Gary Varner

(? - 2023)

The two-level utilitarianism of R. M. Hare provides a nuanced perspective on pets that mirrors the complex and varying relationships that people in different positions have to the animals most commonly kept as pets. Hare argued that real-world utilitarians need an “intuitive level” system of rules (“ILS rules”) to guide them in daily life, when explicitly utilitarian thinking would, ironically, tend to lead to decisions that do not maximize aggregate happiness. These ILS rules are selected and amended using explicitly utilitarian reasoning, and they divide into importantly different types that include laws, codes of professional ethics, and common morality. This chapter uses Harean utilitarianism to motivate a distinction among “companion animals,” “domesticated partners,” and “mere pets.” Using that distinction, the chapter then illustrates the different ways that laws, codes of professional ethics, and common morality change over time as explicitly utilitarian reasoning is used to amend them.

Varner challenges the assumption that animal rights theory and anthropocentric views are at odds with each other. He attempts to reconcile them by arguing that every living organism has interests which ought to be protected, but that some interests--particularly those belonging to sentient animals with conscious desires--are more important than others. The author is not unduly influenced by radical or conservative environmental positions and effectively establishes an individualistic and accessible framework that will be given credence by both camps. In Nature's Interests? is a necessary read for any serious environmental philosopher and is a valuable addition to the current literature on moral considerability.

In this essay, we provide an overview of how production systems can be re-engineered to improve the welfare of the animals involved. At least three potential options exist: engineering their environments to better fit the animals, engineering the animals themselves to better fit their environments, and eliminating the animals from the system by growing meat in vitro rather than on farms. The morality of consuming animal products and the conditions under which agricultural animals are maintained remain highly contentious, and when concerns about animal welfare are coupled with concerns about sustainability and global food security, the problem of welfare in animal agriculture constitutes “a wicked problem,” because it is unlikely that any proposed solution will simultaneously address all the issues of concern. In the final section of this essay, we offer some observations on how debate over reforms in animal agriculture could proceed going forward.

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.

Without looking beyond the conditions under which laying hens typically live in the contemporary U.S. egg industry, we can understand why the production and consumption of factory farmed eggs could be judged immoral. However, the question, What (if anything) is wrong with animal by-products? cannot always be adequately answered by looking at the conditions under which animals live out their productive lives. For the dairy industry looks benign in those terms, but if we look beyond the conditions under which milk cows live, we can better understand some animal rights activists' reasons for objecting to dairy products. The contemporary U.S. dairy industry requires a slaughter industry between one-seventh and one-third the size of the contemporary beef industry. Today, beef slaughter is vastly more humane than poultry slaughter, but if today's beef slaughter industry is judged emmoral, the contemporary dairy industry should be judged similarly immoral, because the two are wedded. This is the deep reason for moral suspicion of the dairy industry.

In Use and Abuse Revisited: Response to Pluhar and Varner, Kathryn Paxton George misunderstands the point of my essay, In Defense of the Vegan Ideal: Rhetoric and Bias in the Nutrition Literature. I did not claim that the nutrition literature unambiguously confirms that vegans are not at significantly greater risk of deficiencies than omnivores. Rather than settling any empirical controversy, my aim was to show how the literature can give the casual reader a skewed impression of what is known about the risks of a vegan diet. In this brief rejoinder, I illustrate how two essays by nutritionists in the same volume as George's and my essays, and a referee's report on my manuscript which was authored by a nutritionist, confirm the soundness of this basic insight.

In his recent essay on moral pluralism in environmental ethics, J. Baird Callicott exaggerates the advantages of monism, ignoring the environmentally unsound implications of Leopold’s holism. In addition, he fails to see that Leopold’s view requires the same kind of intellectual schitzophrenia for which he criticizes the version of moral pluralism advocated by Christopher D. Stone in Earth and Other Ethics. If itis plausible to say that holistic entities like ecosystems are directly morally considerable-and that is a very big if-it must be for a very different reason than is usually given for saying that individual human beings are directly morally considerable.

Much of the scientific literature on vegetarian nutrition leaves one with the impression that vegan diets are significantly more risky than omnivorous ones, especially for individuals with high metabolic demands (such as pregnant or lactating women and children). But nutrition researchers have tended to skew their study populations toward new vegetarians, members of religious sects with especially restrictive diets and tendencies to eschew fortified foods and medical care, and these are arguably the last people we would expect to thrive on vegan diets. Researchers also have some tendency to play up weakly confirmed risks of vegan dietsvis-à-vis equally weakly confirmed benefits. And, in spite of these methodological and rhetorical biases, for every nutrient which vegans are warned to be cognizant of, there is reason to believe that they are not at significantly greater risk of nutritional deficiency than omnivores.

Animal well-being must be a primary normative consideration in a conception of humane sustainability. The two-level utilitarianism of R.M. Hare embodies aspects of both animal welfare and animal rights views, and in this paper I illustrate its application to questions about what counts as humane sustainability. Hare’s theory is highly controversial, and a thorough defense of it is beyond the scope of this paper, but the insightful way it provides of assessing various visions of humane sustainability testifies to the explanatory and analytic power of the theory. In particular, on a Harean analysis, it makes sense to distinguish among “prelapsarian,” “contemporary,” and “utopian” visions of humane sustainability.

Why should governments or individuals invest time and resources in conserving biodiversity? A popular answer is that biodiversity has both instrumental value for humans and intrinsic value in its own right. Defending Biodiversity critically evaluates familiar arguments for these claims and finds that, at best, they provide good reasons for conserving particular species or regions. However, they fail to provide a strong justification for conserving biodiversity per se. Hence, either environmentalists must develop more compelling arguments for conserving biodiversity or else they should modify their agenda. This short precis is an overview of the central findings of our book.

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.