Living Together in an Ecological Community

There is perhaps no area of ethical thinking that pushes us to examine the foundations of ethical thought more than environmental ethics. Should we think of the ethical demands placed upon our behavior in terms of the maximization of pleasure over pain? If so, should it be human pleasure and pain or the pleasure and pain of all sentient beings? Should we think of those demands in terms of the maximization of human happiness or of some other notion of human well-being? Should we think of those demands in terms of the promotion of certain types of virtue? Should we think of those demands in terms of rules governing some sort of moral community, perhaps a Kantian "kingdom of ends" or a Jamesian "Ethical Republic?" The practical question, of course, is how we are to live our lives. In particular, how are we to conduct ourselves when what is involved is our behavior as it affects the environment in which we and our children, grandchildren, and later descendants will live well into the future? The philosophical question is what kind of analytical framework can help us to think more clearly about how we are to live. To address the philosophical question adequately it is important to keep clear focus on the range of practical problems that arise in our interaction with our environment. Suppose that we adopt an ethical framework according to which we judge our behavior on the balance of pleasure over pain that we produce. As Peter Singer has rightly noted in a large body of work, if pleasure and pain are the key moral criteria, it seems arbitrary to privilege human pleasure and pain over pleasure and pain in other forms of sentient life. At the same time, if we adopt a principle of determining our behavior so as to promote pleasure over pain in whatever forms of sentient life they may arise, we find some seriously counter-intuitive consequences. Suppose that we find ourselves in the wilderness needing food, confronted with a choice of killing a common white-tailed deer or an endangered caribou. If our ethical principle is simply promoting the highest level of pleasure over pain it would seem that we could equally well kill the deer or the caribou. Either would likely experience roughly the same level of pain in its death, and, if we kill efficiently, less pain that either would likely experience later in starvation, as road-kill, or as prey to some hungry wolf. We find ourselves with an ethical principle that has no place for consideration of species membership. Such an ethical approach is unable to support the broadly shared view that preservation of species is a good. A number of philosophers have attempted to frame environmental ethics in terms of the alleged intrinsic goodness of various natural objects. Quite apart from the inadequacy of most of the popular arguments for the position, it also fails to provide an analytic framework for addressing species problems. Perhaps worse yet, it would fail to provide any principled distinction between caribou and broccoli. The species problem would seem to arise with any approach that takes individual entities in the environment, whether human individuals or individuals of other sorts, as the starting point of ethical analysis without understanding those individuals as, in some sense, parts of a larger whole. These considerations lead me to the view that the pressing ethical problems that arise in our interaction with the environment in which we live provide important support for understanding ethical agents centrally as parts of some sort of community of interrelated parts. For reasons that will become clear over the course of this paper, the kind of community in terms of which ethical life should be framed is best rooted in William James's "Ethical Republic" rather than Immanuel Kant's "Kingdom of Ends." In current thinking about the environment, sustainability has become a very fashionable topic of conversation. We are, for example, presently well into what UNESCO has declared as the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. …