Environmental Values

by O'Neill; John

• ISBN13: 9780415145084
• ISBN10: 0415145082
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-10
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

We live in a world confronted by mounting environmental problems. We read of increasing global deforestation and desertification, loss of species diversity, pollution and global warming. In everyday life people mourn the loss of valued landscapes and urban spaces. Underlying these problems are conflicting priorities and values. Yet dominant approaches to policy making seem ill-equipped to capture the various ways in which the environment matters to us. Environmental Values introduces readers to these issues by presenting, and then challenging, two dominant approaches to environmental decision-making, one from environmental economics, the other from environmental philosophy. The authors present a sustained case for questioning the underlying ethical theories of both of these traditions. They defend a pluralistic alternative rooted in the rich everyday relations of humans to the environments they inhabit, providing a path for integrating human needs with environmental protectionthrough an understanding of the narrative and history of particular places. The book examines the implications of this approach for policy issues such as biodiversity conservation and sustainability. The book is written in a clear and accessible style for an interdisciplinary audience. It will be ideal for student use in environmental courses in geography, economics, philosophy, politics and sociology. It will also be of wider interest to policy makers and the concerned general reader.

Author Biography

John O'Neill is Professor of Political Economy at The University of Manchester Alan Holland is Emeritus Professor of Applied Philosophy at Lancaster University Andrew Light is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of Washington, Seattle

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. viii
Aknowledgements	p. ix
Values and the environment	p. 1
Environments and values	p. 1
Living from the world	p. 1
Living in the world	p. 2
Living with the world	p. 3
Addressing value conflicts	p. 4
Value conflicts	p. 4
The distribution of goods and harms	p. 5
Addressing conflicts	p. 5
Utilitarian approaches to environmental decision making	p. 11
Human well-being and the natural world	p. 13
Introduction	p. 13
Welfare: hedonism, preferences and objective lists	p. 15
The hedonistic account of well-being	p. 15
Bentham and the felicific calculus	p. 15
John Stuart Mill	p. 16
Preference utilitarianism	p. 21
Objectivist accounts of welfare	p. 24
Whose well-being counts?	p. 26
Making comparisons: utilitarianism, economics and efficiency	p. 27
Consequentialism and its critics	p. 31
Introduction	p. 31
Consequentialism permits too much	p. 32
What is the problem with consequentialism? The moral standing of individuals	p. 33
Rights, conflicts and community	p. 36
Consequentialism demands too much	p. 39
What is the problem with consequentialism? Agent-based restrictions on action	p. 40
Virtues and environmental concern	p. 41
Consequentialist responses	p. 43
Indirect utilitarianism	p. 44
Extend the account of the good	p. 46
Ethical pluralism and the limits of theory	p. 47
Equality, justice and environment	p. 49
Utilitarianism and distribution	p. 50
Equality in moral standing	p. 52
Indirect utilitarian arguments for distributive equality	p. 53
Economics, efficiency and equality	p. 54
Willingness to pay	p. 55
The Kaldor-Hicks compensation test	p. 56
Discounting the future	p. 57
Egalitarian ethics	p. 58
Consequentialism without maximisation	p. 59
The priority view	p. 59
Telic egalitarianism	p. 60
Deontological responses	p. 62
Community, character and equality	p. 64
Equality of what?	p. 67
Value pluralism, value commensurability and environmental choice	p. 70
Value monism	p. 72
Value pluralism	p. 74
Trading-off values	p. 75
Constitutive incommensurabilities	p. 77
Value pluralism, consequentialism, and the alternatives	p. 79
Structural pluralism	p. 81
Choice without commensurability	p. 83
What can we expect from a theory of rational choice?	p. 85
A new environmental ethic?	p. 89
The moral considerability of the non-human world	p. 91
New ethics for old?	p. 91
Moral considerability	p. 93
Extending the boundaries of moral considerability	p. 98
New theories for old?	p. 108
Environment, meta-ethics and intrinsic value	p. 112
Meta-ethics and normative ethics	p. 113
Intrinsic value	p. 114
Is the rejection of meta-ethical realism compatible with an environmental ethic?	p. 116
Objective value and the flourishing of living things	p. 119
Environmental ethics through thick and thin	p. 121
Nature and the natural	p. 125
Valuing the 'natural'	p. 125
The complexity of 'nature'	p. 126
Some distinctions	p. 126
Natural and artificial	p. 128
Natural and cultural	p. 131
Nature as wilderness	p. 132
The value of natural things	p. 134
Nature conservation	p. 138
A paradox?	p. 139
On restoring the value of nature	p. 141
Restitutive ecology	p. 146
History, narrative and environmental goods	p. 148
The narratives of nature	p. 151
Nature and narrative	p. 153
Three walks	p. 154
History and processes as sources of value	p. 155
Going back to nature?	p. 158
Old worlds and new	p. 162
Narrative and nature	p. 163
Biodiversity: biology as biography	p. 165
The itemising approach to environmental values	p. 167
The nature of biodiversity - conceptual clarifications	p. 167
The attractions of itemisation	p. 170
Biodiversity and environmental sustainability	p. 173
Time, history and biodiversity	p. 175
The dangers of moral trumps	p. 179
Sustainability and human well-being	p. 183
Sustainability: of what, for whom and why?	p. 183
Economic accounts of sustainability	p. 185
Sustainability: weak and strong	p. 186
Human well-being and subsistutability	p. 189
From preferences to needs	p. 193
Narrative, human well-being and sustainability	p. 196
Sustainability without capital	p. 200
Public decisions and environmental goods	p. 202
Procedural rationality and deliberative institutions	p. 203
Decisions in context	p. 206
Responsibility and character	p. 212
What makes for good decisions?	p. 215
Bibliography	p. 217
Index	p. 225
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