IB Philosophy 9.2.2 Environmental Conservation and Activism Notes

The Moral and Legal Status of Natural Entities

Singer, Regan, and the Question of Animal Rights

1. As established in 9.2.1, environmental degradation raises fundamental questions about moral obligation. This topic examines the philosophical foundations of environmental conservation by asking: what is the moral and legal status of animals, plants, and natural entities?
   1. The answer to this question determines the scope of our environmental obligations.
2. Western philosophy has generally limited moral status (the right to have your interests taken into account morally) to human beings. Kant argued that only rational agents (beings capable of reasoning and making moral choices) possess dignity and moral worth.
   1. Animals, plants, and ecosystems lack rationality and therefore have no moral claims in their own right. On this view, cruelty to animals is wrong only because it may corrupt human character, not because animals have rights.
3. Peter Singer challenged this by arguing that sentience (the capacity to feel pleasure and pain), not the ability to reason, is what makes a being matter morally. In Animal Liberation (1975), Singer extended the principle of equal consideration to all sentient beings, concluding that factory farming and animal experimentation are morally indefensible.
4. Tom Regan offered a different argument in The Case for Animal Rights (1983). He argued that animals who are "subjects-of-a-life" (meaning they have beliefs, desires, memory, and a sense of their own future) have inherent value and therefore rights, including the right not to be used as a mere resource for humans.
5. The difference between Singer and Regan becomes clear in practice. Singer's approach (based on adding up total suffering vs. total benefit) might allow an experiment that causes moderate suffering to ten lab animals if it saves a thousand human lives, since the overall benefit is greater than the overall harm.
   1. Regan disagrees: each animal that qualifies as a subject-of-a-life has a value that cannot be traded away to produce better outcomes for others. The right not to be used as a mere resource is not negotiable, which is why Regan calls for the total abolition of animal experimentation, not merely its improvement.

Non-Sentient Entities, Legal Standing, and Intrinsic Value

1. The question becomes more challenging for non-sentient entities: plants, rivers, mountains, and ecosystems. If moral status requires sentience, then trees and rivers cannot have moral standing.
   1. However, several philosophical traditions argue that life itself or the integrity of ecosystems deserves moral consideration, extending the circle of moral concern beyond sentient beings.
2. Christopher Stone argued in "Should Trees Have Standing?" (1972) that natural entities should have legal rights. Stone proposed that rivers, forests, and ecosystems should be granted legal standing, allowing guardians to bring lawsuits on their behalf.
   1. This idea has been implemented in several jurisdictions: New Zealand granted the Whanganui River legal personhood in 2017.
3. Granting legal rights to natural entities reflects a major shift from treating nature as property to treating it as something that can have claims of its own. This parallels past expansions of legal rights to previously excluded groups (enslaved people, women, children) and suggests that where we draw the line of moral consideration today may look just as arbitrary to future generations as past exclusions look to us.
4. The debate about the moral status of natural entities connects directly to the intrinsic and extrinsic value distinction explored in 9.2.3. If natural entities have only instrumental value (value as means to human ends), then conservation is justified only by human interests.
   1. If they have intrinsic value (value in themselves), then conservation is a moral obligation regardless of human benefit.

Naess: Shallow and Deep Ecology

1. Arne Naess introduced the distinction between shallow and deep ecology in his 1973 paper. This distinction has become one of the most influential ideas in environmental philosophy, shaping both academic debate and activist practice around the world.
2. Shallow ecology (or "reform environmentalism") addresses environmental problems within existing political and economic frameworks. It focuses on pollution control, resource management, and conservation for the benefit of humans in developed countries.