Environmental Ethics Final

Galbraith: The Dependence Effect

• Economic Growth Conflicts with Environmental Protection

• Just because desires are satisfied, does not mean quality of life is improved.

• The Twisted Poisoner: Man poisons you, then gives you the cure; raising satisfied desires but not increasing quality of life

• The Poison: The source and structure of consumer desires (Advertising and Conspicuous Consumption)

Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich

• Why doesn’t an increase in the number of satisfied desires increase quality of life?

• Consumer desires are desires for the wrong kinds of things (Instrumental, not Intrinsic).

• Illyich was an Evaluative Invert: someone who intrinsically valued merely instrumental things.

Andreou: A Shallow Route to Environmentally Friendly Happiness

• Exalted View: For humans, the material realm is less important than the mental or spiritual realm

• Worldly Views: How good our lives are depends in large part on the material goods we possess

For either of these views, higher affluence does not mean higher quality of life.

1) Hedonic Adaptation: You get used to what you have, so a change in affluence will not negatively impact your life.

2) Relative value of possessions that matter

Turner: The Abstract Wild

We need to maintain the wild as is so it doesn’t lose its aura.

Morgan-Knapp: The Environmental Case Against Employmentism

• Employmentism: the High importance assigned to paid work across a broad swath of our personal and collective lives.

• It encourages consumption, so we should replace it with an alternative value system that is more sustainable, minimizing their own paid work.

Hardin - The Tragedy of the Commons

• The Free-Rider Problem: The fear of contributing when fewer than K members contribute and the hope of not contributing when more than K members contribute make it rational for each not to contribute

• Payoff matrix

Dietz, Ostrom & Stern - The Struggle to Govern the Commons

The Government Regulation Solution:

• Mutual Coercion Mutually agreed upon

• Invasive, difficult to enforce, corruptible, lack of experience

Private Property Solution

• Make the good excludable

• Prevents free-riders from depleting and internalizes the externalities of depleting it (its there are, they suffer)

• Unfair to make public good private. Lockean Provisio: Initial appropriations justified only if it does not leave others worse off than they would have been if no privatization

• Can weaken community solidarity

• Owner vulnerable to Catastrophe

Norms of Cooperation Solution

• Guilt shame, embarrassment

• Only works on someone moral and who Is frequently interacting with the good.

Johnson - Ethical Obligations in a Tragedy of the Commons

• In T of C, its unlikely that commons uses will adopt widespread restraint without only assurances that others will to

• When there’s no reasonable expectation of success, you shouldn’t bother. Enough others will never reduce emissions, so you shouldn’t either

• Limiting emissions is positively bad because it disrupts necessary political action

Challenge: The result doesn’t change the moral relevance of the action

Cafaro - Climate Ethics and Population Policy

Reducing A and Increasing T has not helped in practice (Jevons Effect for T)

Increased Efficiency: Greater use

Increased Efficiency: lower prices: more consumption, just as much resource use (Jevons Effect)

• Free contraceptives, safe abortion access, increased education for women, tax incentives for small families

Against:

• Conservative: Abortion and contraceptives evil

• Women in the kitchen

• Liberal: Blames poor for problems they didn’t cause and unfairly limits their opportunity

Burkett - A Legacy of Harm Climate Change and the Carbon Cost of Procreation

Moral responsibility to curb inessential emissions: children are inessential

• Natural, responsibility, right, demanding, necessary for decent life

Cafaro + Staples - The Environmental Argument for Reducing Immigration into the U.S.

Limit immigration to the extent that it is needed to stop population growth.

Advocating for reduced immigration is more effective than reducing birth rates

• Increased pop. causes urban sprawl, development of remote land for living, higher carbon cost

• Bolster homes of immigrants, enforce sanctions on employers who hire illegals

Sunstein: The Arithmetic of Arsenic

CBA:

• Determine the effects of implementing a policy

• Sort these effects into costs and benefits

• Subtract total price of the costs from total costs of the benefits

• Either

  • a) implement policy if there’s a net benefit

  • Implement policy if it has the highest net benefit of alternatives

• market price: how much it means to people. Accounts for shadow prices. benefits transfer, and contingent valuation

• So, a policy whose monetized benefits are greater than its monetized costs should improve overall well-being.

• Arguments in favor:

  • People’s intuitive judgments are systematically biased. Experts, however, are trained

  • Clear method of scientific knowledge to policy

  • How much people are willing to pay reveals how much human welfare the thing produces

Ackerman & Heinzerling - Pricing the Priceless

Objections to CBA:

• To choose the right policy, we have to know what the right policies are and how to compare their importance accurately

• Some things can’t be given prices that accurately represent their value, they are essentially just guessing

• Can a monetary scale commensurate (scale of value) the costs and benefits of regulation

Response:

• If you make a tradeoff, and one of those values can be measured monetarily (value of continued life), then the other can also be measured (roughly) on a monetary scale

Wenz - Just Garbage

• Justice requires that the distribution of burdens and benefits be commensurate

• Justice requires that those that reap the most benefits from consumption bear the biggest burdens

• Assign LULU points to each kind of envi. burden, and require wealthy communities to earn more LULU points

Singer: One Atmosphere

According to any plausible principle of fairness: The US should carry more of the burden for addressing Climate Change

• Polluter Pays Principle: Fairness requires that those who cause a problem bear primary responsibility for fixing it

• Equal Share Principle: When a desirable and scarce good is to be distributed for the first time, it should be distributed equally to everyone. (US would have to reduce or compensate others)

• Aid the Worse off Principle: When a desirable and scarce good is to be distributed for the first time, it should benefit the worst off.

Gardiner: Core Precautionary Principle

The Precautionary Principle: When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, take measures.

• The proponent should carry the burden of proof, not the regulator

• Objections: too conservative, unjustifiably narrow, and incoherent

Core PP: Maximin Decision Rule: Choose the policy that has the best worst possible outcome where

• The situation is one in which a knowledge of likelihoods is impossible

• The decision-makers care little for potential gains that might be made above the minimum that can be guaranteed by the maximum.

• Situation involves grave risks.

Thresher: When Extinction is Warranted

Should we use gene drives to eradicate invasive species?

• Thresher’s Worst-Case Clause: If a policy would be warranted even after assuming that the worst possible outcome will follow, then we are warranted in implementing it.

• Only possibilities that “we could feasibly see happening”

  • Better than CBA, who pretends it can predict outcomes and PP, who doesn’t know which is worse

• Worst-Case (extinction) is better than letting it drive other species to extinction

Gardiner: Is Arming the Future with Geo-engineering Really the lesser evil?

Geoengineering: making large-scale changes to the natural environment to counter CC

ATF: We should start research now on GE because it may be preferable later.

Gardiner:

• GE is a way to do something w/o sacrifice

• Preparing to do something wrong when you should be instead be preventing is wrong.

• Preparing will make the evil more likely to happen

Baxter: People or Penguins- The Care for Optional Pollution

Baxter’s Arguments for Anthropocentrism (only humans have moral standing)

Only one that Corresponds to Reality (the way people think)

• If its the only one, it should be accepted

Morality is Human construct

• Only humans are moral agents, so can only be the direct objects of moral requirements

Plumwood: Ethics and the Instrumentalizing Self

Ecofeminism: Domination of women and the unjustified domination of nature are connected

The acceptance and glorification of the instrumentalizing self explains both those.

• Egoistic, rational, separate, autonomous, center of power I

Relational Self:

• Dependent, sensitive and responsive, solidarity, empathy

The IS is not a good way to interact with the world.

Singer: All animals are Equal

• Anything that is sentient has moral standing

• Anything that has moral standing has the same moral standing

If an action causes suffering, that is a moral reason not to do it regardless of who feels it, so all sentient animals have moral standing

If you reject that the standing is equal, you either reject human equality or are speciest.

equality = equal consideration of interests

• Utilitarian: calculate aggregate interest when making decisions

• No animal testing or factory farming

Regan: The Radical Case for Animal Rights

• Non-Human animals have moral standing

• All who have moral standing have equal moral standing

Subjects-of-a-Life have fundamental moral value

Never treat a subject as a mere tool

• Aunt Bea

Taylor: The Ethics of Respect for Nautre

• All living things possess equal inherent value

Humans are members of the Earth’s community of life, holding that membership on the same terms apply to all the nonhuman members

Each is goal-directed, pursuing its own way

The claim that humans by nature are superior is groundless

• Our capacities are only instrumentally valuable, good for living our lives, but not other kinds of lives

• Human capacities are only superior only if living a good human life is more important than a good falcon’s life- so they are not a reason.

Leopold: The Land Ethic

Land Ethic: A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the ecosystem. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Ethical Holism: The moral value of an act is at least partly a function of how it treats collectives (cultures, species, ecosystems)

Russow: Why do Species Matter?

Some species have aesthetic value (why saving some is better than saving others and economic is not a reason to kill)

Russowian Challenge to the land Ethic:

• Are ecosystems intrinsically good?

• Are they the only thing that matter?

• Why isn’t everything humans do natural?

• Why would things be better if humans didn’t influence?

Russowian Revision of the land Ethic:

• That a choice tends to preserve the beauty of and in the biotic community counts as a reason in Its favor. And when it tends otherwise, that is a reason against it.