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Biocentric Consequentialism, Pluralism, and ‘The Minimax Implication’: A Reply to Alan Carter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Robin Attfield
Robin Attfield
Affiliation:
Cardiff University, AttfieldR@cardiff.ac.uk
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Abstract

Alan Carter's recent review in Mind of my Ethics of the Global Environment combines praise of biocentric consequentialism (as presented there and in Value, Obligation and Meta-Ethics) with criticisms that it could advocate both minimal satisfaction of human needs and the extinction of ‘inessential species’ for the sake of generating extra people; Carter also maintains that as a monistic theory it is predictably inadequate to cover the full range of ethical issues, since only a pluralistic theory has this capacity. In this reply, I explain how the counter-intuitive implications of biocentric consequentialism suggested by Carter (for population, needs-satisfaction, and biodiversity preservation) are not implications, and argue that since pluralistic theories (in Carter's sense) either generate contradictions or collapse into monistic theories, the superiority of pluralistic theories is far from predictable. Thus Carter's criticisms fail to undermine biocentric consequentialism as a normative theory applicable to the generality of ethical issues.

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Type
Discussions
Information
Utilitas , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2003, pp. 76 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2003

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References

1 Driver, Julia, ‘Introduction’, Utilitas, xiii (2001)Google Scholar.

2 Attfield, Robin, Value, Obligation and Meta-Ethics (VOME), Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1995Google Scholar.

3 Carter, Alan, Review of Attfield, Robin, The Ethics of the Global Environment, in Mind, cx (2001)Google Scholar (henceforth ‘Carter’).

4 Attfield, Robin, The Ethics of the Global Environment, Edinburgh and West Lafayette, IN, 1999Google Scholar.

5 Carter finds biocentric consequentialism to be most fully presented and defended in my earlier work VOME, and includes that work in his summary.

6 Carter at this point depicts biocentric consequentialism as ‘extremely impressive’ (149).

7 Ibid.

8 Attfield, , EGE, p. 39Google Scholar, as quoted in Carter, 149 f.

9 Carter here (150) quotes EGE, p. 40.

10 Carter, 150.

11 Ibid., 150–3.

12 Ibid., 153.

13 VOME, pp. 150 f.

14 Carter, 150.

15 Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons, Oxford, 1984, pp. 381–90Google Scholar.

16 Carter, 150.

17 Parfit, Derek, ‘Overpopulation and the Quality of Life’, Applied Ethics, ed. Singer, Peter, Oxford, 1986Google Scholar.

18 Carter, Alan, ‘Moral Theory and Global Population’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, xcix (1998–1999)Google Scholar.

19 Attfield, , VOME, p. 169Google Scholar.

20 Ibid., p. 168.

21 Ibid., pp. 164, 167 f.

22 Ibid., pp. 107 f.

23 Carter, 151.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 152.

27 Ibid., 151.

28 Ibid.

29 EGE, p. 159; Carter, 152.

30 Carter, ibid.

31 See e.g. VOME, p. 168; EGE, pp. 116–19.

32 Wilson, Edward O., ‘The Little Things That Run the World’, Conservation Biology, i (1987)Google Scholar.

33 See VOME, p. 166; EGE, p. 70.

34 EGE, p. 70.

35 VOME, p. 166.

36 Ibid., p. 168.

37 Carter, 152 f.

38 Ibid., 152.

39 VOME, p. 94.

40 Carter, p. 152.

41 For contrasting views on these matters (which cannot be discussed further here), see Thompson, Janna, ‘A Refutation of Environmental Ethics’, Environmental Ethics, xii (1990)Google Scholar; O'Neill, John, Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-Being and the Natural World, London and New York, 1993, pp. 19–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cooper, David E., ‘Other Species and Moral Reason’, Just Environments: Intergenerational, International and Interspecies Issues, ed. Cooper, David E. and Palmer, Joy A., London and New York, 1995Google Scholar.

42 Ibid., 153.

43 Carter, ‘Moral Theory and Global Population’ (see n. 18 above).

44 Ibid., 307.

45 Ibid., 306.

46 Ibid., 307.

47 These remarks are not directed at the ‘Biocentric Pluralism’ of James Sterba, since it is unclear whether, despite the name he gives it, his theory is pluralist in point of embodying a plurality of irreducible values. Thus the individual and holistic goods that he recognizes might admit of comparisons and of relative weighting, and the four principles that he propounds seem susceptible to being prioritized on some rational basis in case of clashes. If not, however, then these remarks would seem applicable to Sterba's pluralism after all. See Sterba, James, ‘From Biocentric Individualism to Biocentric Pluralism’, Environmental Ethics, xvii (1995)Google Scholar; Justice for Here and Now, Cambridge and New York, 1998, ch. 6Google Scholar; Three Challenges to Ethics, New York, 2001, ch. 2Google Scholar. Similar points have longsince been made about moral pluralism by J. Baird Callicott, particularly in a section entitled ‘Moral pluralism's Achilles heel: the hard choice between contradictory indications’, of his article ‘The Case Against Moral Pluralism’. See Callicott, J. Baird, ‘The Case Against Moral Pluralism’, Environmental Ethics, xii (1990), 109–13Google Scholar. It is a pleasure to acknowledge work of a philosopher with whom I have often been in disagreement.

48 Carter, 153.

49 Attfield, Robin, Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century, (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar.

50 I am grateful to Andrew Belsey, Alex Miller, and Roger Crisp for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this text.