Callicott (1992a) has depicted the conflict between the rights view and the ecological view as being underpinned by different values which yield different concerns. On one hand, on the animal rights view, the psycho-physical wellbeing of individual wild animals is primary concern. On the other hand, the ecologists and environmental ethicists have concern for “the disappearance of species of plants as well as animals, and for soil erosion and stream pollution”
(Callicott, 1992a: 40). According to Callicott, for animal rights proponents, the wrongness of acts, policies or practices is a function of how individual wild animals fare. However, environmentalists advance the thesis “that the good of the biotic community is the ultimate measure of moral value, the rightness or wrongness, of actions” (Callicott, 1992a: 43). The approaches are thus appropriately labelled ‘individualistic’ and ‘holistic’ respectively. Holism would recommend killing of individual members of certain species, introduction of alien predator species, and so on, if this was deemed necessary for attaining or maintaining an optimal ecosystem.
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Callicott believes the animal rights proponents are mistaken in identifying individual animals as loci of value. He sees the pursuit of, and respect for, atomistic interests as being potentially catastrophic for the environment. To drive his point home, he makes a comparison using the example of society.
In society, it is imprudent, according to Callicott, to allow for unfettered pursuit of individual interests. Doing so would render “the community as a whole become noticeably more and more infirm economically, environmentally, and politically” (Callicott, 1992a: 47). We have thus “a duty to behave in ways that do not harm the fabric of society per se”. This shows that society as such, by Callicott’s lights, is an appropriate recipient of human duties. And by analogy, the biotic community imposes “duties binding upon moral agents in relation to that whole.”
(Callicott, 1992a: 45). For Callicott, it is the whole and not the constituent parts that is the proper holder of value that generates obligations in us. Our body cells, tissues, and parts have no moral value in themselves and they may be dispensed with for the good of our bodies. The suffering and death of individuals do not matter morally provided this serves the stability of the whole society or biotic community.
Callicott’s ecological point of view is therefore theoretically incompatible with animal rights theory. On his view, the environment in itself has intrinsic value. We transgress against this value if our behaviour tends to compromise the stability, integrity, and beauty of the environment. But do these three aspects generate such powerful duties towards the environment? It will be question-begging to suggest that this is because in so doing we respect the value in the environment. There are two possible non-circular replies.
First, we might say stability, beauty, and integrity of the environment are instrumentally good for humans. This, however, takes us back to anthropocentrism, which many environmental ethicists including Callicott oppose. Or, second, we might say the stability, integrity, and beauty of the environment are not valuable in themselves but they are ultimately valuable for sentient life forms. On such a view, a good ecosystem is not good in itself but only instrumentally to the extent that it enables its sentient inhabitants to flourish in their various individual natures and ecological niches.
I turn now to try and refute Callicott’s argument from analogy for nature’s intrinsic value.
The analogy Callicott makes from our duties not to harm the fabric of our societies to duties not to harm ecosystems as wholes seems cogent, up to a point. The duties to society or to the
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environment fall under what, for the lack of a better term, are referred to as ‘indirect’ duties. I have in Chapter 3 rejected the notion of ‘indirect’ duties. The term is redundant and conveys the wrong idea that we have a kind of duty to society or to ecosystems.
We care for the environment at least partly as a matter of prudence, out of reasons that emanate from self-interest. Because society and the environment are so important, if not prerequisite, to enjoying anything else in life, humans create rules imposing mutual duties and claims with respect to society or the environment. Duties to not pollute rivers are not owed to rivers or ecosystems to which rivers belong but to other sentient beings who would be harmed by the pollution, for example, through poor health and death after intake or through incurring the cost of sourcing safer water elsewhere.
Anthropology tells us how people create totems, taboos, myths, legends, and so on in order to protect or promote certain interests. Positing intrinsic value for the environment seems a continuation of that human gimmick. Such axiological gilding of nature might prove pragmatically successful, but scepticism regarding its philosophical grounds is well-placed.
The position taken here is that such social construction of value is at best unnecessary, and at worst retrogressive, for an ethically sound wildlife or environmental policy.
Regan (1992) explores mental-state (e.g. hedonism), states of affairs (e.g. beauty), and end-in-itself (e.g. subject of a life) theories as grounds for intrinsic value in the environment. He finds all three wanting and concludes that environmental ethics rests on an axiological mistake.
Mental-state and end-in-itself, for example, both require that at least X possesses sentience for X to have intrinsic value. Of course, the environment as a whole is not a sentient entity.
Callicott’s environmental ethic rests on the ‘state of affairs’ of beauty of the environment. This means that a being can have intrinsic value simply because of the state in which it is independently of any observer’s valuation. Hence, nature can be said to have intrinsic value because of its state of being beautiful or stable even when there is nobody to appreciate the beauty or stability.
However, Regan thinks that inasmuch as “one can admire what is beautiful” it is quite another thing to say “that one should respect the beauty in an object” (Regan, 1992: 169). That an entity has beauty or stability does not seem to generate any (strong) obligations upon humans on how that entity is treated for its own sake. If nature had any intrinsic value grounded in beauty and stability, it is most definitely a value that pales into insignificance when juxtaposed with the
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moral worth of humans. Hence, in the name of consistency, a non-speciesist wildlife ethic ought not to prioritise nature over the intrinsic value of wild animals. Humans are not culled to protect the environment. Wild animals should not be culled at the altar of nature’s ‘intrinsic value’.
Regan aptly puts forth his bottom-up approach to wildlife management thus: “Where we to show proper respect for the rights of the individuals who make up the biotic community, would not the community be preserved?” (Regan, 2004a: 363). This may appear to commit the fallacy of composition. But Regan does not argue that since individuals require respect, the community as a whole must be respected as well. Instead, Regan should be understood as making a probabilistic descriptive statement that when humans do not exploit animals, the land they dwell on, and their plant and other resources, the environment is much more likely to remain more stable than when humans do the opposite.
The crux of the argument is that a societal code including rules allocating rights and correlative obligations would be generally more optimific for the environment than alternative codes. For Regan, discharging obligations to wild animals would have the desired outcomes for a sustainable biodiversity yielding all those benefits that humans seek in the environment, provided that this does not involve treating wild animals as mere receptacles of value.
Recognition and enforcement of wildlife rights would end many anthropogenic activities that are largely responsible for the environmental crisis. Such activities include logging, fracking, and mining in wildlife habitats. In Chapter 5, I make a case for wildlife rights in natural goods including their habitats that, in my view, effectively would generally result in environmental protection.
Animal rights and concern for extinction do have an intersection, albeit a contingent one.
Imagine a population, N, of an ungulate species with individuals, u. The ungulate population is the sum of each and every individual ungulate, u (N=∑u1, u2, u3…un). Extinction is when every individual member of a species has ceased to exist. All that extinction requires is failures of reproduction. If that failure is non-anthropogenic, then biodiversity is lost without rights violations.
Admittedly, though, most cases of extinction with which we are familiar involve pain, suffering, and early death. When we look at how every individual has ceased to exist, we are likely to find pain and suffering. If natural phenomena have caused the pain, suffering, and death of individuals, then there are no rights violations in the offing. Humans, however, have pro tanto duties not to cause pain, suffering, and death to animals. A lot of extinctions are
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anthropogenic. “There is agreement that the greatest threat to both animal and plant species is the loss of habitat” (Plessis, 2000: 16). Other causes of extinctions include over-exploitation, introduced species, pollution, and pesticides, and decreasing range size (Plessis, 2000). These causes involve deprivations and violations against wild animals. Ending the deprivations and violations is likely to significantly lower extinction rates of wild animals.
Respecting rights of wild animals means, for the most part, leaving them alone. That includes prohibitions against tampering with their habitat through encroachments, pollution, and introducing rival or predatory alien species. Regan’s point is particularly forceful given that many extinctions and decimations are widely attributed to human activity despite the causal links not being always so direct. The failure of humans to abide by the laissez-faire policy generates duties based on what Regan calls ‘compensatory justice’.
The idea of compensatory justice for wildlife is analogous to what is owed to people who have been victims of injustice in the past and are, as a consequence of those injustices, worse off.
This notion, Regan believes, can account for people’s bias in favour of endangered species when they are making wildlife policy or management decisions. If we have plentiful rabbits and a handful of rhinos, this alone does not, according to Regan, warrant any preferential treatment to the rhinos. Further inquiry is needed to show, for example, whether habitat destruction by humans has played a part in the present vulnerability of the rhinos. Only this would warrant prioritisation of rhinos over rabbits.
But this answer is not convincing for cases where the rabbits will be harmed or disadvantaged by the compensatory policy or measures for rhinos. In some situations, it is the behaviour or numbers of the populous wild animals that causes or exacerbates the predicament of the few.
Yet the rabbits are innocent and it will be an injustice to them if the compensatory intervention involves doing harm to them. Compensatory interventions will work where any costs resulting from the intervention are borne by the party that was morally or at the very least, causally responsible for the initial harm. In this case, it is humans who should bear the cost on account of their culpability or liability.
Here it suffices to point out that the two solutions Regan offers seem to fall short of providing answers to resolving problems involving animals and mediated by the environment. Human interference may cause changes in the behavioural and population dynamics of some fauna species. This in turn may cause harm to members of another species, to the point where the species may become endangered. Remedial intervention may require changing the behaviour
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or reducing numbers of, say, the invasive or irruptive species. This may not be easily feasible without harming members of the invasive or irruptive species. To this problem, Regan does not give us any rights-based guidance. I explore this problem in the next section.