Benjamin Hale

Climate change leaves conservationists facing unprecedented uncertainty and indeterminacy that make it hard to measure conservation success. The novelty of future ecosystems generates axiological challenges that leave conservation without clear action guidance. In this paper, we argue that our best tool to navigate competing viewpoints is through deliberative democratic mechanisms that bring as many voices to the table as possible. We do this largely by comparing two different wolf reintroduction efforts and emphasizing the epistemic, practical, and political challenges presented by climate futures (which have no present analog) that ecologists and conservation biologists anticipate climate change will bring. Rather than trying to solve these issues through resolving disagreements about environmental value, we suggest that centering democracy around deliberation allows for a more pluralist and practical way to sort out our obligations regarding nature. Our view offers an ahistorical, adaptive, and holistic approach to conservation in a modern and dynamic world.

Should we restore degraded nature, and if so, why? Environmental theorists often approach the problem of restoration from perspectives couched in much broader debates, particularly regarding the intrinsic value and moral status of natural entities. Unfortunately, such approaches are susceptible to concerns such as the baseline problem, which is both a philosophical and technical issue related to identifying an appropriate restoration baseline. Insofar as restoration ostensibly aims to return an ecosystem to a particular baseline state, and depends upon clearly identifying this baseline for success, the very project of restoration appears impossible to get off the ground. Recasting environmental restoration in terms of obligations, instead of status, value, or worth, can avoid this and other classic challenges. If obligations to restore nature follow from intersubjectively validated reasons to justify our actions, we can salvage restoration from the threat of the baseline problem

_The Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics_ is comprised of sixty original essays, which focus on how ethical questions intersect with real and pressing policy issues. Rather than overviewing abstract conceptual categories, the authors focus on specific controversies involving the environment. Clearly written contributions on Fossil Fuels, Urban Sustainability, Novel Ecosystems, and many other subjects make accessible these issues‘ empirical and political dimensions as well as their theoretical underpinnings. Written to be accessible for undergraduates and general readers, but comprehensive enough to be a useful reference work for researchers in a variety of related fields, it promises to be an invaluable resource for better understanding the ethical landscape of our environmental world.

Many people believe that individual actors should and can respond to social and environmental problems by making ethical or conscientious decisions in the marketplace. They encourage consumers to purchase fair trade coffee, buy locally grown produce, avoid shopping in stores with union-busting tactics, boycott exploitative soda manufacturers, and so on. In this paper, I argue against the idea that demand-side decisions on the part of individual consumers can adequately capture the complicated moral dimensions of any given product. I argue this position by pointing to two intermingled features of consumer choice: value incommensurability and market indeterminacy.

Synthetic meat products promise to serve as inexpensive substitute proteins that can replace meat made through conventional animal agriculture. At least some of the excitement about these products stems from ethical and moral concerns regarding animal welfare, environmental costs, and human health. A governing idea behind the creation of substitute meat is that consumers will recognize the ethical and moral concerns of conventional production and substitute one (better) product for another (worse) product. This approach, however, overlooks a much more practical complication: the problem of indifference. That is,--consumer demand does not in practice greatly hinge on the well-known moral issues in conventional animal agriculture, as evident by the immense scale of the current meat market. In this paper, we ask how consumer indifference and producer strategy might influence the uptake of clean meat in the economic market. We suggest that thinking about the challenge in this way reveals powerful presuppositions that confuse our thinking about the potential of synthetic meat. Rather than understanding synthetic meat in terms of its substitution value, we propose approaching the challenge of synthetic meat from the standpoint of reasons-for and reasons-against. Doing so, we suggest, exposes the complications of “causal indeterminacy” that in turn implicate our thinking both about moral responsibility and the broader nature of technocratic solutions to environmental problems. We argue instead that synthetic meat offers an exciting and novel product, but likely not a substitute that will displace the conventional protein industry.

For years, many people have believedthat the only reasonable way to approach a problem of environmental concern is to evaluate the eventuating state of affairs. Since environmental matters are primarily about states of affairs, these ‘consequentialist’ approaches appear to make sense. More recently, however, others have looked to different branches of philosophy for guidance. These non- or anti-consequentialist theorists typically fall into two camps: act-oriented camps and character-oriented camps. This chapter aims to defend nonconsequentialist act-oriented ethics, and in particular, a deontological justificatory liberalism, as at least one plausible route forward for environmental ethics. It does so by suggesting that more traditional consequentialist approaches to environmental problems are subject to potentially devastating criticisms that can more adequately be handled by some deontological approaches.

Ever since Kenneth Goodpaster published his article "On Being Morally Considerable," environmental ethicists have been engaged in a debate over whether animals, plants, and other natural objects matter morally (Goodpaster 1978). Many, if not most, theorists have treated the problem of moral considerability as a problem of status, arguing that earlier ethical positions have unjustifiably given privileged status to one group of beings over others. They have then proceeded in one of two ways. Either they have appealed to intrinsic value and absolute ends, suggesting that there are somehow non-anthropocentric, objective values "out there," outside of human considerations; or they have appealed to subjective or ..

U.S. conservation policy, both in structure and in practice, places a heavy burden on conservationists to halt development projects, rather than on advocates of development to defend their proposed actions. In this paper, we identify this structural phenomenon in several landmark environmental policies and in practice in the contemporary debate concerning oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The burdens placed on conservation can be understood in terms of constraints—as conservation ‘floors’ and degradation ‘ceilings’. At base, these floors and ceilings emerge out of underlying consequentialist commitments that assume that our environmental activity can be justified by appeal primarily to ends. A series of intuition pumps guides our argument to instead shift the conservation discourse away from these consequentialist commitments to more widely justify activities on our public lands.

ABSTRACT Some fear the Anthropocene heralds the end of nature, while others argue that nature will persist throughout the Anthropocene. Still others worry that acknowledging the Anthropocene grants humanity broad license to further inject itself into nature. We propose that this debate rests on a conflation between naturalness and wildness. Where naturalness is best understood as fundamentally a metaphysical category, wildness can be better understood as an inter-relational category. The raccoons in cities, the deer in suburban yards, the coyotes hunting cats and dogs: these all return wildness, where naturalness may have been lost.

In this paper we introduce the ‘New Substitution Problem’ which, on its face, presents a problem for adaptation proposals that are justified by appeal to obligations of reparation. In contrast to the standard view, which is that obligations of reparation require that one restore lost value, we propose instead that obligations to aid and assist species and ecosystems in adaptation, in particular, follow from a failure to adequately justify – either by absence, neglect, omission or malice – actions that caused, or coalesced to cause, climatic change. Because this position suggests a different reason for reparation – namely, it does not rely on the notion that an obligation to repair is contingent upon a lost good – it permits moving forward with assisted colonisation and migration, but does so without falling subject to the complications of the New Substitution Problem.

This paper addresses whether universal, general education programs are enough to satisfy basic criteria of human rights, or whether comprehensive family planning programs, in conjunction with universal education programs, might also be morally required. Even before the Reagan administration instituted the ‘global gag rule’ at the 1984 conference in Mexico City, prohibiting funding to nongovernmental organizations that included providing information about abortion as a possible method of family planning, the moral acceptability of family planning programs has been called into question. This paper makes a moral argument for family planning by appealing to both data and to theory: data about the efficacy of universal and comprehensive family planning education programs at reducing fertility and infant mortality, and theory about what is required for the establishment of autonomy. It reasons that universal educational programs are insufficient for the promotion of autonomy, and therefore argues on substantive autonomy grounds for comprehensive family planning programs in addition to universal education programs

A brief foray into a moral thicket, exploring why we should protect nature despite tsunamis, malaria, bird flu, cancer, killer asteroids, and tofu. Most of us think that in order to be environmentalists, we have to love nature. Essentially, we should be tree huggers—embracing majestic redwoods, mighty oaks, graceful birches, etc. We ought to eat granola, drive hybrids, cook tofu, and write our appointments in Sierra Club calendars. Nature's splendor, in other words, justifies our protection of it. But, asks Benjamin Hale in this provocative book, what about tsunamis, earthquakes, cancer, bird flu, killer asteroids? They are nature, too. For years, environmentalists have insisted that nature is fundamentally good. In The Wild and the Wicked, Benjamin Hale adopts the opposite position—that much of the time nature can be bad—in order to show that even if nature is cruel, we still need to be environmentally conscientious. Hale argues that environmentalists needn't feel compelled to defend the value of nature, or even to adopt the attitudes of tree-hugging nature lovers. We can acknowledge nature's indifference and periodic hostility. Deftly weaving anecdote and philosophy, he shows that we don't need to love nature to be green. What really ought to be driving our environmentalism is our humanity, not nature's value. Hale argues that our unique burden as human beings is that we can act for reasons, good or bad. He claims that we should be environmentalists because environmentalism is right, because we humans have the capacity to be better than nature. As humans, we fail to live up to our moral potential if we act as brutally as nature. Hale argues that despite nature's indifference to the plight of humanity, humanity cannot be indifferent to the plight of nature.

Recent work in applied ethics has advanced a raft of arguments regarding individual responsibilities to address collective challenges like climate change or the welfare and environmental impacts of meat production. Frequently, such arguments suggest that individual actors have a responsibility to be more conscientious with their consumption decisions, that they can and should harness the power of the market to bring about a desired outcome. A common response to these arguments, and a challenge in particular to act-consequentialist reasoning, is that it “makes no difference” if one takes conscious consumption action or not – that one is “causally impotent” to change an outcome. In this paper, I break causal impotence objections into three distinct lines of argument and present causal indeterminacy as a third, unexplored variation of much more common causal impotence lines. I suggest that the causal indeterminacy argument presents additional challenges to consequentialist moral theory because it acknowledges that individual actions can have an impact on outcome, but suggests instead that the outcome can neither be known nor secured by the action itself.

Electronic waste is the fastest growing form of waste worldwide, associated with a range of environmental, health, and justice problems. Unfortunately, disposal and recycling are hindered by a tendency of consumers to resist recycling their e-waste. This backlog of un-discarded e-waste poses significant challenges for the future. This paper addresses the reasons why many people might continue to value their technological artifacts and therefore to hoard them, suggesting that many of these common explanations are deficient in some way. It argues instead for a derivative kind of value, here labelled “system value”. Addressing the problem of hoarding by invoking the idea of system value, the authors conjecture, could offer some clarity about how to move forward with more successful e-waste management programs.

In this paper I argue that applied philosophers hoping to develop a stronger role in public policy formation can begin by aligning their methods with the tools employed in the policy sciences. I proceed first by characterizing the standard view of policymaking and policy education as instrumentally oriented toward the employment of specific policy tools. I then investigate pressures internal to philosophy that nudge work in applied philosophy toward the periphery of policy debates. I capture the dynamics of these pressures by framing them as the “dilemma dilemma” and the “problem problem.” Seeking a remedy, I turn to the interdisciplinarity of a unique approach to policymaking generally known as the “policy sciences.” Finally, I investigate the case of bioethics, an instance where philosophy has made decent headway with policymakers. From this I draw parallels to public policy. I suggest that because the policy sciences are essentially analchemist’s brew of academic fields, and because philosophy covers many of the foundational questions associated with these fields, it is only natural that applied philosophers should begin collaborations with other applied academics by adopting the strategies that have so successfully applied in other theoretical fields.

The term moral considerability refers to the question of whether a being or set of beings is worthy of moral consideration. Moral considerability is most readily afforded to those beings that demonstrate the clearest relationship to rational humans, though many have also argued for and against the moral considerability of species, ecosystems, and “lesser” animals. Among these arguments there are at least two positions: “environmentalist” positions that tend to emphasize the systemic relations between species, and “liberationist” positions that tend to emphasize the attributes or welfare of a particular individual organism. Already, this classic conflict provides for some challenging theoretical clashes between environmentalists and animal liberationists. The question of moral considerability is complicated, however, by recent developments in genetic engineering. Some animals, like pigs and fish, have been genetically modified by humans to grow organs that can then be transplanted into humans. If environmental arguments for the moral consideration of species are correct, then we are released from our obligations to morally consider those animals that we have genetically modified, since they are by their nature always an “invader species.” If, instead, the welfare of the animal is of penultimate importance, then there is a case for strengthening the moral considerability of GM animals over “naturally-occurring” animals, since they bear a closer relationship to humans. This would appear to be an intractable problem, a “bad marriage,” as Mark Sagoff once proposed. This paper argues that the case of invasive transgenic animals exposes weaknesses in this classic conflict, and particularly, in the framing of this conflict. To remedy this framing problem, this paper argues for a reconceptualization of the term “moral considerability,” instead urging a strong distinction between moral considerability, moral relevance, and moral significance.

This article argues that teachers of environmental ethics must more aggressively entertain questions of private property in their work and in their teaching. To make this case, it first introduces the three primary positions on property: occupation arguments, labor theory of value arguments, and efficiency arguments. It then contextualizes these arguments in light of the contemporary U.S. wise-use movement, in an attempt to make sense of the concerns that motivate wise-use activists, and also to demonstrate how intrinsic value arguments miss the mark. Finally, it offers some suggestions about further directions for environmental ethics, reasoning that there is a good deal of headway to be gained for environmental ethics by accepting that nature can be owned as property, but nevertheless engaging the idea of private property critically.

Recent advancements in stem-cell research have given scientists hope that new technologies will soon enable them to grow a variety of organs for transplantation into humans. Though such developments are still in their early stages, romantic prognosticators are hopeful that scientists will be capable of growing fully functioning and complex organs, such as hearts, kidneys, muscles, and livers. This raises the question of whether such profound medical developments might have other potentially fruitful applications. In the spirit of innovation, this paper examines the ethical ramifications of a spin-off technology that has just begun being considered by scientists and enthusiastic entrepreneurs: animal organs grown, independently of their host animals, for food. Most importantly, this paper presents the homegrown organs market as a philosopher's Gedankenexperiment come true. By comparing three of the primary arguments against the use of animals for meat production -- Peter Singer's Utilitarianism, Tom Regan's Kantianism, and Cora Diamond's non-cognitivism -- this paper proposes that the case of organs grown in a laboratory for food further accentuates the point that the critical moral difference between an animal and a slab of meat lies in the way in which the animal interacts with us, not in specific attributes or values intrinsic to that animal. It suggests that our main impetus for not eating, and even for protecting, animals ought to be grounded in our sense of who we are, in our own practical identity as ethical agents, which develops over a long course of interactive interrelations with human and non-human others.