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.

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

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.

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.

Environmental holism and environmental individualism are based on incompatible notions of moral considerability, and yield incompatible results. For Schopenhauer, every intelligible character--every irreducible instance of formative nature---defines a distinct moral patient, and for hirn both holistic entities and the individual members of higher species have distinguishable intelligible characters. Schopenhauer’s neglected metaethics thus can be used to generate an environmental ethics which is complete in the sense of synthesizing holism and individualism while simultaneously meeting TomRegan’s (implicit) demand that an environmental ethics make moral patients of natural objects

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 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.