Kimberly Smith

This chapter addresses the question, to whom do we owe justice? Or, in other words, who belongs to the moral community? Traditional moral theories usually limit the moral community to humans. Environmental ethicists, in contrast, argue that at least some nonhuman entities have moral status. This chapter reviews arguments concerning the moral status of animals, species, ecosystems, and nature itself. It includes discussion of intrinsic and instrumental value, as well as Elizabeth Anderson’s pluralist-expressivist value theory.

Land management invorelves weighing the ecological, aesthetic, scientific, historical, economic, and other kinds of value the landscape holds for a community. In other words, it involves interpreting the meaning of the landscape. This chapter explores the ethical dimension of interpreting the landscape. It then focuses on two important sources of interpretive conflict: the meaning and value of wilderness (and the related concept of biodiversity) and the role of ecological knowledge in judging the aesthetic value of a landscape. It concludes by considering how interpreting the landscape may relate to social justice.

How do your environmental values fit into your life? This chapter explores the idea of environmental stewardship as a vocation, a way to give meaning to our choice of career and lifestyle. It also explains how one’s workplace or school can affect one’s moral development and how one might influence the moral ecologies of these institutions so that they support ethical environmental actions. It concludes by considering how the political arena can be a place to practice stewardship by working to create a society that supports your environmental values.

Ethics is a field in philosophy that focuses on explaining and defending judgments about right and wrong conduct. Ethicists use the method of ethical inquiry to examine value judgments critically, clarifying them and resolving conflicts among them. This chapter takes a brief tour of metaethics to orient us before delving into more specific questions about how to answer questions about environmental values. The chapter concludes with an introduction to environmental ethics, which addresses the need for and general outlines of an ethic that recognizes the value of nonhuman nature and our duties toward it.

This book is designed as a basic text for courses that are part of an interdisciplinary program in environmental studies. The intended reader is anyone who expects environmental stewardship to be an important part of his or her life, as a citizen, a policy maker, or an environmental management professional. In addition to discussing major issues in environmental ethics, it invites readers to think about how an ethicist's perspective differs from the perspectives encountered in other environmental studies courses. Additional topics covered include corporate social responsibility, ecological citizenship, property theory, and the concept of stewardship as a vocation.

The concept of wilderness found in the black American intellectual tradition poses a provocative alternative to the preservationist concept. For black writers, the wilderness is not radically separate from human society but has an important historical and social dimension. Nor is it merely a feature of the external landscape; there is also a wilderness within, a vital energy that derives from and connects one to the external wilderness. Wilderness is the origin and foundation of culture; preserving it means preserving not merely the physical landscape but our collective memory of it. But black writers also highlight the racial essentialism that infuses both their own and traditional American concepts of the wild, giving us greater insight into why the wilderness celebrated by preservationists can be a problematic value for racial minorities

The concept of wilderness found in the black American intellectual tradition poses a provocative alternative to the preservationist concept. For black writers, the wilderness is not radically separate from human society but has an important historical and social dimension. Nor is it merely a feature of the external landscape; there is also a wilderness within, a vital energy that derives from and connects one to the external wilderness. Wilderness is the origin and foundation of culture; preserving it means preserving not merely the physical landscape but our collective memory of it. But black writers also highlight the racial essentialism that infuses both their own and traditional American concepts of the wild, giving us greater insight into why the wilderness celebrated by preservationists can be a problematic value for racial minorities.

Environmental political theory poses new challenges to our received political concepts and values. Increasingly, we are reconceptualising nature as a subject rather than solely an object of politics. On one front, we are being challenged to think of natural entities as subjects of justice – as bearers of rights or interests that the political system should accommodate. On a second front, we are being challenged to see nature as a subject of power, constructed and ordered through scientific and political practice. These reconceptualisations have significant implications for our political practices and institutions

Beginning with the nineteenth-century critiques of slave agriculture, African American writers have been centrally concerned with their relationship to the American landscape. Drawing on and responding to the dominant ideology of democratic agrarianism, nineteenth-century black writers developed an agrarian critique of slavery and racial oppression. This black agrarianism focuses on property rights, the status of labor, and the exploitation of workers, exploring how racial oppression can prevent a community from establishing a responsible relationship to the land. Black agrarianism serves as an important starting point for understanding black environmental thought as it developed in the twentieth century, and for illuminating the connections between social justice and environmental stewardship.

Elizabeth Anderson’s “pluralist–expressivist” value theory, an alternative to the understanding of value and rationality underlying the “rational actor” model of human behavior, provides rich resources for addressing questions of environmental and animal ethics. It is particularly well-suited to help us think about the ethics of commodification, as I demonstrate in this critique of the pet trade. I argue that Anderson’s approach identifies the proper grounds for criticizing the commodification of animals, and directs our attention to the importance of maintaining social practices and institutions that respect the social meanings of animals. Her theory alone, however, does not adequately address the role of the state in this project. Drawing on social contract theory to fill this gap, I conclude that the state’s role in regulating the pet trade should be limited to ensuring the welfare of animals in the stream of commerce, not prohibiting their mass marketing altogether.

In The Frontiers of Justice, Martha Nussbaum argues that social contract theory cannot accommodate political duties to animals because it requires the parties to the contract to enjoy rough physical and mental equality. Her interpretation of the social contract tradi­tion is unpersuasive; social contract theory requires only that the parties be equally free and deserving of moral consideration. Moreover, social contract theory is superior to her capabilities approach in that it allows us to limit the scope of the community of justice to animals we are capable of recognizing as subjects of justice and with whom we have a political relationship.