Gary Varner

(? - 2023)

Environmentalists are sometimes criticized for implausibly separating human beings from nature. However, in the debate between the "wise-use" and environmental movements, it is the proponents of "wise-use," and not the environmentalists, who implausibly divide human beings from nature. The "wise-use" movement calls for landowners to be compensated whenever environmental regulations reduce the economic value of their land. However, a well-established principle of constitutional law is that compensation is not required if the regulations prevent harm to others. Insofar as they can plausibly be construed as preventing harm to others, then, environmental regulations can be enforced without running afoul of the just compensation clause of the Fifth Amendment. I argue that while the public trust doctrine of U.S. common law can be extended to cover ecological processes on which the long-term wellbeing of the nation and its people depend, environmentalists must do a better job of articulating how this is so. In doing so, however, they will show that the wise use movement's position depends on an implausible separation of humans from the eco-systems on which we depend.

In his recent article Should Trees Have Standing? Revisited" Christopher D. Stone has effectively withdrawn his proposal that natural objects be granted legal rights, in response to criticism from the Feinberg/McCloskey camp. Stone now favors a weaker proposal that natural objects be granted what he calls legal "considerateness". I argue that Stone's retreat is both unnecessary and undesirable. I develop the notion of a "de facto" legal right and argue that species already have de facto legal rights as statutory beneficiaries of the "Endangered Species Act of 1973." I conclude that granting certain nonhuman natural entities legal rights is both more important and less costly that Stone and his critics have realized, and that it is not Stone's original proposal which needs rethinking, but the concept of interests at work in the Feinberg/McCloskey position.

This thesis elaborates and defends the patiency conception of moral considerability, according to which moral agents have direct, prima facie duties of beneficence and non-maleficence toward any entity which has interests. ;Interests are divided into two kinds. An argument by analogy is used to show that preference interests, which are analyzed on the model of desires, probably are present in all animals with a functional prefrontal cortex and probably are not present in any non-mammalian creature. The claim that some non-human animals have desires is defended against two popular objections based on the claim that no non-human animal possesses a true language. That claim either is false or, when interpreted so as to be true, provides no ground for criticising the above argument. ;It is then argued that all and only individual living organisms have welfare interests, which are analyzed on the model of needs. Various arguments which have been offered in the literature for the claim that the needs of plants, but not those of simple artefacts, define morally significant interests are critically assessed. By filling in two lacunas in these arguments, it is argued that every living organism has a welfare interest in the fulfillment of each of its biological functions, where the biological functions of an organism are defined in terms of consequence selection of component subsystems. ;The charge that this view is utterly impracticable is answered by showing how practicable principles of adjudication can be defended without appealing to alternative accounts of moral considerability. It is argued that desires ought to be given precedence over biologically defined needs, and that the 'ground projects' of human beings ought to be given precedence over all interests of non-human beings, because in each case the former member of the pair is more inclusive than the latter. The charge is then answered that in thus rendering it practicable, the patiency conception of moral considerability has been rendered trivial. It is argued that the patiency conception can be an instrument of morally significant change, because the same considerations give every moral agent a reason for changing her desires so as to accommodate the interests of all non-human creatures