Paul wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
> References
>
> Attfield, Robin. 1986. 'The Good of Trees.' In VanDeVeer and Pierce,
> op. cit., 96-105.
>
> Bookchin, Murray. 1995. The Philosophy of Social Ecology. Montral:
> Black Rose Books.
>
> Callicott, J. Baird and Roger T. Ames, eds. 1989. Nature in Asian
> Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. State
> University of New York Press.
>
> Coscuella, Victor. 1995. The Ethics of Suicide. New York: Garland
> Publishing.
>
> Curtin, Deane W. 1992. 'Recipes for Values.' In Curtin and Heldke, op.
> cit., 123-144.
>
> Curtin, Deane W. and Lisa M. Heldke, eds. 1992. Cooking, Eating,
> Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food. Indiana University
> Press.
>
> Dombrowski, Daniel A. 1984. The Philosophy of Vegetarianism.
> University of Massachusetts Press.
>
> Elliot, Robert and Arran Gare, eds. 1983. Environmental Philosophy: A
> Collection of Readings. Pennsylvania State University Press.
>
> Godlovitch, Stanley and Roslind and John Harris, eds. 1972. Animals,
> Men, and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans. New
> York: Taplinger Publishing Company.
>
> Harris, John. 1972. 'Killing for Food.' In Godlovitch and Harris, op.
> cit., 97-110.
>
> Kalupahana, David J. 1989. 'Toward a Middle Path of Survival.' In
> Callicot and Ames, op. cit., 247-256.
>
> Kapleau, Roshi Philip. 1982. To Cherish All Life: A Buddhist Case for
> Becoming Vegetarian, Second Edition. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
>
> Miller, Harlan B. and Williams, William H. 1983. Ethics and Animals.
> Clifton, NJ: Humana Press.
>
> Moore, G. E. 1993. Principia Ethica, Revised Edition. Cambridge
> University Press.
>
> Naess, Arne. 1974. Gandhi and Group Conflict: An Exploration of
> Satyagraha Theoretical Background. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
>
> Nash, Roderick Frazier. 1989. The Rights of Natu A History of
> Environmental Ethics. University of Wisconsin Press.
>
> Nelson, Leonard. 1972. 'Duties to Animals.' In Godlovitch and Harris,
> op. cit., 149-155.
>
> Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London:
> Routledge.
>
> Rgamy, P. 1966. Non-violence and the Christian Conscience. London:
> Darton, Longman, and Todd.
>
> Rodman, John. 1977. 'The Liberation of Nature?' Inquiry 20:1, 83-145.
>
> Rolston, Holmes III. 1988. Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values
> in the Natural World. Temple University Press.
>
> Routley, Richard. 1973. 'Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental,
> Ethic?' Proceedings of the XVth World Congress of Philosophy, 205-210.
>
> Schweitzer, Albert. 1962. An Anthology. Charles R. Joy, ed. Boston:
> Beacon Press.
>
> Sorabji, Richard. 1993. Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of
> the Western Debate. Cornell University Press, 1993.
>
> Taylor, Paul W. 1986. Respect for Natu A Theory of Environmental
> Ethics. Princeton University Press.
>
> Tideman, T. Nicolaus. 1983. 'Deciding What to Kill.' In Miller and
> Williams, op. cit., 317-322.
>
> VanDeVeer, Donald and Christine Pierce, eds. 1986. People, Penguins
> and Plastic Trees: Basic Issues in Environmental Ethics. Belmont, CA:
> Wadsworth.
>
> Warren, Mary Anne. 1983. 'The Rights of the Nonhuman World.' In Elliot
> and Gare, op. cit., 109-134.
>
> 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.
>
>
> courtesy of http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Envi/EnviWall.htm

I'm sorry, but i got tired of reading your learned words somewhere about
the "last man (or person) argument". Was there something you should have
said by then?

Don