reasons for international attention

• Protection and conservation

• Cute animals (easy to gain support when animals are cute. There are lots of species that are endangered that don't get campaigned for because of how they look - people are less likely to care about an endangered bug) 

Contextualizing angry Inuk

• Anti-sealing organizations target much-publicized commercial seal hunts that happen off the coast of Newfoundland and in the Gulf of the Saint Lawrence in southern Canada every spring 

• Inuit seal hunters hunt all over the Canadian Arctic as well as Alaska, Greenland and Russia

• They never hunted the baby whitecoat harp seal pups targeted by the anti-sealing campaigns - illegal in Canada since 1987

• They hunt mostly ringed seals, as well as harp seals, that are adults by the time they’ve migrated that far north

Inuit and seal hunting

• Way of life - nutrition

• Sustainability and co-existence

• Cultural tradition - hunting is central

• Economy

• Ban has led to poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, relocating to cities

• (If they can't hunt/get food, they're forced to move to the city (which leads to poverty, unemployment, etc.))

Normative ethics - overview 

• How do things matter

• How the interests of directly morally considerable agents need to be taken into consideration in decision making processes (helps determine which beings are morally considerable). Ex: based on anthropocentrism, here’s how you should treat humans 

• Central to developing a normative ethics is evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of different normative theories

•  Evaluating based on principles

• Scope of normative theories: pressing environmental issues including allocation of scarce resources, land use, consumption patterns, etc.

• Whose interests should take precedence when values/interests come into conflict?

• Provide approaches to evaluating actions, practices, and policies 

• Human-nonhumans-animate-inanimate relations

Normative ethics - varieties (list the different types of normative ethics)

• Utilitarianism

• deontology

• virtue ethics

• care ethics

Utilitarianism

consequentialist ethics where the outcome of an action/policy that determines whether it is right/good or not

Deontology

an action is right or wrong depending on to the extent that it conforms to the operative rules or duties

Virtue ethics

the rightness or wrongness of actions is dependent on the character of the agent/traits they express

Care ethics

emotions, compassion, and care are centered 

Utilitarianism - overview 

• Basis - consequentialism (consequentialist ethic)

  • Actions are weighed based on their outcomes (based on whether an action yields a good outcome, or a bad outcome)

  • The better the outcomes, the more justified an action or policy is  

• The doctrine that an action is right insofar as it promotes happiness. The guiding principle of conduct here is the greatest happiness of the greatest number (greatest number → trying to get majority of people happy, trying to be equal (equality))

• Aims and goals - a means to arrive at equality, justice, and right action

• Methods - principle of utility 

Utilitarianism - principle of utility 

• “Something is right to the extent that it brings about the greatest balance of good over bad among the options available to the agent, considering everyone and everything impacted” (p. 175)

• (an action is more right or good if it brings more happiness)

• (Everybody's interests matter, and they matter equally → Anti-monarchial)

• (Peter Singer argues for all sentient beings)

• Principle of utility + value axiology 

• Principle of right action

• Different kinds of utilitarianism: egalitarian sentient utilitarianism, biocentric utilitarianism, anthropocentric utilitarian 

List the different types of utilitarianism

• egalitarian sentient utilitarianism

• biocentric utilitarianism

• anthropocentric utilitarian 

Utilitarianism - strengths

• Intuitively possible - more happiness is better than less happiness (favouring good over bad is an intuitive way to live, and is how we live)

• Attempts at egalitarianism - everyone’s interests are taken into account 

• Impartial - everyone’s interests matter equally

• Seems fairly simple and straightforward to apply to practical decisions - utility calculus (don't have to read and understand rules, don't need to know complex laws or study virtues)

Utility calculus

(Utility calculus procedure → need to do 4 things)

• Actions: identifying all the possible courses of action

• Consequences: identifying what the consequences of each of those actions will be

• Values: assigning appropriate values (good and bad) to consequences 

• Summing: summing up each alternative to arrive at the overall balance of good and bad

Challenges to utility calculi

• Epistemic

• Evaluative

• Strength of interests

Challenges to utility calculi: epistemic

• its difficult to identify in advance the impacts and how they have an impact on human and nonhuman wellbeing.

• Might be things we don't know about yet/shortcomings.

• Hard to arrive at epistemic outcome

Challenges to utility calculi: evaluative

•  hard to know the impacts, hard to know who will be involved, hard to know who will be directly and indirectly impacted.

• Comparing interests of everything involved is hard

Challenges to utility calculi: strengths of interests

• method that pays attention to strength of interests.

• Its a way to not be arrested in process, allows to more forward.

• This brings attention to the fact that each being has varying degrees of interests based on importance.

• Some are basic to wellbeing, some are basic to their existence, etc.

Utilitarianism - weighing interests 

• Basic

• Serious

• Significant

• Peripheral

• Not hard categories, better understand as a continuum (ex: if you’re disabled, a swimming pool might be more essential for you than for others)

• Determined by context

• Here basic interests should take precedence over less basic 

• The core feature of utilitarianism is weighing interests (its how you determine good or bad)

weighing interests: basic

needs that must be met for a being to live and healthy. Cant survive without

weighing interests: serious

needs that, if not met, it will sustainably diminish the beings quality of life.

Ex: friendship, education, work.

(Can live without)

weighing interests: significant

if met, can improve beings life or opportunities.

Ex: good university, good food, sports/hobbies

weighing interests: peripheral

wants (but don’t need)

Not essential

Ex: current fashion, latest trends, luxury cars/products, nice restaurants.

Principle of beneficence

 “if you can prevent something very bad from happening with little cost to yourself, then you ought to do so”

• Also acts as a principle of nonmaleficence (whenever we are in a situation where we don't have to cause harm to a being, you shouldn't harm them)

• Number of interests matter

• Physiological complexity (needs to be taken into account)

  • Lifeboat cases

• Two factor egalitarianism

Two factor egalitarianism

• points us to levels of interest + psychological capacities

• Non-anthropocentric (ex: looking at psychological capacities of chimps, we see that they’re very similar to humans, which helps make this less anthropocentric)

• Rule 1 (the interests of psychologically complex beings needs to be taken into account (not just humans))

• Rule 2 (within the psychologically complex beings, their levels of interests matter (basic needs are more important than luxuries))

Rule consequentialism

“an action is right if it conforms to the rules that if generally adopted would bring about the greatest balance of good over bad”

• Rules are evaluated in terms of their consequences 

• Eg. traffic lights (deemed to be good because they lead to better outcomes)

• Actions are evaluated as right or wrong on the basis of whether they conform to outcome maximizing rules - indirect consequentialism (there are different types of consequentialism. Rule consequentialism: direct, based consequence (on outcome of following the rule). Indirect consequentialism: actions are evaluated as right or wrong based on whether they conform to outcome maximizing rules.)