Espen Dyrnes Stabell

Endörfer and Larue (2022) argue that Joseph Heath’s Market Failures Approach to business ethics (MFA) implies a demandingness dilemma: under conditions of imperfect competition, they argue, the MFA is either too demanding, if requiring that firms should seek to generate Pareto efficiency or “social optima”, or not demanding enough, if it gives up on social optima and focus instead on incremental Pareto improvements. I argue the MFA can be combined with an excusability principle to overcome the problem of over-demandingness. Since this means the MFA can hold on to the obligation to promote social optima, the under- demandingness problem too is avoided, and the dilemma is solved.

Instrumentalism about need suggests that the significance of an agent's need for x depends on the end for which x is needed. Instrumental accounts have, however, been vague about the transfer or transmission of normative significance supposed to be occurring from ends to needs. How should such transmission be understood, and how can we assess the amount or degree of significance being transmitted in particular cases? The Relational Account (RA) combines work on normative transmission principles and the strength of reasons in order to clarify these issues. RA, it is argued, both (1) improves the instrumental view on need and (2) can be used to analyze and assess a large range of needs and arguments from need-including 'basic needs', which some argue require non-instrumental explanation. While the paper develops an instrumental view, the analysis of the normativity of the needs-end relation will also be helpful for clarifying instrumental relations between different kinds of need in non-instrumentalist theories-such as relations between 'absolute' and intermediate needs.

The value of nature has been extensively debated in environmental ethics. There has been less discussion, however, about how one should understand the relation between this value and normativity, or reasons: if something in nature is seen as valuable, how should we understand the relation between this fact and claims about reasons to, for example, protect it or promote its existence? The “commonsense” view is that value gives rise to reasons. The buck-passing account of value, on the other hand, implies that for an entity or state of affairs in nature to be valuable just is for it to have properties that provide reasons to promote or have a pro-attitude towards it. BPA has been extensively debated, but has received little attention in environmental philosophy. In this paper, it is argued that the view suggests a “reasons first” approach to environmental ethics, and that it should be preferred to competing accounts of value in the context of environmental ethics.

While there is an extensive literature on how the precautionary principle should be interpreted and when precautions should be taken, relatively little discussion exists about the fair distribution of costs of taking precautions. We address this issue by proposing a general framework for deciding how costs of precautions should be shared, which consists of a series of default principles that are triggered according to desert, rights, and ability to pay. The framework is developed with close attention to the pragmatics of how distributions will affect actual behaviours. It is intended to help decision-makers think more systematically about distributional consequences of taking precautionary measures, thereby to improve decision-making. Two case studies—one about a ban on turtle fishing in Costa Rica, and one about a deep-sea mining project in Papua New Guinea—are given to show how the framework can be applied.

In decision-making based on multiple criteria, situations may arise where agents find their options to be neither better than, worse than nor equal to each other with respect to the relevant criteria. How, if at all, can a justified choice be made between such options? Are the options incomparable? This article explores a hypothetical case that illustrates how such a situation can arise in an environmental context; more specifically, it considers the deliberations of an imagined ‘ethics committee’ as it struggles to decide whether or not a deep-sea mining project should be allowed to proceed. I argue that the case is best understood as involving options that are comparable in the sense of being ‘on a par’. Working out from a discussion of Ruth Chang's ‘self-governance’ theory of choice in cases of parity, I suggest that, in the environmental context, the idea of choices expressing a moral identity may lead us in the direction of a plausible solution to these particularly challenging cases.

Existence value refers to the value humans ascribe to the existence of something, regard­less of whether it is or will be of any particular use to them. This existence value based on preference satisfaction should be taken into account in evaluating activities that come with a risk of species extinction. There are two main objections. The first is that on the preference satisfaction interpretation, the concept lacks moral importance because satisfying people’s preferences may involve no good or well-being for them. However, existence value can be based on a restricted version of the preference satisfaction theory, which is not vulnerable to the skeptical arguments about the link between preference satisfaction and well-being. The second objection is that even if preference satisfaction can be linked to well-being, understanding existence value in terms of individual preference satisfaction is incoherent, because existence value reflects disinterested preferences that involve no benefits to the individual. However, the fact that existence value may involve disinterested preferences does not threaten the coherence of the concept, but suggests that it does not fit smoothly into the “utilitarian” or “welfarist” framework it is commonly considered within. A pluralistic normative approach based on prima facie duties can be an alternative to standard utilitarian-style approaches for considering existence value in concrete cases involving a risk of species extinction, such as through deep sea mining.