An Environmental Ethic

 An Environmental Ethic

Dr Robert Howell, September 2019

In an article written in 1947, Aldo Leopold wrote that when Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged a dozen slave-girls whom he suspected of misbehaviour.  The girls were his property, and hence outside the moral domain.   During the Middle Ages, it was considered that there was no responsibility for animals because it was thought they had no soul.  This changed when the Utilitarians such as Bentham (1748-1832) and Mill (1806-1873) promoted the idea that right and wrong were determined by the increase of happiness and the reduction of pain.  Because animals experience pain they were brought into the moral sphere.  But, Leopold, argued, we now need to extend this to include soils, waters, plants and animals.  He proposed an ethic where a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Leopold’s claim that this extension was needed overlooked that there have always been people throughout history who have included human-Earth relations in their ethic.  These include people from many indigenous cultures, Francis of Assisi, Blake, Wordsworth, John Muir (Sierra Club), Gandhi, Rousseau and Schweitzer.  German foresters influenced in part by Rousseau, and the movement promoting wilderness, included a human-Earth perspective into their thinking.  But because the dominant notion was that the Earth’s resources were there for human benefit, the extension Leopold argued for was justified. 

It was twentieth century scientists such as Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold who led the modern development in environmental ethics.  Carson’s influential Silent Spring, published in 1963, described a town where there were no birds because they were killed by chemical pesticides.  Carson argued that we need a moral notion of respect for nature.

It has been the last few decades of the twentieth century and this century, with the growing awareness of the deterioration of the Earth’s ecological systems, especially those that are critical for human survival, that the need to rethink our values has become urgent.  The climate crisis is the obvious threat, but there are other aspects including water, food supplies, atmospheric and water borne toxins, and species loss.  This is linked with the limits to growth, and this is in contrast to our dominant economic activity that sees no limits to the exploitation of Earth’s resources for human utility. 

Modern philosophers have used the tradition ethical frameworks, which focussed on a human-human ethic, to include a human-Earth ethic.  Hursthouse builds on Aristotle’s Ethics: she has developed the virtue of respect for nature as a new virtue.  

Singer is a modern utilitarian or consequentialist.  He argues that we have a responsibility to avoid harming people.  Individually and collectively through our emissions we are causing harm.  We have an obligation to act individually and to change the policy of governments to slow climate change. 

Shue uses the social contract tradition to advocate for a rights approach based on fairness.  He states that the purpose of a right is to provide protection for human beings.  The climate crisis threatens in particular the right to life, the right to health, and the right to subsistence. 

In 1987 The World Commission on Environment and Development (known as “the Brundtland Commission”) launched Our Common Future Report with a call for a “new charter” to set “new norms” to guide the transition to sustainable development.

Following that, discussion about an Earth Charter took place in the process leading to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The Rio Declaration became the statement of the achievable consensus at that time, but it had its limitations.

In 1994, Maurice Strong (Secretary-General of the Rio Summit) and Mikhail Gorbachev, working through organizations they each founded (Earth Council and Green Cross International respectively), launched an initiative (with the support from the Dutch Government) to develop an Earth Charter as a civil society initiative. The initial drafting and consultation process drew on hundreds of international documents and people.  The Earth Charter uses a number of concepts including respect, ecological integrity, and care.

I have recommended as a General Principle: Respect and care for the Earth and its ecological systems by living within the energy and material capacity of the Earth to support human and other forms of life, encourage resilience, and take responsibility as stewards of the Earth (kaitiakitanga).