Applied Philosophy

Morals and Metaphysics in Contemporary Debate

Brenda Almond, Donald Hill, Brenda Almond, Donald Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000041422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In bringing the concepts and methods of philosophy to bear on specific, pressing, practical concerns, applied philosophy is the modern expression of a perennial concern: to understand, in part to control, and to come to terms with the conditions in which human life is to be lived. Originally published in 1991 and written by distinguished philosophers and academics from Europe, the USA and Australia, the essays collected in this volume examine subjects of continued concern and debate, such as the environment, personal relationships, terrorism and medicine. The contributions were originally published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

Part I

The Environment

1

Moral Reasoning about the Environment

R. M. HARE

ABSTRACT This paper deals in the main with the problem of delimiting the classes of beings to which we have moral duties when making environmental decisions, and of how to balance their interests fairly. The relation between having interests, having desires and having value (intrinsic or other) is discussed, and a distinction made between entities which can themselves value and those which can have value. Its conclusion is that duties are owed directly to, and only to, sentient beings, and that these duties can be ascertained by weighing their interests impartially strength for strength. It ends with some suggestions about procedures for doing this. Examples are taken from proposals to develop a beach commercially, and to construct a new road in an environmentally sensitive area [1].

I

Though philosophers can make a modest but useful contribution to environmental problems, it is important to be clear what this contribution is. Philosophers are above all students of arguments (how to tell the good from the bad ones); and they have their own techniques for achieving this, all part of logic in a wide sense. They ought to be able to sort arguments out with more expertise than many of them manage. And non-philosophers who address this essentially philosophical task often, in their innocence, simply fail to notice on what thin logical ice they are skating; and no amount of enthusiasm or commitment will make up for the blunders they then commit. What we need is some account of the way in which one should reason about environmental issues, and the principles that such reasoning leads to. It might go on to suggest political and administrative procedures to make the public argument run clear. Both conservationists and their opponents ought to be trying to make their arguments hold water. Unless they can do this, how can they expect reasonable people, who do not want just to listen to a lot of rhetoric, to be convinced by them?

I shall not be able in this paper to complete such an account, but I will discuss just two or three very crucial questions with which it would have to deal. First, since environmental planning is a way of adjudicating conflicts between various interests, we need a careful delimitation of the interests that have to be considered: and then we need to ask by what method of moral thinking the adjudication should be done. Since it iś moral reasoning that we are discussing, we need consider only those interests which can generate moral duties and rights. I shall call these ‘morally relevant interests’, and sometimes in what follows abbreviate this to ‘interests’. As we shall see later, there may be some kinds of entities (trees and bicycles for example) which have interests of a sort, or in a sense, that is not morally relevant. This complication I will ignore for the present.

In the literature a lot of things are credited with interests, and the first task should be to decide which of these things actually have morally relevant interests. Some people speak of the interests of ‘Nature’. Others speak of the interests of the biosphere, of the ecosystem, and of non-living things in it, such as lakes, valleys and mountains. It is a controversial question whether such non-living things can have interests. Others, while denying that such things have interests, assign interests to plants and non-sentient animals, which are living indeed, but have no conscious experiences.

We could rule all these latter classes of things out of court if it is impossible to have interests without having desires for their furtherance or regrets if they are not preserved; for desires and regrets are conscious experiences which non-sentient things cannot have. One might be inclined to answer that it is not impossible, because obviously a small child might be harmed if its trustees made away with some of its money, and it never found out about the defalcation, and, because there was plenty of money left, never noticed the diminution in spending power even when it grew up. So the child would have interests without having any desires or regrets. This answer, however, misses the point I am trying to make. Presumably the child, when grown up, will have some desires which would have been realised if there had been more money, but as it was could not be realised. If this were not so, there really would be no harm to the child’s interests. So even in this case the frustration of desire, now or in the future or possible future, is a necessary condition of harm to interests. Even if the child, in the event, dies before it has the desire that would have been frustrated, it might not have, and therefore its expectation of desire-satisfaction has been diminished, and that is harm.

I shall assume provisionally (leaving for later consideration an argument against this view) that there can be no harm to morally relevant interests without at least potential prevention of desire-satisfaction. So, on this showing, we ought not to attribute such interests to creatures such as plants and the lower animals, which could not have desires. Next, we have to ask about the interests of the higher animals, who do have conscious experiences including desires (or at least I presume they do), and lastly of people. The general question is, where in this list do we draw the line and say that, since the things below the line have no interests (at least of the kind that generate moral duties) questions about duties to them, and of their rights, do not arise?

II

A second dimension of controversy emerges when we ask, of things of any of these sorts, whether to have interests they have already to exist, or at least be definitely going to exist. It is easiest to take people as an example, though the question arises in principle for any of the things I have been listing. It seems reasonable to say that if it is the case that a certain person is definitely going to exist (say the person that the foetus in this normal pregnancy will turn into when born), then he or she will have interests in what happens to him or her after becoming a normal adult. But it is not possible to generalise from this clear case to the interests of posterity in general. The reason is that almost any adoption of an environmental or planning policy is going to affect people’s actions in the future, and in particular the times at which they copulate to produce children. This in turn will affect the precise sperms and ova that unite to produce the children, and so the individual identities of those children [2].

The consequence is that there is no such thing as an identifiable set of people that we can label as ‘posterity’—as if those and only those people were the ones that were going to be born. ‘Posterity’ is a set of people whose identities are not yet fixed, because they depend on actions not yet taken and policies not yet decided. If therefore (as some philosophers have done) we claim that no interests are harmed or rights infringed unless there already exists, or is definitely going to exist, an identifiable individual person whose interests and rights these are going to be, posterity in general will have no interests or rights and we can do what we please about the future of the world.

A particular case of this problem is that of whether we have a duty to bring people into existence. Most people think that we do not have a duty to bring into existence all the people we could—and there are arguments for this view which I shall not have room to go into. But have we a duty to bring any people into existence? Could we rightly, if it suited us, just stop having children altogether? I do not myself accept the view that, just because posterity does not consist of now identifiable individuals who could have interests and rights, posterity in general has no interests or rights. I do think that we have duties to posterity, and these may even include the duty to ensure that there is a posterity; but I shall not here give my arguments for this view, which I have set out in full in a paper that I hope to publish before long [3].

III

There is a relation between having an interest and valuing, which is a special case of that between having an interest and desiring. If A values B (or in other words if B is of value to A), then A has an interest (pro tanto and ceteris paribus) in the existence of B. And this implies that (again ceteris paribus) A desires, or will under certain conditions desire, that B exist. Valuing is one kind (I am not committed to saying that it is the only kind) of desiring. This relation between interests and values may help us in delimiting the class of entities which have interests, and to which, therefore, there is a point in attributing rights.

It does not follow, from the fact that an entity can value other entities, that it itself has positive value, even to itself. It is not self-contradictory to speak of a valueless valuer. A very unhappy man might value his childrens’ continued existence, even though he did not value his own, and neither did anyone else. So, in classifying entities that have value, we do not need to include any entity just because it is capable of valuing. The class of entities which have interests may therefore contain members which do not have value; for these members may value other entities though they themselves are of no value to any entity, even to themselves.

We must distinguish three classes of entities which can be said to have value. I shall call these classes alpha, beta and gamma.

Alpha. Pre-eminently, something has value if it has value to itself, as when A values the existence of A. Most humans fall into this class, because they value, and therefore have an interest in, their own continued existence. The same may be true of other higher animals. For example, it seems likely that cows, as sentient creatures, value their own existence. At the other end of the scale God, if he exists, values and has an interest in his own existence. To borrow a phrase from Aristotle, to all these things ‘their own existence is good and pleasant; for they take pleasure in being conscious of [their own] intrinsic good’ [4]. We may say that such entities are valuable to themselves.
Beta. There are other entities of which this cannot be said, but which, though not valuable to themselves, are valuable in themselves to other entities (e.g. to those in class alpha, or to other entities which can value). As examples of beta entities, we may give inanimate objects which are valued in themselves. For example, someone may value Wastwater in itself, and want it to exist for its own sake, even when he is no longer alive to enjoy the beauty of the lake. I am not discussing whether there could be any good reason for thinking like this about Wastwater, but only claiming that if somebody said it, we would understand him. The same might be said of some kind of tree of which we make no use: somebody might want giant sequoias to go on growing in California even after he is no longer there to see them, and perhaps even when there is nobody there to see them. But Wastwater is of no value to Wastwater, and the sequoias are of no value to the sequoias, because they are not entities that can value.
Gamma. Lastly, there are entities which do not value their own existence like those in class alpha, and which are not of value in themselves to other entities as are those in class beta, but which are valued by, or of value to, other entities instrumentally, for the use made of them. Into this class fall crops, natural commodities like gravel, and some artefacts.

IV

It might be objected that we are prejudging an important issue if we say that these are the only classes of things that have value. May there not be a class (let us call it omega) of entities which have value (are valuable) though they do not have value (are not valuable) to anything, even to themselves? I wish to argue that class omega must be empty, because to think that an entity has value although nothing is valuing it is incoherent. For to think that something has value is either to value it oneself, or to think that it has value to something else. To think that something has value although nobody and nothing, not even oneself, values it is like thinking that some statement is true although nobody, not even oneself, believes it. In thinking it true one is believing it. It is important, however, not to confuse this argument with the view, to which I can attach no sense that makes it acceptable, that we somehow make things valuable by valuing them. This is like saying that we make statements true by believing them.

Even if it be granted that it is incoherent to say that something is valuable though valued by nobody, does it follow (an objector might ask) that it is incoherent to suppose that there might be something that was valuable although valued by nobody? There could after all be a statement that was true although believed by nobody (not even the person who made it). I would answer that it is incoherent, because it is incoherent to suppose that the supposition could be true. For if it were true, we should be able to say of the thing in question that it was valuable, and in so doing we should either be valuing it ourselves, or claiming that something else valued it, and therefore could not, without the same pragmatic inconsistency as before, say that nobody was valuing it. In any case, such supposed valuable entities are not going to have a bearing on practical decisions unless and until it is established that they might become actual if certain decisions were taken.

It is true that we can coherently suppose the existence of an entity having certain specific properties, and say that it would be valuable if it existed. Then we should be valuing its existence hypothetically, and could not consistently say in the same breath that this was not valued by anybody. Hypothetical valuing as inescapably accompanies the hypothetical existence of valuable things as actual valuing does their actual existence. In each case we are valuing the existence of a thing having those properties because it has t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The Environment
• Part II Personal Relationships
• Part III Terrorism, War and Conflict
• Part IV Justice and Equality
• Part V Ethics and Medicine
• Note on the Society for Applied Philosophy
• Index