The Intrinsic Value of Endangered Species

Ian A. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317605966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

Why save endangered species without clear aesthetic, economic, or ecosystemic value? This book takes on this challenging question through an account of the intrinsic goods of species. Ian A. Smith argues that a species' intrinsic value stems from its ability to flourish—its organisms continuing to reproduce successfully and it avoiding extinction—which helps to demonstrate a further claim, that humans ought to preserve species that we have endangered. He shows our need to exercise humility in our relations with endangered species through the preservation of their intrinsic goods, which in turn rectifies our degradation of their importance. Unique in its appeal to virtue ethics and to species concepts, The Intrinsic Value of Endangered Species is an important resource for scholars working in environmental ethics and the philosophy of biology.

1 Introduction

The Humpback Chub

In the western United States, environmental groups like the Glen Canyon Institute have worked tirelessly to save several species of endangered fish endemic to the Colorado River, including the humpback chub (Gila cypha). Many people, curious as to why these environmentalists would want to save such species as the humpback chub, ask, “What good is it, anyway?” These critics are asking the environmentalists what instrumental value the humpback chub has, that is, what value it has as a resource, as a tool, or as a means to an end of some other being. The humpback chub does not seem to have any significant instrumental value, but environmentalists have championed the cause of its preservation nonetheless.

When asked the question, “What good is it, anyway?” the environmentalist could turn the question around on the questioner and ask, “What good are you, anyway?”¹ The questioner, of course, would regard this question as inappropriate. People see themselves as being valuable not only in an instrumental way but also in an intrinsic way. That is, even though people see themselves as being valuable in various ways to family, friends, and business colleagues, they view themselves as having value that exceeds and is independent of their value as resources for other people’s objectives. People, in short, see themselves as possessing something that is valuable in and of itself, a value that is not for the sake or objective of anyone or anything else.

With the question, “What good are you, anyway?” environmentalists could try to show people that asking whether something has just instrumental value misses something, namely that the entity in question might also have intrinsic or inherent value. Understanding this, people might then ask environmentalists the question, “Does the humpback chub have intrinsic value?”

If the humpback chub has intrinsic value (or equivalently, intrinsic goods), then having this value could help to show that the chub should be preserved. Indeed, if the humpback chub has no instrumental value, then appealing to another kind of value such as intrinsic value is needed to show that it should be preserved.

In this book, I develop a rationale for species preservation that does not appeal to instrumental value. I begin the book and this chapter with preliminaries, including arguing that the humpback chub has no significant instrumental value or goods. I then draw on and move beyond the work of John O’Neill to argue that all currently existing (sexual) species have their own goods, or intrinsic goods (O’Neill 1992).^2,3 I argue that a species’ intrinsic goods consist in its abilities to flourish.

From the account of species’ intrinsic goods, it is a further step to the preservationist claim that humans ought to preserve species. As I discuss in a later section of this introductory chapter, the recognition of a species having intrinsic goods is not by itself a sufficient reason for preserving that species.

1.1 Intrinsic Value

Before continuing, it is important to be very clear about how the notion of intrinsicality will be defined in this book, that is, the notion of the ‘intrinsic’ part of ‘intrinsic value’. This is because the ways in which the term ‘intrinsic value’ is used are diverse throughout the literature, whether in the environmental ethics literature or in the broader philosophical literature.

O’Neill (1992) recounts that the term ‘intrinsic value’ has been used in three ways. First, it has been used as a synonym for ‘noninstrumental value’, as in meaning the value something has as an end as opposed to a means to an end (where something having value as a means to an end refers to that entity’s instrumental value). Second, it can mean the value an object has solely in virtue of its intrinsic properties, as opposed to its relational properties (Moore 1922). In other words, we might say that if nothing else in the world existed except for some intrinsically valuable thing, then it would be clear that this thing would have such value not on the basis of its relation to anything else but only in virtue of its own features. And third, it has been used as a synonym for ‘objective value’. In other words, we might say that an object that has value in this sense has this value independently of those humans who may come to value the object. So, even if no humans ever existed who had the potential of valuing the object, the object would still have intrinsic value anyway. The mantra for this view is ‘value without (human) valuers’.⁴

Katie McShane (2007) draws a distinction between two ways that the term can be used with respect to the first sense. When someone says that something has value as a means to an end, this can refer to the value something has in being useful to serve some purpose or goal, where the purpose or goal is the end. For example, we might say that the yew tree, in providing a natural resource for the breast cancer drug tamoxifen, is useful to serve the purpose of breast cancer remediation. An end can be understood in another way as well. In this other way, “end is used to describe something that has value in its own right (nonderivative value), and means is used to describe something that has value in virtue of a relation it has to some end (derivative value)” (McShane 2007). In other words, when we say that something has nonderivative value, we do not ask what that thing is valuable for; rather, we say that it is valuable in and of itself, period. For an example in moral philosophy more generally, we might say that promise-keeping is not valuable for anything; rather, promise-keeping is valuable in and of itself, period. For another example germane to our discussion of species’ intrinsic value, it is this sense in which the environmentalists who wish to preserve the humpback chub might say that the humpback chub has intrinsic value. In this book, I use ‘intrinsic value’ as a synonym for ‘nonderivative value’, as I use it in this sense in my account of species’ intrinsic value and as the authors who offer competing accounts of species’ intrinsic value also use it in this way. (Some authors, like Holmes Rolston, use this term in more than one sense, but they all use it in at least this sense.)

1.2 Are Species Real?

The introduction of any book on species should address the question of whether species are real, as there has been (sometimes-misguided) debate about this issue. The consensus among biologists is that species are real—that is, that species taxa such as Gila cypha, Homo sapiens, and Panthera tigris (the tiger species) exist.⁵ (The plural, ‘taxa’ are groups in a biological classification [or system], whereas the singular, a ‘taxon’ is one grouping within that classification [or system].)⁶ According to Lennart Andersson, “The literature on species concepts is vast, dispersed, and varied. The only thing generally agreed on is that…species are real and not mere artifacts created by the minds of observers” (1990, 375). For another example demonstrating the widespread advocacy of this view, Joel Cracraft agrees that the assumption of most evolutionists and systematists (those who study the science of biological classification or systemization) is that species are real entities (2000, 6). And John Wilkins, philosopher of biology, recognizes “…that individual species are real seems to me to be the default view [among biologists]…” (2003, 626).

This book will assume that species taxa are real; in fact, if the book did not recognize that species were real, there would be nowhere for it to go! It would be nonsensical to say that a species had intrinsic value and yet acknowledge that the species was merely an artifact created in human minds. In other words, how could a species be valuable in and of itself and yet that species not exist?

That species are real is a distinct claim from the statement that sub-species (or ‘varieties’) are real. E. O. Wilson, in his engaging memoir Naturalist, both gives an argument for why sub-species are not real and also discusses the state of sub-species in the systematic biology literature. In the early 1950s, Wilson collaborated with William Brown to write an article recommending that sub-species not be given formal names, owing to them not being real (Wilson and Brown 1953). Usually sub-species are demarcated by possession of varying traits, as in one sub-species of butterfly having an extra band on its hind wing versus another sub-species not having that extra band. What Wilson and Brown discovered was that the geographic limits of sub-species were difficult or impossible to objectively draw because the “traits used to define them vary in a discordant pattern” (Wilson 1994, 207). We can understand this discordance with a hypothetical example involving the aforementioned butterflies. As we view the geographic range of the butterfly species from east to west, we notice that the color changes; as we view the range from north to south, we notice that the size decreases; and as we view the populations of the butterfly near the center of its range, we notice that an extra band near the hind wing emerges. The demarcation of each of the sub-species that make up the species will depend upon the traits chosen to define them. If the taxonomist picks color, then there are two east-west sub-species. If the taxonomist picks color plus size, then four species in a quadrant emerges. If the taxonomist adds the hind-wing band, the number of sub-species double again. The point here is that the delimitation of the sub-species by the taxonomist on the basis of trait differentiation is arbitrary, and so sub-species are not real. Now, this is not to say that the differing characteristics among the different populations of the butterfly species are not biologically relevant or interesting; rather, it is to say that appealing to them does not carve out real sub-species among the species.

When Wilson and Brown published their work, systematic biologists of the time were up in arms about Wilson’s and Brown’s claimed results. But the steaming controversy largely ended several years later (Wilson 1994, 208) and so the view of systematists had largely shifted to the side of Wilson and Brown in conceding that sub-species are not real. In other words, sub-species are, for the most part, “mere artifacts created by the minds of observers [read ‘taxonomists’ here].” Accordingly, claims about preserving sub-species will not be treated in this book, as if it is true that they are mere artifacts created in our minds, then arguments concerning their preservation based on their supposed reality will not be compelling. Now, this is not to say that wholly human-centered reasons could not be put forward in an attempt to justify preserving a portion of a species. We might want a certain sub-species, like Panthera tigris tigris (the Bengal tiger), to be preserved based upon the pleasure that the beauty of viewing Bengal tigers provides for us, for example. But we must be clear that any attempt to justify preserving sub-species cannot rely on the claim that sub-species are real.

1.3 Moving from a Description of Species to the Preservation of Species

An important theme in this book is the question of how best to describe species. After all, in order to determine what species’ intrinsic value is, we ought to know what they are first. Once species have been correctly described, then we need to know how to make the inferential move (or give the argument) from this descriptive claim to the statement about what we humans ought to do concerning species, that is, to a normative claim concerning species preservation. The ‘is to ought’ inferential move (or descriptive to normative move) actually involves two inferences, the ‘is to good’ (or ‘is to value’) move and the ‘good to ought’ (or ‘value to ought’) move. (Or in other words, it involves the descriptive to evaluative inference and the evaluative to normative inference.) As John Nolt made clear, these moves are valid if (and only if) they follow a valid argument form, of which the following is valid:

All F has good (or value) G (is to good),

We ought to V whatever has G (good to ought),

[Therefore] We ought to V whatever has F (is to ought),

where F is some attribute that defines a class of natural entities, G is a good or value, and the variable V is to be replaced by a transitive verb specifying a moral attitude or action (e.g., “protect,” “promote,” “respect,” “consider the consequences of our actions for”). (2009, 136)⁷

With respect to the ‘good to ought’ move, it would be helpful to understand why this is (typically) viewed as a separate inferential step. Suppose we thought that individual biological organisms had intrinsic value on the basis of their capacity to flourish as the kind of thing that they are.⁸ For example, we might say that an individual greenfly in someone’s garden has intrinsic value on the basis of its flourishing as the type of thing it is. However, the gardener can consistently affirm that the individual greenfly has intrinsic value and yet deny that its intrinsic value should be preserved. In fact, she would claim that she has perfectly good reasons for not preserving its intrinsic value; in fact, she might say that she should be able to eradicate the greenfly, because it is a pest in her garden. Hence, if we thought that individual biological organisms had intrinsic value on the basis of their capacity to flourish as the kind of thing that they are, then it would not automatically follow that she should preserve that value.

One may provide an account of an entity’s intrinsic value whereby it did follow, ceteris paribus, that this value should be preserved. One of the accounts I discuss is committed to this inference (Johnson 1991), as this account equates intrinsic value with moral status. However, what has been shown here is that according to at least one view of an entity’s intrinsic value, it does not follow that we should promote that value. That a commitment to preservation does not follow from a recognition of intrinsic value alone is the motivation to provide both an account of species’ intrinsic value and an account of why endangered species should have their intrinsic value preserved. This is precisely what I do, and at the end of this chapter, an outline will be given of the remaining chapters in the book, including an outline of Chapter 7. In that chapter, I provide an account of why endangered species that we have caused to be endangered should have their intrinsic value preserved.

1.4 Species’ Intrinsic Goods and the Need to Move beyond Instrumental Goods

Another preliminary that needs to be discussed is making clear that arguing for the view that a species has intrinsic value is a distinct (although possibly related) matter from identifying the intrinsic value of the organisms that belong to the species. Why does this matter, though? There are two reasons. First, if the intrinsic value of a species were not distinct from the intrinsic value of the organisms that belonged to the species, then the intrinsic value of the species would simply reduce to the intrinsic value of its organisms. If this is right, then we should just bypass the question of whether species have intrinsic value and ask whether biological organisms have such value. However, if we bypass the central question, then an examination into the intrinsic value of species is a moot point.

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