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20201112201127environmental_ethicspl.pptxEthics and the Environment
David Barzilai, Ph.D.
Fair Use: This presentation is only a learning device It uses many sources and resources to help the learning process
The Swallows of San Juan Capistrano
The Swallows of San Juan Capistrano
Back from winter vacation in Argentina
by Gerry Brown
They're on their way.
The famous cliff swallows of San Juan Capistrano that leave town every year in a swirling mass near the Day of San Juan (October 23), are returning from their winter vacation spot 6,000 miles south in Goya, Corrientes, Argentina.
They land at the mission in San Juan, California, on or around St. Joseph's Day, March 19, to the ringing bells of the old church and a crowd of visitors from all over the world who are in town awaiting their arrival and celebrating with a huge fiesta as well as a parade.
Wikipedia: “In recent years, the swallows have failed to return in large flocks to the Mission. Few birds were counted in the 1990s and 2000s. The reduction has been connected to increased development of the area…” Less places to nest and less insects to eat.
“The mission has tried to lure them there using food and bird calls. Nothing has worked.
Now, researchers hope a new approach might bring back these once-famous residents: fake swallow nests.
As far back as the beginning of the 1900s, these birds would fly up from Argentina and supposedly arrive at San Juan Capistrano in droves on March 19th, St Joseph's Day”.
See also:
http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2009/03/25/another_year_without_swallows/
A Question of Rights
The story of the swallows is important also we consider the various form of new ethics concerning the environment, we consider the ways they confront the question of rights – who has them, on what basis, what kind, and so forth, as we consider the various definitions to the concept of “moral agent,” or “moral status” or “moral significance.”
The swallows are a unique species with the unique capacity to travel 6,000 miles from Argentina and back. They have this unique capacity much like the dolphins and the human being has others, and thus the question rises if this uniqueness and these capacities provide moral status and protective rights. If so, what is the nature of these rights and how should they be given and secured and by whom???
What lesson it is for Us ?
Human activates are affecting critically the life of other creatures on earth.
And this is the case also with bees and many other wild animals.
(CNN)Maybe you could stand to live in a world without honey. But what about almonds, pears, avocados, grapes and -- dare we say -- wine?
Most plants rely on bees and other natural pollinators to produce some of nature's most nutritious and beloved foods.
But pollinators, a diverse group that includes insects and animals such as birds and bats, are under threat because of widespread pesticide use, climate change, the emergence of foreign pests, diseases and habitat loss. Between April 2015 and April 2016, beekeepers in the United States lost 44 percent of their colonies and in the UK, beekeepers reported losses of almost 17 percent, according to the British Beekeepers Association.
The Environment
Planet earth is the home of humanity and as such it encompasses a complex of physical and biotic elements of the world, including earth, water, the air and the sky, as well as all the biological and vegetative organisms that reside in it.
The focal point of Environmental Ethics is to address and exam the reciprocal interactions between humanity and the environment and the impact of one on the other, especially of humanity on the world in which we live. Consequently, using the ethical prism or yard stick, this approach aims to provide a normative evaluation of the actions and attitudes that were taken so far. Culminating with pointing towards the righter and more just course that should be taken.
Many factors shape our worldviews
Religious and spiritual beliefs shape our worldview and perception of the environment
Political ideology: government’s role in protecting the environment
Shared cultural experiences if members of the community have lived through similar experiences
Nature
The field of the environment is relatively new and was formed in the last century. Before that the reference was to NATURE.
Human beings related to the world and its elements since they were able to reflect and reason.
We can distinguish roughly several historical stages:
Nature in religious terms of the gods, God creation and the mystery of exitance
Nature in scientific terms of God creation and the discovering the Laws of Nature
Nature in social and economic terms of the “common” as the source of Property
Nature in political terms as the challenge of distributive justice
And today --- Nature as our environment in terms of global responsibility
Genesis I -- The Anthropocentric View Nature as a mean to the Human End
1:26God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 1:27God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them. 1:28God blessed them. God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 1:29God said, “Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree, which bears fruit yielding seed. It will be your food. 1:30To every animal of the earth, and to every bird of the sky, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food.” And it was so.
Genesis II – The Stewardship relationship View
2:8Yahweh God planted a garden eastward, in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 2:9Out of the ground Yahweh God made every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 2:10A river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it was parted, and became four heads. 2:11The name of the first is Pishon: this is the one which flows through the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; 2:12and the gold of that land is good. There is aromatic resin and the onyx stone. 2:13The name of the second river is Gihon: the same river that flows through the whole land of Cush. 2:14The name of the third river is Hiddekel: this is the one which flows in front of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates. 2:15Yahweh God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. 2:16Yahweh God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat: 2:17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it: for in the day that you eat of it you will surely die.”
2:18Yahweh God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.” 2:19Out of the ground Yahweh God formed every animal of the field, and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 2:20The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every animal of the field; but for man there was not found a helper suitable for him.2:21
Traditional Chinese Concept of Nature
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art page it is written:
The natural world has long been conceived in Chinese thought as a self-generating, complex arrangement of elements that are continuously changing and interacting. Uniting these disparate elements is the Dao, or the Way. Dao is the dominant principle by which all things exist, but it is not understood as a causal or governing force. Chinese philosophy tends to focus on the relationships between the various elements in nature rather than on what makes or controls them. According to Daoist beliefs, man is a crucial component of the natural world and is advised to follow the flow of nature’s rhythms. Daoism also teaches that people should maintain a close relationship with nature for optimal moral and physical health.
Within this structure, each part of the universe is made up of complementary aspects known as yin and yang. Yin, which can be described as passive, dark, secretive, negative, weak, feminine, and cool, and yang, which is active, bright, revealed, positive, masculine, and hot, constantly interact and shift from one extreme to the other, giving rise to the rhythm of nature and unending change.
Chief Seattle 1786 –1866
All things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man... the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.
Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. One thing we know: our god is also your god. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.
Farms have become factories and the animals raised in these factories are mere commodities.
As of 2000, only 30% of the 640,000 farms in the U.S. provided pasture for their animals.
All the rest are confined in CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations).
We and the Animal World
Deliberate Indifference to Life
9 billion animals killed each year for food in the U.S. alone.
Animals confined in spaces so small they often cannot turn around.
Stacked in cages by the hundreds of thousands.
In the last 15 minutes, 2.5 million animals have been slaughtered in the U.S., many of them in grotesquely painful ways.
Der wienerschnitzel
Confined for all their short life 16 weeks
Dog as Food
Cats as Food
Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic
“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.”
Albert Schweitzer: Reverence for Life
Wrote in 1919 that life is good -- destroying and obstructing life is bad.
In 1963, he expanded on this, saying: “There we have given us that basic principle of the morality which is a necessity of thought. It is good to maintain and to encourage life; it is bad to destroy life or obstruct it.”
The concept of “Ehrfurcht” -- Awe to life
Reverence for life is more an attitude that determines who we are than a rule for determining what we should do
Ethics of character as virtue theory
Peter Singer: Animal Liberation
Singer picks up on a comment by Bentham
Because animals are sentient, they should count in the utilitarian calculus
What counts are the pleasures, not the nature of the vessel in which pleasures and pains are occurring.
All sentient beings have moral worth
Sentiency includes consciousness and ability to feel pleasure and pain
Extended Utilitarianism Continued
McDonald’s works with PETA (people ethical treatment animals) and animal suppliers to lessen the pain animals experience in various phases of their raising
Temple Grandin
Has special insight into how animals feel. She developed a “methodology for objectively measuring animal welfare in slaughterhouses and audit protocols based on these measures.”
Regan: The Case for Animal Rights
Moral consideration expanded to cover non-human moral patients
Moral patients have “preference autonomy,” that is, preferences (which can be satisfied or frustrated) and the ability to act on them
Humans have duties to respect preference autonomy of moral patients (=animals)
Since animals have only preference autonomy, they do not have duties correlative to their rights.
Paul Taylor: Biocentrism
Every living thing has a telos = a good of its own. (Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly)
Helping the living thing achieve this telos or preventing it from achieving this telos (=good) benefits or harms it
All teleological centers of a life have “inherent worth as members of the Earth’s Community of Life.”
Positive duties to promote the telos
Negative duties not to interfere with telos
Biocentrism -- some definitions
A system of ethics that attempts to protect all life in nature
All life - not just human life - should be protected for the organism's sake
Life centered approach to nature, argues that all organisms have a degree of intrinsic values and therefore rights as well.
An ethical theory according to which all living individuals have MORAL STANDING, because they have OBJECTIVE well-being.
In more details:
(1) All living things have, a will to live, an instinct to resist death and the process of increasing entropy, that means for their own survival and their species.
(2) Maintaining their own survival is an intrinsic aim for all living things. Moreover, their values are intrinsically the same
Thus, they should have equal moral rights, and be given moral acknowledgement, concern, and protection.
INTRINSIC & INSTRUMENTAL VALUE
INSTRUMENTAL VALUE -- THE VALUE OF THINGS AS MEANS TO FURTHER SOME OTHER ENDS
INTRINSIC VALUE - THE VALUE OF THINGS AS ENDS IN THEMSELVES REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THEY ARE ALSO USEFUL AS MEANS TO OTHER ENDS
A CERTAIN PLANT OR ANIMAL MAY HAVE INSTRUMENTAL VALUE BECAUSE IT PROVIDES NOURISMENT OR THE INGREDIENTS FOR SOME MEDICINE OR AS AN AESTHETIC OBJECT FOR HUMAN OBSERVERS. BUT IT HAS ALSO HAS SOME VALUE IN ITSELF INDEPENDENTLY OF ITS PROSPECTS FOR FURTHERING SOME OTHER ENDS SUCH AS HUMAN NEEDS, HUMAN HEALTH, OR THE PLEASURE FROM AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE, THEN THE PLANT ALSO HAS INTRINSIC VALUE
Arne Naess’s Ecosophy
“By an ecosophy I mean a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium. A philosophy as a kind of sofia (or) wisdom, is openly normative, it contains both norms, rules, postulates, value priority announcements and hypotheses concerning the state of affairs in our universe. Wisdom is policy wisdom, prescription, not only scientific description and prediction. The details of an ecosophy will show many variations due to significant differences concerning not only the ‘facts’ of pollution, resources, population, etc. but also value priorities.”
The Core Insight
We have a moral duty to respect all living sentient creatures even the ones we consume, buy treating them in a way that will not inflict pain and will not be cruel. Maximize their wellbeing as long as they live and minimalize their pain as we are using them for our needs.
The old man and the Sea
“Fish," he said, "I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.”
