Ecological Objects for Environmental Ethics

e emergence of theoretical ecology during the twentieth century advanced our understanding of what kinds of things might exist in our world. In particular, it suggested that objects like “ecological communities” and “ecosystems” might exist. In developing those ideas, ecology offered a new set of things we might care about or care for, and that development has both stimulated and challenged environmental ethics. Here, I consider how ecological objects like these may serve as objects of moral concern, and what questions about them deserve further investigation. Questions about what kinds of things in the world one might be morally concerned about are relatively new. e dominant ethical traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were those broadly in the tradition of Immanuel Kant and forms of utilitarianism, in particular as developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Kantians argued that we ought to respect and protect “rational agency” (being capable of willing rationally about what to do). So, the question of whether a thing deserved our moral concern was determined by the empirical question of whether it possessed rational agency. For utilitarians like John Stuart Mill, happiness stood out as that which is good in itself, and the question of what we ought to care for could again be settled by answering an empirical question, the question of what things are capable of experiencing happiness. While Kantians assumed that only human beings were capable of rational agency, utilitarians, most conspicuously Jeremy Bentham, accepted that some animals could suffer and feel happiness, and that we should take this into account when making moral decisions. Recent scientific work in cognitive science and ethology, in particular, has confirmed Bentham’s view that some non-human animals experience pleasure or happiness, and even that they are capable of reasoning, is has led to more widespread acceptance of the idea that individual sentient animals are objects of moral concern, whether they are human or non-human. If these beings are the focus of moral concern, however, other things such as habitats are of interest just because of their relationship to valuable animals. is can certainly ground a kind of environmental ethic: one focused around protecting the environment to benefit individual sentient organisms. However, this view differs from more traditional, anthropocentric ethics only in what things it understands as meeting its criteria for valuation.