Species and Individuals (essay)
I am posting a nine-year old essay I wrote on environmental ethics from November 1996. Just dug it out from the old computer files...
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Species and Individuals
IN THIS essay, I will examine the problem of individuals and species. This problem is particularly a moral problem in environmental ethics, where "[i]n the modern debate, the question has arisen whether we should not be concerned with species, at the expense of individuals" [Sorabji, p. 166]. The general form of the problem, that of ‘one and many,’ is present in areas other than environmental ethics, for example, in politics and in theology. In these two areas, the solution to the problem has been political doctrine (ideology) and church dogma (teachings). In environmental ethics, several insights from proponents of animal liberation and endangered species protection have been critical to the appreciation of this problem. But, no hard [ideological] lines appear to have been drawn by force of arguments. However, the arguments tended to circumambulate around the two opposite attractors. Individuals and species are concepts that require more rigorous examination within this problem's particular form. My objective is to subject this form to philosophical analysis and probably intuit the morally relevant view of the moral opposition which the problem presents.
Two very sticky situations illustrate the state of the current debate. One, "[s]hould endangered species be protected, even though this almost always disadvantages individual members of a more plentiful one?" Two, "[i]s the factory farming of animals justified because it keeps the species in being, however much it harms the individuals?" [p. 166].
These ethical problems hold water today because the necessary and sufficient conditions are present in the current environmental context. That ecological or scientific information points to certain facts about the world, and that these facts reveal the skewed causal relationship of human individuals or of human societies with the rest of the planet, probably give these problems more urgency, but these pointers and facts probably can not give answers to the ethical problems involved. A merely scientific solution will go the way of changing the conditions behind the facts by intervening in behalf of endangered species, for example. Once the conditions have been set right and new ecological information points to the fact that the species is no longer at risk, from the scientific point of view the ecological problem has been solved. But is the ethical problem also solved? Does the ethical dimension disappear along with the antecedent conditions? I will hazard the position that scientific facts do not matter in this debate because the meaning of the problem is not located in the determination of conditions of fact, but rather it is to be found in the definition of relationships which hold between the two constructs individuals and species.
Of these two terms, species is the simpler construct. It refers to a category of biological classification ranking just below the genus or subgenus and comprising closely related organisms potentially able to breed with one another. This definition might someday break at the seams when reproductive technology would have overtaken natural selection as a means to species differentiation, by forcing the emergence of new genotypes by mixing soups of genes from unrelated surviving or extinct species. This undoubtedly must raise new ethical questions. For purposes of this essay, I limit the term to existing species whether presently surviving or previously extinct. Future species, because they do not yet exist and would not exist if the biological lineage is broken, should not be encompassed by the definition since the potential for reproduction is nil. It should also be clear that any one member of any species which has lost reproductive capacity does not render the entire population at risk of extinction, unless that one member was the sole female or male, or other reproductive receptacle, of the species. A distinction should also be made between reproducing which involves the biological process between individual organisms or by unicellular organisms, and breeding which involves a more contrived or more accidental relationship between at least two closely related organisms. It should help to remember too that both plants and animals are classified according to species, and so are bacteria and retroviruses which exhibit unique reproductive adaptations.
The term individuals, on the other hand, refers to some intuitive category of human understanding which a metaphysics of primitive concepts would be hard-pressed to define. It is a negative concept taken from a naturally occurring plenitude of things to refer to several definite or indefinite parts thereof, as useful intuitive abstractions for speaking about the world. A critical exposition of this notion reads as follows:
A substance is individual not because it is absolutely indivisible. . . . Its individuality rather consists, first, in its being divided from other substances in such a way that it can perish without necessarily destroying them, or they can perish without destroying it; and, second, in the fact that, though divisible into parts, it is one whole when these parts remain undivided. Yet as one substance it has more unity than a mere collection of things [Adler, p. 589].
This particular definition denotes individuals as ‘windowless,’ as having no particular view of its relation to the plurality of individuals whereof it bears some sameness. Perhaps we should question if the term individuals in the critical sense given is not an impossible notion to give to biological organisms, who it is not uncritical to say are totalities of relationships and connections, and are reciprocals in a so-called ‘great chain of being.’ What does it mean to be individual and to be alive? What does it mean to perish like individuals?
This analysis is considered inadequate for animal liberation philosophy. Consequently, the impetus for this philosophy derives from the principle of equality of rights, which reside in individuals, their proper loci, and not in any arbitrary or non-arbitrary grouping of individuals that may be said to manifest a unity. The question arises whether or not this thinking is to be taken absolutely; for if not, its demanding logic should fail entirely.
However, I do not believe that animal rights arguments were presented as arguments for individual animals per se, but for the class of individual animals as a "morally considerable" whole. The individual rights view [Regan], however, invites criticism for its criterion of decidability for lacking sufficient consistency and for incompleteness. This view, I think, should suggest absolute equality of rights rather than equality of absolute rights. Because no more than one absolute right can co-exist, the rights of individuals (i.e., of many individuals) can not therefore be absolutes. If the rights of individuals were absolute, then this right becomes the single most compelling danger to the existence of all life. An antinomy seems to derive from this.
Animal rights arguments clearly address the issue of the current hegemony of one species of the genus Homo over most other species. Though not significantly more populous than species of clams or gnats or worms, for example, the current hegemon nonetheless possesses a blind destructive power that it can as well pull on itself as on anybody else greater or less than itself. Beneficent or responsible stewardship which ought to inform this blindness is rejected in the current debate since it appears to privilege the interests of the dominant moralising species over those of the rest that do not exercise the sufficient moral clout. The ideological standpoint seems to be to axiomatize the necessary inherence of rights in (animal) individuals in order to collapse the (fascist) articulation of moral indifference towards these perishable individuals.
The skeptical argument that a fact does not imply another fact holds true for the notion of individuals. Why should individuals exist? I mean to ask this question as a moral question. Some authors are rather quicker to answer the question Why should species exist?, and I believe it is the simpler question. At least two morally relevant reasons have been given: the principle of plenitude [Sorabji, p. 200], and that of the irreplaceability of the broken form [Rolston, pp. 323-325]. The principle of plenitude---"the realisation of as many different species as was possible"--- is formulated in Maimonides (AD 1135-1204, [Guide for the Perplexed 3.25]). In this representation, the principle is attributed to God who created "a universe organized for the preservation only of species." However, it was believed that God's providence extended to "individual humans, but only to species of animals" [p. 166]. In the modern view, the diversity and complexity of the "biotic community" [Callicott] logically derive from this plenitude.
The second view grounds the analyticity of arguments from the dichotomy of forms and their instantiations on the ontological necessity of the continuation of instantiations to preserve their forms. One contemporary proponent of endangered species protection, Holmes Rolston III, argues that "[t]he individual is a receptacle of the form, and the receptacles are broken while the form survives; but the form cannot otherwise survive" [Rolston, p. 324] The moral dimension to this argument seems to be in answer to the philosophical milieu in environmental ethics which has protracted a problematic extensionism and an extended individualism in the current debate. "An ethic about species," Rolston realizes, "needs to see how the species is a bigger event than individual interests or sentience. Making this clearer can support the conviction that a species ought to continue" [p. 323]. Implicit in the argumentation, I believe, is the tacit appreciation that moralising agents are not possessed of creative agency or restitutive causality. The background principle seems to be that ‘what one can not create, one can not destroy.’ I think this thought can be found in Aristotle (384-322 BC). In other words, it may be perfectly justifiable to destroy a bridge or piece of paper, but not a river or a forest, and absolutely senseless to create something like a triangle or destroy it. This observation should apply to both individual organisms and species of organisms. In Rolston's view, however, species takes precedence because "[n]o individual crosses the extinction threshold; the species does" [p. 324].
The problem of species extinction is not necessarily mired in what I call problems of ‘hijacked individuals.’ Catastrophic events like the end-Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago [Erwin, pp. 72-78] are but a result of ecologically destabilising geological events and of a surfeit of species otherwise fit to survive in meta-stable environments. But maybe not if the Gaia hypothesis is to be believed, since ex hypothesi "any single species threatening the survival of life in general on the planet would naturally be forced into extinction" [Dashefsky, p. 105]. This easily introduces the problem of ‘hijacked species,’ and particularly nullifies the principle of plenitude and that of species’ reason for being (raison d’être) examined earlier. At the moment, I bracket these issues to proceed. A similar view, the Selfish Gene hypothesis, attempts to draw the justification for the existence of individuals and species not from the point of view of their inherent right to exist, but from the perspective of a life as nothing more than a "utility function" for the single purpose of "survival of DNA" [Dawkins, pp. 80-85]. This thinking seems absolutely nihilist about the commonly held meaning, purpose, and value of life.
Questions arise concerning these two hypotheses which I will not discuss here. The reader is, of course, aware that the question of hijacked individuals is an altogether different matter. Thus far, our analysis points in the direction of species having the stronger justification for survival than perishable individuals. Is this correct? This direction is objected to by some authors as dangerous in its implications to humanistic ethics. One view [Marietta, pp. 49-68] indicates such dangers need not be so. This notwithstanding, I think problems of hijacked individuals can be spoken of in strictly non-humanistic terms.
I distinguish problems of hijacked individuals from those which arise out of the ideological grip of an individualism's monolithic pose. This latter posture is premised on the ideology of freedom and autonomy that plays out in the conflict between the state and the individual, and on how this conflict should be arbitrated in the interest of the individual. In contrast, the challenge of the former is quite different. However, there is some confusion here. Distinguish, for example, between protecting endangered species of fowl from preserving collapsing slave societies, or between culturing poultry for food from raising child prostitutes for sex. Such refrains are heard often enough in the debate, but it is not always understood that the first points in each case involve problems of hijacked individuals whereas the second ones do not. Further, the arguments that it is not justified to mass produce animals for food since it is not justified to bear children for trade in sex, and that there is no moral obligation to keep an ugly species in being because the collapse of something ugly like slavery is morally good, may prove rhetorically effective, but I think this is not how philosophical discourse operates. We need to differentiate.
Problems of hijacked individuals concern how one individual's existence is bound to the existence of another closely related or completely unrelated individual or groups thereof, or, to be precise, to the existence of its own species or some other to which it may be ecologically linked. In my analysis, the difficulties issue from two incongruous positions: extensionism and individualism. Extensionism and individualism put together is a strange mix, simply because an ‘expanding circle’ of moral considerability, within which compass moral duty can take its meaning, must have a centre, and its centre can not be everywhere singular on the circle. Shifting centres reduce the radius at one point and extend it at the other. The extensionist policy towards all sentient beings, or to those with interests, may logically imply a reductionism on the level of individuals, but maybe not on the level of an individualism. Here, extensionism is the morally relevant position, but individualism tests the consistency of that position. If, however, the test is resolved against individuals, whereof there are plenty, problems of hijacked individuals may chance in the debate.
Maybe the relevant question to ask is whether or not a moral action should be taken for the sake of something else, some ‘bigger event,’ rather than against individuals. This view is often justified in the context of an ecoholism. On the contrary, however, I do not see how the continued existence of species is a bigger event in this context to justify the factory farming of animals. Counterfactual arguments that an individual would not otherwise be in being if not for the intervention of a farming milieu invite the individualist retort "I did not ask to be born a veal calf." Animal rights arguments that ‘subjects-of-a-life’ should not at all be treated as resources take the other extreme view. So, how close are we to a rational moral vision?
Because moral duty responds to the moral good, and moral good is immanent from moral purpose, moral duty must respond to a unity of moral purpose, else it will possibly collapse from the welter of speculation about the moral good. I tend to view problems of hijacked individuals in terms of divisions in our moral thinking. It is uncritical to take for granted that what is plenty (sand, for example) should count for less as individuals, and what is rare (diamonds, maybe) should count for more. Perhaps our economic mindset fails to discriminate property and contracts from relationships and community; I am not sure. The house is divided. In the end, I ask, What is the moral good of individuals and that of species? How do moralising agents weigh the life of one individual with the survival of its community? Is the individual perishable? When do moralising agents decide against the individual?
I conclude with difficult questions. My analysis re-defined the problem of species and individuals in its conceptual form and recognized the error of drawing the rhetorical analogy between humanism and environmental ethics. Specifically, I introduced the notion of ‘problems of hijacked individuals’ as the really fuzzy point in the debate. Did I take a stand? No. I looked at a satellite picture of planet Earth and I saw only people, searched for my little spot and was satisfied to know my place in the world. I did not see the birds and the whales and the big trees; from an altitude above Earth, they did not appear a concern. On second thought, when I looked again, the planet was richer, far richer than when peopled alone by creatures like myself. I can belong to the sea, the air, and the forest. That was the closest epiphany revealed to me. There is one Earth in the universe, and I call it home.
–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—
Bibliography
Adler, Mortimer J. 1992. The Great Ideas. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.
Callicott, J. Baird. 1993. The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic. In Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence. Edited by Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G. Botzler. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc. 387-397.
Dashefsky, H. Steven. 1993. Environmental Literacy: Everything You Need to Know About Saving Our Planet. New York: Random House.
Dawkins, Richard. 1995. God's Utility Function. Scientific American. November 1995: 80-85.
Erwin, Douglas H. 1996. The Mother of Mass Extinctions. Scientific American. July 1996: 72-78.
Marietta, Don E. 1995. For People and the Planet: Holism and Humanism in Environmental Ethics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Regan, Tom. 1993. The Case for Animal Rights. In Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence. Edited by Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G. Botzler. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc. 321-328.
Rolston, Holmes, III. 1995. Duties to Endangered Species. In Earth Ethics: Environmental Ethics, Animal Rights, and Practical Applications. Edited by James P. Sterba. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 317-328.
Sorabji, Richard. 1993. Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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November 20th, 1996
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Species and Individuals
IN THIS essay, I will examine the problem of individuals and species. This problem is particularly a moral problem in environmental ethics, where "[i]n the modern debate, the question has arisen whether we should not be concerned with species, at the expense of individuals" [Sorabji, p. 166]. The general form of the problem, that of ‘one and many,’ is present in areas other than environmental ethics, for example, in politics and in theology. In these two areas, the solution to the problem has been political doctrine (ideology) and church dogma (teachings). In environmental ethics, several insights from proponents of animal liberation and endangered species protection have been critical to the appreciation of this problem. But, no hard [ideological] lines appear to have been drawn by force of arguments. However, the arguments tended to circumambulate around the two opposite attractors. Individuals and species are concepts that require more rigorous examination within this problem's particular form. My objective is to subject this form to philosophical analysis and probably intuit the morally relevant view of the moral opposition which the problem presents.
Two very sticky situations illustrate the state of the current debate. One, "[s]hould endangered species be protected, even though this almost always disadvantages individual members of a more plentiful one?" Two, "[i]s the factory farming of animals justified because it keeps the species in being, however much it harms the individuals?" [p. 166].
These ethical problems hold water today because the necessary and sufficient conditions are present in the current environmental context. That ecological or scientific information points to certain facts about the world, and that these facts reveal the skewed causal relationship of human individuals or of human societies with the rest of the planet, probably give these problems more urgency, but these pointers and facts probably can not give answers to the ethical problems involved. A merely scientific solution will go the way of changing the conditions behind the facts by intervening in behalf of endangered species, for example. Once the conditions have been set right and new ecological information points to the fact that the species is no longer at risk, from the scientific point of view the ecological problem has been solved. But is the ethical problem also solved? Does the ethical dimension disappear along with the antecedent conditions? I will hazard the position that scientific facts do not matter in this debate because the meaning of the problem is not located in the determination of conditions of fact, but rather it is to be found in the definition of relationships which hold between the two constructs individuals and species.
Of these two terms, species is the simpler construct. It refers to a category of biological classification ranking just below the genus or subgenus and comprising closely related organisms potentially able to breed with one another. This definition might someday break at the seams when reproductive technology would have overtaken natural selection as a means to species differentiation, by forcing the emergence of new genotypes by mixing soups of genes from unrelated surviving or extinct species. This undoubtedly must raise new ethical questions. For purposes of this essay, I limit the term to existing species whether presently surviving or previously extinct. Future species, because they do not yet exist and would not exist if the biological lineage is broken, should not be encompassed by the definition since the potential for reproduction is nil. It should also be clear that any one member of any species which has lost reproductive capacity does not render the entire population at risk of extinction, unless that one member was the sole female or male, or other reproductive receptacle, of the species. A distinction should also be made between reproducing which involves the biological process between individual organisms or by unicellular organisms, and breeding which involves a more contrived or more accidental relationship between at least two closely related organisms. It should help to remember too that both plants and animals are classified according to species, and so are bacteria and retroviruses which exhibit unique reproductive adaptations.
The term individuals, on the other hand, refers to some intuitive category of human understanding which a metaphysics of primitive concepts would be hard-pressed to define. It is a negative concept taken from a naturally occurring plenitude of things to refer to several definite or indefinite parts thereof, as useful intuitive abstractions for speaking about the world. A critical exposition of this notion reads as follows:
A substance is individual not because it is absolutely indivisible. . . . Its individuality rather consists, first, in its being divided from other substances in such a way that it can perish without necessarily destroying them, or they can perish without destroying it; and, second, in the fact that, though divisible into parts, it is one whole when these parts remain undivided. Yet as one substance it has more unity than a mere collection of things [Adler, p. 589].
This particular definition denotes individuals as ‘windowless,’ as having no particular view of its relation to the plurality of individuals whereof it bears some sameness. Perhaps we should question if the term individuals in the critical sense given is not an impossible notion to give to biological organisms, who it is not uncritical to say are totalities of relationships and connections, and are reciprocals in a so-called ‘great chain of being.’ What does it mean to be individual and to be alive? What does it mean to perish like individuals?
This analysis is considered inadequate for animal liberation philosophy. Consequently, the impetus for this philosophy derives from the principle of equality of rights, which reside in individuals, their proper loci, and not in any arbitrary or non-arbitrary grouping of individuals that may be said to manifest a unity. The question arises whether or not this thinking is to be taken absolutely; for if not, its demanding logic should fail entirely.
However, I do not believe that animal rights arguments were presented as arguments for individual animals per se, but for the class of individual animals as a "morally considerable" whole. The individual rights view [Regan], however, invites criticism for its criterion of decidability for lacking sufficient consistency and for incompleteness. This view, I think, should suggest absolute equality of rights rather than equality of absolute rights. Because no more than one absolute right can co-exist, the rights of individuals (i.e., of many individuals) can not therefore be absolutes. If the rights of individuals were absolute, then this right becomes the single most compelling danger to the existence of all life. An antinomy seems to derive from this.
Animal rights arguments clearly address the issue of the current hegemony of one species of the genus Homo over most other species. Though not significantly more populous than species of clams or gnats or worms, for example, the current hegemon nonetheless possesses a blind destructive power that it can as well pull on itself as on anybody else greater or less than itself. Beneficent or responsible stewardship which ought to inform this blindness is rejected in the current debate since it appears to privilege the interests of the dominant moralising species over those of the rest that do not exercise the sufficient moral clout. The ideological standpoint seems to be to axiomatize the necessary inherence of rights in (animal) individuals in order to collapse the (fascist) articulation of moral indifference towards these perishable individuals.
The skeptical argument that a fact does not imply another fact holds true for the notion of individuals. Why should individuals exist? I mean to ask this question as a moral question. Some authors are rather quicker to answer the question Why should species exist?, and I believe it is the simpler question. At least two morally relevant reasons have been given: the principle of plenitude [Sorabji, p. 200], and that of the irreplaceability of the broken form [Rolston, pp. 323-325]. The principle of plenitude---"the realisation of as many different species as was possible"--- is formulated in Maimonides (AD 1135-1204, [Guide for the Perplexed 3.25]). In this representation, the principle is attributed to God who created "a universe organized for the preservation only of species." However, it was believed that God's providence extended to "individual humans, but only to species of animals" [p. 166]. In the modern view, the diversity and complexity of the "biotic community" [Callicott] logically derive from this plenitude.
The second view grounds the analyticity of arguments from the dichotomy of forms and their instantiations on the ontological necessity of the continuation of instantiations to preserve their forms. One contemporary proponent of endangered species protection, Holmes Rolston III, argues that "[t]he individual is a receptacle of the form, and the receptacles are broken while the form survives; but the form cannot otherwise survive" [Rolston, p. 324] The moral dimension to this argument seems to be in answer to the philosophical milieu in environmental ethics which has protracted a problematic extensionism and an extended individualism in the current debate. "An ethic about species," Rolston realizes, "needs to see how the species is a bigger event than individual interests or sentience. Making this clearer can support the conviction that a species ought to continue" [p. 323]. Implicit in the argumentation, I believe, is the tacit appreciation that moralising agents are not possessed of creative agency or restitutive causality. The background principle seems to be that ‘what one can not create, one can not destroy.’ I think this thought can be found in Aristotle (384-322 BC). In other words, it may be perfectly justifiable to destroy a bridge or piece of paper, but not a river or a forest, and absolutely senseless to create something like a triangle or destroy it. This observation should apply to both individual organisms and species of organisms. In Rolston's view, however, species takes precedence because "[n]o individual crosses the extinction threshold; the species does" [p. 324].
The problem of species extinction is not necessarily mired in what I call problems of ‘hijacked individuals.’ Catastrophic events like the end-Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago [Erwin, pp. 72-78] are but a result of ecologically destabilising geological events and of a surfeit of species otherwise fit to survive in meta-stable environments. But maybe not if the Gaia hypothesis is to be believed, since ex hypothesi "any single species threatening the survival of life in general on the planet would naturally be forced into extinction" [Dashefsky, p. 105]. This easily introduces the problem of ‘hijacked species,’ and particularly nullifies the principle of plenitude and that of species’ reason for being (raison d’être) examined earlier. At the moment, I bracket these issues to proceed. A similar view, the Selfish Gene hypothesis, attempts to draw the justification for the existence of individuals and species not from the point of view of their inherent right to exist, but from the perspective of a life as nothing more than a "utility function" for the single purpose of "survival of DNA" [Dawkins, pp. 80-85]. This thinking seems absolutely nihilist about the commonly held meaning, purpose, and value of life.
Questions arise concerning these two hypotheses which I will not discuss here. The reader is, of course, aware that the question of hijacked individuals is an altogether different matter. Thus far, our analysis points in the direction of species having the stronger justification for survival than perishable individuals. Is this correct? This direction is objected to by some authors as dangerous in its implications to humanistic ethics. One view [Marietta, pp. 49-68] indicates such dangers need not be so. This notwithstanding, I think problems of hijacked individuals can be spoken of in strictly non-humanistic terms.
I distinguish problems of hijacked individuals from those which arise out of the ideological grip of an individualism's monolithic pose. This latter posture is premised on the ideology of freedom and autonomy that plays out in the conflict between the state and the individual, and on how this conflict should be arbitrated in the interest of the individual. In contrast, the challenge of the former is quite different. However, there is some confusion here. Distinguish, for example, between protecting endangered species of fowl from preserving collapsing slave societies, or between culturing poultry for food from raising child prostitutes for sex. Such refrains are heard often enough in the debate, but it is not always understood that the first points in each case involve problems of hijacked individuals whereas the second ones do not. Further, the arguments that it is not justified to mass produce animals for food since it is not justified to bear children for trade in sex, and that there is no moral obligation to keep an ugly species in being because the collapse of something ugly like slavery is morally good, may prove rhetorically effective, but I think this is not how philosophical discourse operates. We need to differentiate.
Problems of hijacked individuals concern how one individual's existence is bound to the existence of another closely related or completely unrelated individual or groups thereof, or, to be precise, to the existence of its own species or some other to which it may be ecologically linked. In my analysis, the difficulties issue from two incongruous positions: extensionism and individualism. Extensionism and individualism put together is a strange mix, simply because an ‘expanding circle’ of moral considerability, within which compass moral duty can take its meaning, must have a centre, and its centre can not be everywhere singular on the circle. Shifting centres reduce the radius at one point and extend it at the other. The extensionist policy towards all sentient beings, or to those with interests, may logically imply a reductionism on the level of individuals, but maybe not on the level of an individualism. Here, extensionism is the morally relevant position, but individualism tests the consistency of that position. If, however, the test is resolved against individuals, whereof there are plenty, problems of hijacked individuals may chance in the debate.
Maybe the relevant question to ask is whether or not a moral action should be taken for the sake of something else, some ‘bigger event,’ rather than against individuals. This view is often justified in the context of an ecoholism. On the contrary, however, I do not see how the continued existence of species is a bigger event in this context to justify the factory farming of animals. Counterfactual arguments that an individual would not otherwise be in being if not for the intervention of a farming milieu invite the individualist retort "I did not ask to be born a veal calf." Animal rights arguments that ‘subjects-of-a-life’ should not at all be treated as resources take the other extreme view. So, how close are we to a rational moral vision?
Because moral duty responds to the moral good, and moral good is immanent from moral purpose, moral duty must respond to a unity of moral purpose, else it will possibly collapse from the welter of speculation about the moral good. I tend to view problems of hijacked individuals in terms of divisions in our moral thinking. It is uncritical to take for granted that what is plenty (sand, for example) should count for less as individuals, and what is rare (diamonds, maybe) should count for more. Perhaps our economic mindset fails to discriminate property and contracts from relationships and community; I am not sure. The house is divided. In the end, I ask, What is the moral good of individuals and that of species? How do moralising agents weigh the life of one individual with the survival of its community? Is the individual perishable? When do moralising agents decide against the individual?
I conclude with difficult questions. My analysis re-defined the problem of species and individuals in its conceptual form and recognized the error of drawing the rhetorical analogy between humanism and environmental ethics. Specifically, I introduced the notion of ‘problems of hijacked individuals’ as the really fuzzy point in the debate. Did I take a stand? No. I looked at a satellite picture of planet Earth and I saw only people, searched for my little spot and was satisfied to know my place in the world. I did not see the birds and the whales and the big trees; from an altitude above Earth, they did not appear a concern. On second thought, when I looked again, the planet was richer, far richer than when peopled alone by creatures like myself. I can belong to the sea, the air, and the forest. That was the closest epiphany revealed to me. There is one Earth in the universe, and I call it home.
–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–—
Bibliography
Adler, Mortimer J. 1992. The Great Ideas. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.
Callicott, J. Baird. 1993. The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic. In Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence. Edited by Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G. Botzler. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc. 387-397.
Dashefsky, H. Steven. 1993. Environmental Literacy: Everything You Need to Know About Saving Our Planet. New York: Random House.
Dawkins, Richard. 1995. God's Utility Function. Scientific American. November 1995: 80-85.
Erwin, Douglas H. 1996. The Mother of Mass Extinctions. Scientific American. July 1996: 72-78.
Marietta, Don E. 1995. For People and the Planet: Holism and Humanism in Environmental Ethics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Regan, Tom. 1993. The Case for Animal Rights. In Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence. Edited by Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G. Botzler. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc. 321-328.
Rolston, Holmes, III. 1995. Duties to Endangered Species. In Earth Ethics: Environmental Ethics, Animal Rights, and Practical Applications. Edited by James P. Sterba. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 317-328.
Sorabji, Richard. 1993. Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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November 20th, 1996
posted by Luctor et Emergo at 9:38 PM
1 comments
