The moral significance of preserving natural environments is not entirely an issue of rights and social utility, for a person’s attitude toward nature may be importantly connected with virtues or human excellences. The question is, “What sort of person would destroy the natural environment--or even see its value solely in cost/benefit terms?” The answer I suggest is that willingness to do so may well reveal the absence of traits which are a natural basis for a proper humility, self-acceptance, gratitude, and (...) appreciation of the good in others. (shrink)

The assumption that environmental ethics must be nonanthropocentric in order to be adequate is mistaken. There are two forms of anthropocentrism, weak and strong, and weak anthropocentrism is adequate to support an environmental ethic. Environmental ethics is, however, distinctive vis-a-vis standard British and American ethical systems because, in order to be adequate, it must be nonindividualistic.Environmental ethics involves decisions on two levels, one kind of which differs from usual decisions affecting individual fairness while the other does not. The latter, called (...) allocational decisions, are not reducible to the former and govern the use of resources across extended time. Weak anthropocentrism provides a basis for criticizing individual, consumptive needs and can provide the basis for adjudicatingbetween these levels, thereby providing an adequate basis for environmental ethics without the questionable ontological commitments made by nonanthropocentrists in attributing intrinsie value to nature. (shrink)

Environmentalists in the United States are often confronted by rural landowners who feel that they have the right to do whatever they want with their land regardless of the consequences for other human beings or of the damage to the environment. This attitude is traced from its origins in ancient German and Saxon land use practices into the political writings of Thomas Jefferson where it was fused togetherwith John Locke’s theory of property. This view of land and property rights was (...) most influential in the late nineteenth century after the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862 when it was used in the arguments opposing national parks and nature preservation. Today it remains a formidable obstacle to planning and zoning in rural areas, despite unstated underlying assumptions which are either outdated or false. (shrink)

John Passmore has claimed that American environmental attitudes are incompatible with Western traditions and Western civilization: they arose out of a Romantic transvaluation of values in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and today are defensible only in terms of antiscientific nature mysticism and Oriental religions. I argue that these attitudes developed out of an intricate interplay between Western science and art over the last three centuries, and are, therefore, of Western, not Eastern, origin. Moreover, they are apart of scientific and (...) aesthetic changes so broad and fundamental that, despite Passmore’s prediction that they are unlikely to survive into the twenty-first century, they cannot be regarded lightly as a passing fad, and probably have already found a permanent place in Western thought and values. (shrink)

If environmentalists are to combat effectively the continuing environmental decay resulting from more and more intense human exploitation of nature, they need a plausible and coherent rationale for preserving sensitive areas and other species. This need is illustrated by reference to two examples of controversies concerning large public projects in wilderness areas. Analyses of costs and benefits to presently existing human beings and the utilitarian theory which supports such theories are inadequate to provide such a rationale, as other writers have (...) shown. A number of environmentalists have suggested that ascriptions of rights to nonhuman animals, plants, and other natural objects may provide the necessary rationale. I argue that such ascriptions can only be effective if they are supported by a general theory of rights. Although no such general theory is developed, I state four minimal conditions which must be fulfilled by all rights holders as entailments of the concept of a right and, hence, as necessary conditions on rights holding, regardless of the general theory of rights espoused. I then argue that no appeals to rights of nonhumans can simultaneously fulfill these four minimal conditions and, on the other hand, satisfy the need for a coherent rationale for environmental preservation. In the central argument of the essay I exploit the distinction between the concern of vegetarians and antivivisectionists who rest their case for animal rights on the analogy ofanimal suffering to human suffering and the concern of environmentalists to protect the integrity of holistic ecosystems. I then conclude that even if the case for nonhuman rights can be made convincingly, the rights defended are insufficient for the development of a complete and coherent rationale for environmental preservation. (shrink)