Philosophy and the environment
of justice (such as most western societies north of the Brent line are), we can begin to discern the best philosophy to govern our actions and produce the most desirable results.
Firstly, deontology at first examination proved to be a good contender for a philosophical system of choice, as it allows us to justify respect for living beings such as non-human animals while condemning small acts of extreme barbarism such as vivisection, which a utilitarian would condone. Tom Regan argues that we should govern our actions by assessing whether they are fundamentally ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ rather than the consequences they will have to the gr and calculation of utility. He argues that natural sentient beings should be afforded individual respect just like we would for humans on the basis of universal conceptions of right and wrong (e.g. it is wrong to confine someone against their will if there is no good reason for it). He argues that, no matter how great the utilitarian calculation is, some actions are just not acceptable. However, bearing in mind that the environment is everything around us rather than just non-human animals or forests, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern what is right or wrong universally; is essentially becomes a conflict of interest. Let us explore this further by way of example: it could be very easy to argue that keeping an elephant captive in a circus is universally wrong as it deprives it of its liberty, causes physical and emotional suffering and so on. The utilitarian objection in this case could also be defeated by appealing to basic morality, that is, by suggesting that, no matter how much the audience enjoyed it, how big the audience was and even if the elephant enjoyed it too, it is still deontologically wrong as were we to be put in this situation, we would not want to be treated that way. However, we should consider context when debating the rightness or wrongness of an action. For instance, were there to be a debate about whether to demolish a brutalist piece of architecture or a Victorian piece of architecture (which are both established as pieces of the environment), all other things such as what was to be done with the land being equal, the rightness or wrongness would be a matter of value assigned to each of the buildings by each different individual, making deontological reasoning become very impractical without an agreement on the virtues by which it is governed and therefore what value is assigned. So, bearing in mind that deontological thought can be a useful starting point in governing human action on some environmental issues, let us examine the framework of virtues which could inform our perception of right and wrong and therefore make deontology much more usable. We often assign value to different parts of the natural environment based on the consequentialist reasoning of ‘it provides us x so therefore it ought to be valued at y’. Utilitarianism was often used to defend this by stating that the benefits that humanity would gain are proportional to the value assigned to the object. However, Peter Singer laid out the case for animal liberation also on a utilitarian basis. He argued that animals have moral standing in that they feel pain and thus when assigning value to something we ought not to be ‘speciesist’ and consider the benefit to non -human elements of the natural world. Although Singer’s argument was primarily targeted at sentient beings who gained their moral standing on the basis of feeling pain, this argument could be extended to cover the value of other non-sentient parts of our environment based on them being ‘subjects of life’ and therefore having moral standing. This could be construed in several different ways. One argument is that a part of the environment has value on the basis of it having value to other members, whether it be trees which are valuable to non- human animals such as squirrels as shelter or indeed man-made buildings which are valuable based on their history, emotional significance or simply because they act as shelter to inhabitants. The strengths of this argument are that is relevant to all parts of the environment and allows us to acknowledge that
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