Philosophy and the Environment
From Necessity to Authenticity:
An Argument for Environmental Angst
David Waller
California State University
ABSTRACT: In this paper I propose to answer the age-old reductio
against vegetarianism, which is usually presented in the form of a
sarcastic question (e.g., "How do you justify killing and eating
plants?"). Addressing the question takes on special significance in
the light of arguments which seem to show that even nonsentient life
is intrinsically valuable. Thus, I suggest that we rephrase the
question in the following manner: When beings (who are biological and
thus dependent on the destruction of other forms of life in order to
sustain their own) evolve into societies of moral agents are they
entitled merely to assume that they retain their license to destroy
other life in order to sustain their own? I answer in the negative. I
argue that such societies must continually earn that right by engaging
in activity that makes up for and augments the values that they
destroy. Unlike other biological beings, humans have complete control
over what they eat, whether they eat, and whether they reproduce.
Hence, the appeals to necessity that are ubiquitous in justifications
of both vegetarian and non-vegetarian diets are inauthentic and must
be accordingly forsaken. We will have to appeal instead to the value
of particular human activities that are fueled by our consumption of
other lives.
'So you don't eat animals, but you do eat plants. Plants, like
animals, are living things; how do you justify killing and eating
them?'
The mock indignation and air of self-congratulation which invariably
accompany this question make it plain that the speaker does not expect
the requested information but rather believes that he or she has
delivered an original and decisive reductio ad absurdum against
vegetarianism. In this paper I propose to supply the requested
information. The issues involved suggest that we rephrase the question
thus: When beings which are biological, and thus dependent on the
destruction of other life in order to sustain their own, evolve into
societies of moral agents, are they entitled to assume that they
retain their license to destroy other life in order to sustain their
own? I answer in the negative. I argue instead that such societies
must continually earn that right by engaging in activity that makes up
for and augments the values that they destroy.
I
The reductio has a venerable history going back at least as far as
Solon (Sorabji 1993, 102), and it is still called upon, refuted, and
otherwise alluded to by philosophers on all sides of the vegetarian
issue.
Bertrand Russell once remarked of vegetarians that, "if they refuse to
eat meat because of humanitarian principles, they should also refuse
to eat bread," i.e. because we have to kill wheat in order to make it.
(Harris 1972, 108)
It is pointed out that there is no clear line of demarcation between
animals and creatures that cannot be subsumed under the concept of
person, and our assertion must therefore include the rights of plants.
(Nelson 1972, 151)
Animal liberationists put their ethic into practice (and display their
devotion to it) by becoming vegetarians...(No one, however, has yet
expressed, as among Butler's Erewhonians, qualms about eating plants,
though such sentiments might be expected to be latently present if the
rights of plants are next to be defended.) (Callicott 1989, 17)
When non-vegetarians demand that vegetarians act consistently toward
nonhuman forms of life, the usual line of defense is to show that an
outward practical consistency between the various cases is
inappropriate. The appeal is usually to animal consciousness. Plants,
after all, do not feel pleasure, pain, terror, and so on.
II
Still, a number of arguments have been advanced for the view that
non-sentient life is morally considerable on its own account. Some
arguments rely on a modification of Routley's last-person argument,
which undercuts anthropocentric morality:
The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system
lays about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing,
animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best
abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to basic
[human] chauvinism, but on environmental grounds what he does is
wrong. (Routley 1973, 207f)
Routley, now Sylvan, includes the destruction of animal life in his
story. Philosophers who want to establish the moral relevance of
nonsentient life have put forward modified versions. Robin Attfield
considers the last man about to chop down the last elm as an act of
protest (Attfield 1981, 103); Mary Anne Warren weaves us a story about
two viruses, the first of which has been released and will kill all
sentient life, the second of which will, if released in the meantime,
kill all plant life long after the conscious creatures have been
destroyed (Warren 1983, 128f). If we conclude that the last man should
desist from destroying the elm and that we should not release the
plant-killing virus, then we are committed to the view that even
non-sentient life is intrinsically valuable.
Yet there are two windows of escape for the opposition. First, there
is the fact that all the stories we have considered invite us to judge
human actions or characters. Our conclusion about the worth of
nonsentient life might be riding piggyback on a simple existential
failure on the part of the last people to spend the closing days of
the human species doing something more becoming.
We might want to supplement these arguments with some scenarios that
discount the moral weight of human actions. (1) Let us start with G.
E. Moore's famous argument (first published in 1903 yet rarely, if
ever, mentioned by environmentalists) designed to show the objective
value of beauty. The goal of the argument and the content of the
example anticipate Sylvan and his followers:
Let us imagine one world exceedingly beautiful. Imagine it as
beautiful as you can; put into it whatever on this earth you most
admi mountains, rivers, the sea; trees, and sunsets, stars and
moon. Imagine the all combined in the most exquisite proportions, so
that no one thing jars against another, but each contributes to
increase the beauty of the whole. And then imagine the ugliest world
you can possibly conceive. Imagine it simply one heap of filth,
containing everything that is most disgusting to us, for whatever
reason, and the whole, as far as may be, without one redeeming
feature...The only thing we are not entitled to imagine is that any
human being ever has or ever, by any possibility, can, live in either,
can ever see and enjoy the beauty of the one or hate the foulness of
the other. Well, even so, supposing them quite apart from any possible
contemplation by human beings; still, is it irrational to hold that it
is better that the beautiful world should exist, than the one which is
ugly? (Moore 1993, 135)
Even if Moore's argument solves the problem of discounting human acts,
there is a second task before us. Neither Moore's argument nor the
modifications of Sylvan's argument say anything about the comparative
worth of humans and non-sentient life.
Here, then, is a story. Unlike the previous last-person arguments, it
does not leave an opening for a moral judgment about a human act.
Unlike Moore's argument, it does ask us to consider the relative value
of human life.
Consider an astronaut floating about in a vehicle millions of miles
above some distant planet. She does not know it, but she will never be
able to return to earth, or to any other planet for that matter,
because the engine has a subtle malfunction which is starting to have
effect and, in a week, will result in the ship's exploding, killing
its passenger. The planet she is orbiting is teeming with non-sentient
life. The astronaut has been studying this life from afar. At the same
time, an errant asteroid is heading in her general direction at
hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. She does not know this. Now,
in one world, the asteroid hits the planet, destroying it utterly but
sparing the astronaut. She spends the next week recording the events
following the asteroid's impact. Then her ship blows up. In the other
world, the asteroid misses the planet, but smashes through the
spaceship, instantly killing our astronaut.
Which world is preferable? Anyone who assents to Attfield and Warren's
arguments should judge that it would be best for the asteroid to miss
the planet. Any other judgment would threaten either the conclusion
that last-person stories prove the moral significance of non-sentient
life or the practical relevance of that conclusion.
III
Yet, we make a similar, if more modest, trade-off every day. This has
yet to prompt serious concern in environmentalist literature. Even
while recognizing the value of non-sentient life, philosophers in the
west have been content to assume that we have a right, or that it is
somehow for the best, that we eat other life in order to sustain our
own.
There is no hope of avoiding killing. And to allow oneself to die
instead would certainly be irreverent of life. (Tideman 1983, 318)
Some opponents to vegetarianism all of a sudden discover a sentiency
in plants, thereby,they think, reducing the vegetarian's arguments to
absurdity, for we will have nothing left to eat. (Dombrowski 1984, 52)
Not seeing the clear line between sentient and non-sentient beings
that Singer does, I find the logic underlying vegetarianism leading
me, as it led Samuel Butler's Erewhonians, to abstain from plant life
as well, at which point the whole enterprise becomes absurd. (Rodman
1977, 107)
Only Schweitzer seems to appreciate the serious difficulties for
justifying human existence in a value-laden world:
Man is subject to the puzzling and horrible law of being obliged to
live at the cost of other life, and to incur again and again the guilt
of destroying and injuring life. (Schweitzer 1962, 252)
However, even Schweitzer never fully wrestles with the difficulty.
What is this 'law', this 'obligation' that he speaks of? It seems to
me that he avoids a meaningful confrontation with the paradox by
characterizing our killing and eating other creatures as actions
undertaken 'under the law of necessity,' excusable 'only so far as a
compelling necessity exists for it' (303). Again, 'since we are so
often compelled by necessity to bring pain and death to living
creatures, it is all the more incumbent upon us, when we can act as
free beings, to help rather than harm these creatures' (305). Yet
again, 'each time I do harm to any kind of living thing whatsoever, I
must ask myself most carefully if this action is inevitable [!] or
not. I must never go beyond what is absolutely necessary even in
apparently trivial things' (cited in Regamey 1966, 164 n. 7).
Schweitzer sometimes speaks as if he means to ground this necessity in
the will-to-live itself: 'we find the simple fact of consciousness is
this, I will to live' (255). But this will not hold water, for there
are those who commit suicide in despair, whom Schweitzer criticizes
(253, 256), and those who give their lives in sacrifice, with
Schweitzer's blessing.
Now, if humanity's bodily existence really is founded on a horror, if
choosing one life over any other is an arbitrary matter (as when
feeding worms to an injured birdsee Schweitzer, 303), if the
will-to-live is neither necessary (witness the suicide) nor morally
binding (witness the martyr), and if a person is an ethical being
obligated to escape whenever possible from the necessity of injuring
other life, then what room is there for the affirmation of human life?
IV
The first thing to do to understand the puzzle is to dispose of the
idea that our destruction of other life arises from necessity.
In practical affairs, the expression 'x is necessary' presupposes some
end. Consuming the environment is, of course, necessary for our own
biological survival, but is that an end environmentalists should
embrace? The value of our bodies has been called into question both by
philosophers with little interest in the environment (Plato) and by
those who are hypersensitive to it (the Jains). Indeed, philosophical
and religious traditions from Platonism to Christianity to
existentialism have had to confront the idea that suicide might be in
our own best interests (in order to contemplate the forms directly, in
order to be in the presence of God, or in order to relieve ourselves
of the absurdities of existence). Jainism, with an ideal of
non-violence so extreme that it even precludes sitting on sprouting
plants, cannot easily dismiss suicide as the best we can do by others
(although, as in Plato, the official line is against it). (2)
Cosculluela (1995) observes it is not that difficult to concoct simple
scenarios that raise the possibility of obligatory suicidee.g., where
I have contracted an incurable mental illness which I know will lead
me to commit horrendous acts of murder (76). If we attach
Cosculluela's observation to an environmental axiology, we might
conclude that our astronaut is obligated to commit suicide. Some will
reject that conclusion while at the same time allowing that her
suicide would be supererogatory. Still, supererogatory actions are not
merely actions that are permitted; they are also considered in some
way ideal.
The issue of suicide can be sidestepped by remembering that we need
not have existed in the first place. The 'necessary consumption' of
the environment by our descendants can be avoided by simply preventing
their existence, which is not necessary for our own physical survival.
V
We must lay aside, then, Schweitzer's appeals to necessity as well as
claims like that of Bookchin that 'human intervention into nature is
inherent and inevitable' (Bookchin 1995, 131) and that of Ghandi that
'to observe [nonviolence] fully is impossible for men, who kill a
number of living beings large and small as they breathe or blink or
till the land' (cited in Naess 1974, 47). Rather, a choice lay before
us, and we must take seriously the question of whether life forms
which have developed intellectual and moral sense do the best thing in
continuing to consume other life.
Among mainstream environmentalists, only Rolston has attempted a
systematic justification of all predation. In Rolston's axiology of
nature the food chain is a 'trophic pyramid' (Rolston 1988, 82) with
carnivores at the top not only in terms of diet but in terms of value.
What happens when a wolf eats a caribou is that the lower values of
caribou life are transformed into the higher values of wolf life.
'Lower organisms do not express the richness in potential in the
ecosystem as fully as do higher ones' (Rolston 1988, 68).
Rolston views predation as a simple transformation of the value
associated with the life of the prey animal into the higher values
associated with the life of the predator animal. He calls
predator-prey relations a system of 'value capture.' Humans, of
course, are at the very top (the system, Rolston tells us, is
'anthroapical').
There are two problems here. First, if it is true that the value
associated with a Thompson's gazelle is not destroyed but rather is
transferred and transformed into a higher value attached to the
cheetah who ate it, then a cheetah, who will in its lifetime eat many
a gazelle, must be many times more valuable than any one (or two, or
three) of the gazelles it consumes. That seems unlikely.
Next, consider the sharks and snakes that feed on birds and mammals,
the invertebrate jellies that capture and consume vertebrate fish, the
plants that prey on insects, the hawks that eat monkeys, and so on.
Rolston's conception of predation as a mere transfer of lower values
into higher values does not come close to justifying nature as we know
it.
When a human consumes other, more humble, creatures, there is still no
guarantee that 'higher' instead of 'lower' values will be realized.
This is the two-edged sword of being knowledgeable, rational, moral
agents. Our consumption of other life might result in activity that
realizes goods unique in degree and kind in the universe, but we need
look no further than the evening news to see that it can just as
easily be the fuel for astonishing evil.
Rolston's error is in understating the purely instrumental and
contingent nature of the value of predation, even though these aspects
of predation seem to find implicit acknowledgment in his
'value-transfer' theory. Predation cannot be assigned positive value
without reference to the circumstances attendant upon itintrinsically,
there is nothing good about one creature's being eaten by another. His
theory also implies, correctly, that predation is at its best when it
involves the most efficient 'transfer of values.'
While it is certainly false as a descriptive theory, a society of
moral agents may nevertheless take it as a sound prescription for its
own role in the world. We should freely acknowledge that our own
predation, like all predation, has value that is purely instrumental
and contingent, and that we (usually) have the power to determine the
nature of those instrumentalities and contingencies. Both egalitarian
and 'anthroapical' (not to be confused with anthropocentric) theories
of environmental ethics tend to propagate half-truths. Human society
is in the position of having to determine its axiological position and
its contribution to the overall value of this worldpositive, negative,
or neutralby its choice of activity.
We should, in fact, make use of the environment when human life and
activity and peculiarly human projects are goodswhich they often are.
When they are not, the persons in question do an injustice to that
which they consume for the sustenance of their bodies and their
bodies' activities.
Persons of the latter sort are bewildering in their variety, from
members of genocidal militias to the Fortune 500 to even the
self-denigrating ascetic who puts on the mantle of an anemone, for a
human being who deliberately reduces his or her own existence to the
bare sustenance of the biological body does an injustice to the little
that is consumed. The latter was, after all, biological body already;
to simply redistribute it, to appropriate it for one's own body to no
further purpose, would indeed be arbitrary and legitimize Schweitzer's
anxieties. (3)
Human beings, then, do have an obligation to flourish. Only in
flourishing can we instantiate values that make up for and augment,
rather than (at best) simply redistribute, the values that are already
present. Those values that we are uniquely positioned to contribute
include love, friendship, shared artistic and scientific achievement,
and so on. A diet informed by a special compassion for sentient life
can be part of that contributionno other creature has such capacity
for empathy and the ability to act on it, given the opportunity. But
it should also be said that people living in harsh circumstances on
seal meat, if they live well, live more in keeping with this active
conception of vegetarianism than do those who avoid treading on animal
lives at all costs. In whatever environment we drop anchor, we must
not simply survive but flourish, so that we might realize the full
range of human values and do justice to that which we consume.
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Notes
(1) These sorts of arguments only acknowledge, and do not give an
account of, the intrinsic value of non-sentient life. Such
accountse.g., in Rolston (1988) and Taylor (1986)are usually based on
the peculiarly teleological nature of organisms. For an expansion of
this sort of account to include non-living natural objects see
Plumwood (1993).
(2) Indeed, Jainism has all along presented us with a model of the
sort of axiology that last-person arguments are meant to establish.
All creatures imaginable are valued and are attributed with at least
one sense, from human beings (five-sensed) to leeches (two-sensed) to
clods of earth (one-sensed). Any intentional act of violence against
any of these is considered sinful, even an act done for a good cause
(e.g., to feed human beings). It is odd, then, that Jainism is merely
dismissed in environmentalist literature (Nash 1989, 70; Kalupahana
1989, 248; Curtin 1992, 141 n. 12).
(3) My complaint here is against the deliberate ascetic. When people
lead meager lives on the edge of physical exhaustion and starvation
because of the inequities of economic distribution, it is not they but
their oppressors who do an injustice to the environment, using the
latter to fill their bellies and their wallets through acts of social
injustice.
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