1. Introduction
In this paper I would like to say a few words on environmental ethics both as a practical and a theoretical enterprise. There is a very close link between the practical and theoretical dimensions of environmental ethics, although the practical dimension of it is often not recognized as such. I would like to start with a short sketch of three “snapshots” of environmental ethics as a practical enterprise within the context of international action. In these snapshots a picture will emerge of some of the practical things that have already been done in the international arena to address environmental problems. In the second part of my paper I will give an interpretation the meaning of these actions from the perspective of environmental ethics (or environmental philosophy, for that matter, to use a wider term) as a broader theoretical enterprise.
2. Three snapshots of practical environmental ethics in action
2.1 Snapshot 1: The Kyoto Protocol
The Kyoto Protocol came into effect a little more than a month ago on the 16th of February 2005 [1]. Since it was ratified by Russia in October 2004, enough industrialized countries have endorsed it to become a fully functioning international treaty. This treaty legally binds the industrialized countries (Annex 1 Parties) among the 128 signatories to cut or limit their collective emissions of six key greenhouse gasses in the commitment period of 2008 to 2012 to 5% below 1990 levels. Mechanisms have also been created for industrialised countries to assist other countries in the reduction of emissions. The aim of the Kyoto Protocol is to stem global warming by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in the most cost effective manner, while addressing issues of environmental integrity and equity. The main instruments for achieving this reduction in emissions are the following:
Emissions trading: The Kyoto Protocol created a free market in Carbon Reduction Credits. A country will get credits for reaching certain national emission reduction targets. The lower the emissions, the more these credits will be. However, if a certain country cannot reach its emission reduction targets, it will be able to buy credits from countries that have a “surplus” that they do not want to use. Thus a market is created in which polluters are penalized for exceeding their targets, and those with low emissions are rewarded for keeping it low.
The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM): This makes provision for a system in which industrialized countries can earn emission reduction credits by assisting developing countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Joint Implementation (JI): This takes place on the same basis as the CDM, but allows only for cooperation between developed countries.
2.2. Snapshot 2: The World Summit on Sustainable Development of Johannesburg in 2002
In 2002 the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was held in Johannesburg to assess the progress that was made in the implementation of Agenda 21 – the comprehensive agenda for environmental protection and sustainable development that was adopted at the United Nations’ World Conference on the Environment and Development that was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
At the Johannesburg Conference, the nations of the world agreed about the following diagnosis of our environmental challenges:
Equal concern was also expressed about the growing gap between the rich and the poor of the world – meaning that the costs and benefits of globalization, the opening of new markets, the mobility of capital, the significant increases in investment flows, and advances in technology are unevenly distributed between the countries and the people of the world [2]. It was thus agreed that issues of justice and equity are part and parcel of our environmental problems, and not something separate from it [3].
Acknowledging that this dismal picture is the result of unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, the nations of the world recommitted themselves at the Johannesburg Summit to the implementation of sustainable development, and in particular to a definition of it coming from the 1987 Brundtland Report [4]. There sustainable development was defined as development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising future generations to meet their needs. It is important to note that two qualifications are given in the Brundtland Report to this definition:
According to the Johannesburg Declaration sustainable development should be seen as the creation of a new and brighter world of hope. With a view to achieving this, the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation was drawn up, detailing specific programmes, plans, and target dates.
2.3 Snapshot 3: The Millenium Development Goals
On the eve of the new millenium, the Secretary General of the United Nations launched the Millenium Development Goals in the United Nations Millennium Declaration (UNMD) [5]. Within this Declaration six fundamental shared values were stipulated as essential to international relations in the twenty-first century. Respect for nature was listed as one of these values, besides freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, and shared responsibility. In order to translate these values into action, protecting our common environment was singled out as one of the key objectives which is assigned special significance, besides others like peace, security and disarmament; development and poverty eradication; human rights, democracy and good governance; protecting the vulnerable; meeting the special needs of Africa; and strengthening the United Nations. Spelled out in terms of targets, the Millennium Goals states that a new ethic of conservation and stewardship should be adopted, and that the first steps towards this should entail:
3. The normative basis of a practical environmental ethics
These three snapshots of international action, I believe, capture important dimensions of environmental ethics as a practical enterprise. In all three of these snapshots a clear normative distinction is made between what is morally acceptable and what not in international action. In ethics, these distinctions are usually captured in terms of normative categories such as right and wrong, good and bad, and what deserves respect and what not. The distinction between right and wrong underlies what has been sketched in the three snapshots above as the duties and obligations that we should accept as nations – but also as individuals or as corporations: to reduce greenhouse emissions and fight climate change; to pursue sustainable development, the eradication of poverty, and a more equitable distribution of resources in the world; and to embark on a wide spectrum of development goals that, if taken seriously, could change the lives of billions of people for the better – while protecting the environment from destruction.
The distinction between good and bad underlies what has been sketched above, albeit implicitly, as the good life that we should embrace and strive for. Stated in general terms, our three snapshots reveal a good life as one of dignity and justice for all, peace and prosperity, and freedom from terror, diseases and manmade disasters. It furthermore reveals a whole number of prerequisites for such a life, ranging from access to clean water, through access to information, to technology transfer between developed and developing nations.
Similarly, the distinction between what deserves respect and what not, underlies what has been suggested in the snapshots sketched above as that with which we can identify ourselves with as human beings, and even accept as the sources or our very being. In the practical ethics reflected above, we find, albeit on an implicit level, a normative image of humans emerging as caring beings, caring not only for themselves and their own children, but also for others, human and non-human alike, who have become the victims of injustices and unwise choices that we have made in the past. What emerges from this is the normative image of the human being as a care-taker – in the literal and the widest sense of the word. What deserves respect, in terms of this, is care-taking; what elicits disrespect is careless, unthinking behaviour for the sake of narrow individual or national interests, not being prepared to proceed in an informed and cautionary fashion in every decision we make, every policy and programme that we adopt.
Within the practical realm, ethics also has to do with the quality of the justifications that we offer for our actions, and in this regard the three snapshots given above also provide an abundance of information about the values and normative principles that are accepted today in the international arena as a basis for action. To mention but a few, without claiming to be exhaustive in this regard:
4. Looking at the world from three positions in theoretical environmental ethics
In the second part of this paper, I would like to evaluate the above from what I interpret as three complementary perspectives in theoretical environmental ethics. As a theoretical enterprise, environmental ethics is often divided into three separate approaches, and portrayed as operating from different and opposing assumptions – which explains the intense debates that are often found between what can at best be described as three separate normative positions [6]. For our purposes here, I would like to treat these three normative positions as mutually supportive of one another, in the sense that they focus on different aspects of the world’s environmental problems, and explore different levels of analysis and thinking about overcoming these problems.
Probably the most widespread normative position in environmental ethics has been labelled as anthropocentrism. Different versions of an anthropocentric environmental ethics exist, but what they all have in common, is that their calls for the conservation of nature or the preservation of some parts of nature in its pristine natural state, are all based on a form of enlightened self-interest [7]. In terms of this, the basis of our concern about a deteriorating natural order is the fact that it will eventually harm humans, either those living now, or those living in the future. Accordingly, nature is valued instrumentally, as a means to human ends – and also treated as such: as a treasurehouse of actual and potential resources that are available for human use and development.
Within this framework debates exist between those who lay more emphasis on the consumptive use of our natural resources, and those who focus more on the non-consumptive use of nature, including untouched nature, for its aesthetic, spiritual, or psychological value, to mention but a few examples. These debates, however, take place within the framework of an instrumental value theory about nature, differing not on the use value that nature has for humans, but on the nature and extent of the use that we can make of nature.
Having said this, all three of the snapshots given above can receive appreciation from the point of view of an anthropocentric environmental ethics. The Kyoto Protocol, emphasizing the need for reductions in greenhouse emissions, the Johannesburg Declaration focusing on the need for sustainable development, equity and justice, and the Millenium Development Goals are in fact all concerned about overcoming harm or negative impacts to humans, and providing humans with a better life. The concern for nature and the fight against climate change and unsustainable development that emerge from these three snapshots all display the position of enlightened self-interest: we care for nature and promote wise use of resources because it is in the best interests of humans to do so.
While such an approach may currently be the best place to start when engaging governments and multi-national companies about environmental issues, given the emphasis it places on the benefits that humans will receive from environmental protection and ecologically sustainable development, a different, nature centered position in environmental ethics will argue that instrumental value theory is not strong enough to protect nature from human induced destruction [8]. Their point would be that human interests will always tend to win in situations where trade-offs between humans and nature are made, and that we rather need a theory that will change our attitude towards nature, and what we can legitimately do with it. Such a different attitude, this approach would argue, is possible within the framework of an intrinsic value theory about nature.
According to this approach, the whole of nature, or at least some parts of it, has intrinsic value – that is: value in and of itself, regardless of any use value it may or may not have for humans. This approach further states that entities with intrinsic value should be accorded a dignity and respect for the mere fact of being there, or being alive, and accordingly, that we as humans cannot do with them as we wish. Instead, we have a moral duty, if not to promote that intrinsic value, to at least preserve it by preserving the conditions under which these intrinsic values emerge. As such, intrinsic value theorists pleads for a change of perspective and attitude, entailing an expansion of our moral horizons in which we not only morally consider the interests of humans, but also that of non-human entities.
From the position of intrinsic value theory, the three snapshots provided above could be appreciated for the emphasis that they place on efforts to prevent climate change, and to promote sustainable development and environmental protection. This at least moves us away from the position of ruthless or unthinking exploitation of the natural environment. However, exponents of intrinsic value theory would argue that environmental protection based on instrumental value theory alone can only provide for weak forms of protection and weak notions of sustainable development. Having taken the first steps towards global environmental protection in measures such as the Kyoto Protocol, the Johannesburg Declaration and the Millenium Development Goals, they would argue, we have to move on and develop even stronger measures of protection, based on the notion of moral respect for nature that stems from its intrinsic value.
In a third position that is often distinguished in the field of theoretical environmental ethics, the focus falls more on efforts to understand the root causes of the world’s environmental problems, and to address them on a fundamental, radical level. For many theorists within this framework, the root causes of our environmental problems have to do with the manner in which the world’s economy is organized, or, stated in more specific terms, with the manner in which economic and political power is distributed and functioning in the world today [9, 10, 11, 12]. Accordingly, they would argue for a radical analysis of the political economy of decision-making in the world today about resource use, economic policies, and distributive allocations, making the basic point that we will continue on our path of ecologically unsustainable development and the destruction of nature unless we radically transform society as we know it, including the world’s international political and economic structure, as well as power relations between and within nations.
Within this transformative framework, much attention is given to analyses of the social and cognitive structures informing the organization of the world order today, taking it right down to analyses of the dominant ways in which we think about ourselves as human beings and how we realize ourselves as such. Deep Ecology [9], for instance, draws our attention to the narrow, egotistic notions of self and self-realization that are prevalent in current consumer society, arguing for an expansion of the self and forms of self-realization that treads much lighter on the earth than we currently do; while some eco-feminists [11, 12] focus on unmasking, challenging and overcoming the logic of dualistic and hierarchical thinking that not only underlie, according to their analysis, the domination and exploitation of women in this world, but also the domination and exploitation of nature.
There may be many sceptics that will argue that a total transformation of economic and political relations in the world is impossible, and that any effort to radically change our notions of self and self-realization, is futile. The momentum of current trends in political and economic development in the world, they would say, and the power of consumer society to establish and perpetuate itself globally are too strong to challenge. From an ethical perspective, though, the value of these radical perspectives lies in acknowledging that our environmental challenges have to do with the impacts on people and nature of the development paths that we have chosen to implement in the past, and that these development paths have been chosen on the basis of notions of self and self-realization that, in all probability, are not fully transparent to us, and are in desperate need of clarification and critical questioning.
With this in mind, theorists of a radical persuasion in environmental ethics would characterise our environmental predicaments as a crisis of culture and character [13]. As they see it, what is at stake is not merely human survival, nor social and economic development within the constraints of supporting ecosystems with a view to overcoming poverty, distributive injustices, and stumbling blocks to human indignity, but the very notion of who we are as humans in this world, and how we endeavour to realize ourselves as such in this world. Unless we ask radical questions about ourselves and self-realization, the kinds of lives we claim that are meaningful, they would argue, we will not even make a beginning to resolving the environmental challenges that we experience in the world today. Unless we radically confront ourselves with the crisis of culture and character that we are faced with today, with radical questions about who we are, measures like the Kyoto Protocol, the Johannesburg Declaration and the Millenium Development Goals may turn out to do little, if anything, about the deeper-lying trends and thinking patterns that lie at the roots of our environmental problems. In fact, they would intimate that unless we radically question and challenge these deeper-lying trends and thinking-patterns, the Kyoto Protocol, the Johannesburg Declaration and the Millenium Development Goals may create the dangerous illusion that we are effectively addressing our environmental predicaments, while we in fact do not.
5. Conclusion
In this paper I have started by giving three snapshots of international initiatives that all display elements of environmental ethics as a practical enterprise. In the Kyoto Protocol with its measures to address global climate change, in the Johannesburg Declaration with its commitment to sustainable development and its associated Plan of Implementation, and in the Millenium Development Goals with its focus on the eradication of poverty and establishing human dignity without destroying the natural environment, we find practical efforts to address the world’s environmental problems.
I have then proceeded to show that these practical measures articulate in some way or another, very often on an implicit level, the strong distinctions that we make in ethics between morally right and wrong, morally good and bad, and what deserves respect and what not. In this context I have also shown that each one of these distinctions can be related back, through an argument, to basic moral principles such as respect for persons, not to harm others, to do good, or justice.
This was followed up by a short overview of what I regard as three complementary perspectives in theoretical environmental ethics. A short evaluation, from the point of view of each one of these perspectives, was given of the three snapshots of a practical environmental ethics that were sketched above. Within this context I have shown that these three snapshots basically fall within the framework of an anthropocentric environmental ethics in which concern for the environment and protective measures can be justified from the benefits this will bring to humans.
I have also, shown, however, that exponents of intrinsic value theory and radical positions would criticize enlightened self-interest as too weak a position to really address our environmental problems. Intrinsic value theory argues that we could find such a stronger position by acknowledging the intrinsic value of nature, thereby changing our perspective of nature and our attitude towards it. Radical positions on the other hand, do not argue for an expansion of our moral horizon, but rather a radical questioning and challenging of the dominant structures and thought patterns in society that brought about our environmental problems.
My contention is that all three of these positions in theoretical environmental ethics are vital to better understand the nature and scope of the actions and measures that we need on a personal, societal, organizational and international level to overcome the world’s environmental problems. On all four of these levels, it is highly important to acknowledge that if humans do not see benefits flowing to them from measures to protect the natural environment, they will not support it. In fact, if protective measures increase world poverty, and entrench current patterns of distributive injustices, then international initiatives such as those sketched above, will be rejected as clever ideological ploys to further the sectional interests of dominant political and economic power in the world.
It is also highly important to acknowledge that use value (or: instrumental value) is not the only value that things or nature may have. The notion of intrinsic value introduces another important aspect from which things and nature should also be valued – emphasizing that we have a duty to morally consider the value that non-human entities may have in and of themselves, regardless of the use that humans can make of them.
Lastly, it is highly important to note that the state of the world today, of which environmental problems are but one of the symptoms, reflects a crisis of culture and character that we as humans have not yet fully grasped, and still do not know how to respond to adequately. Environmental ethics in its practical and theoretical formats, I believe, are sincere efforts to find a language within which we can articulate this crisis of culture and character, its meaning, and how to respond to it. It is still early days for environmental ethics in the world today, both as a practical enterprise and a theoretical endeavour. Given current development trends and thinking patterns in the world today, I reckon that we will hear much more of it in the future.
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