Environmental values

Chapter 1 Values and the environment 1 Environments and values 1 Living from the world 1 Living in the world 2 Living with the world 3 Addressing value conflicts 4 Value conflicts 4 The distribution of goods and harms 5 Addressing conflicts 5 PART ONE Utilitarian approaches to environmental decision making 11 Chapter 2 Human well-being and the natural world 13 Introduction 13 Welfare: hedonism, preferences and objective lists 15 The hedonistic account of well-being 15 Bentham and the felicific calculus 15 John Stuart Mill 16 Preference utilitarianism 21 Objectivist accounts of welfare 24 Whose well-being counts? 26 Making comparisons: utilitarianism, economics and efficiency 27 Chapter 3 Consequentialism and its critics 31 Introduction 31 Consequentialism permits too much 32 What is the problem with consequentialism? The moral standing of individuals 33 Rights, conflicts and community 36 Consequentialism demands too much 39 What is the problem with consequentialism? Agent-based restrictions on action 40 Virtues and environmental concern 41 Consequentialist responses 43 Indirect utilitarianism 44 Extend the account of the good 46 Ethical pluralism and the limits of theory 47 Chapter 4 Equality, justice and environment 49 Utilitarianism and distribution 50 Equality in moral standing 52 Indirect utilitarian arguments for distributive equality 53 Economics, efficiency and equality 54 Willingness to pay 55 The Kaldor–Hicks compensation test 56 Discounting the future 57 Egalitarian ethics 58 Consequentialism without maximisation 59 The priority view 59 Telic egalitarianism 60 Deontological responses 62 Community, character and equality 64 Equality of what? 67 Chapter 5 Value pluralism, value commensurability and environmental choice 70 Value monism 72 Value pluralism 74 Trading-off values 75 Constitutive incommensurabilities 77 Value pluralism, consequentialism, and the alternatives 79 Structural pluralism 81 Choice without commensurability 83 What can we expect from a theory of rational choice? 85 PART TWO A new environmental ethic? 89 Chapter 6 The moral considerability of the non-human world 91 New ethics for old? 91 Moral considerability 93 Extending the boundaries of moral considerability 98 New theories for old? 108 Chapter 7 Environment, meta-ethics and intrinsic value 112 Meta-ethics and normative ethics 113 Intrinsic value 114 Is the rejection of meta-ethical realism compatible with an environmental ethic? 116 Objective value and the flourishing of living things 119 Environmental ethics through thick and thin 121 vi • Contents Chapter 8 Nature and the natural 125 Valuing the ‘natural’ 125 The complexity of ‘nature’ 126 Some distinctions 126 Natural and artificial 128 Natural and cultural 131 Nature as wilderness 132 The value of natural things 134 Nature conservation 138 A paradox? 139 On restoring the value of nature 141 Restitutive ecology 146 History, narrative and environmental goods 148 PART THREE The narratives of nature 151 Chapter 9 Nature and narrative 153 Three walks 154 History and processes as sources of value 155 Going back to nature? 158 Old worlds and new 162 Narrative and nature 163 Chapter 10 Biodiversity: biology as biography 165 The itemising approach to environmental values 167 The nature of biodiversity – conceptual clarifications 167 The attractions of itemisation 170 Biodiversity and environmental sustainability 173 Time, history and biodiversity 175 The dangers of moral trumps 179 Chapter 11 Sustainability and human well-being 183 Sustainability: of what, for whom and why? 183 Economic accounts of sustainability 185 Sustainability: weak and strong 186 Human well-being and substitutability 189 From preferences to needs 193 Narrative, human well-being and sustainability 196 Sustainability without capital 200 Chapter 12 Public decisions and environmental goods 202 Procedural rationality and deliberative institutions 203 Decisions in context 206 Responsibility and character 212 What makes for good decisions? 215 Bibliography 217 Index 225 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 1 2 31 Contents • vii List of Figures 4.1 Distributions of Welfare and a Utilitarian Justification of the Narmada Dam 51 4.2 The Utilitarian Argument for Equality 54 4.3 A Problem with the Utilitarian Argument for Equality 55 11.1 An Indifference Curve 191