Kant’s moral theory is widely viewed as being inadequate for dealing with questions concerning our treatment of non-human animals and the environment. According to some philosophers, Kant’s ethics has anthropocentric starting points, which leads to a position where persons alone must be respected. For instance, one of Kant’s most familiar statements from the Groundwork distinguishes persons or rational beings who are ends in themselves and have absolute value from things or something that may be used merely as a means, which have only a relative worth (AA, 4: 428). Furthermore, Kant writes in the Doctrine of Virtue that human beings have only indirect duties in relation to nature and nonrational beings (AA, 6: 442–3). This seems to imply that Kant’s account is merely that one should abstain from animal cruelty and the destruction of nature because doing so makes one less likely to violate one’s duties to other humans.
In Duties Regarding Nature, Toby Svoboda challenges this interpretation and provides a Kantian environmental virtue ethic. A central claim of Svoboda’s book is that the indirect-duty view can satisfy our intuition that interaction with non-human nature has moral significance. He offers an interpretation of Kant’s ethics that justifies much stronger moral requirements regarding non-human nature: wanton destruction of nature and cruel treatment of animals are not allowed because they weaken our virtuous disposition and undermine our duty to increase our moral perfection. Additionally, Svoboda is committed to showing that a Kantian account can oblige us to care about non-human organisms in their own right and to value their flourishing independently of human needs and interests. Taken together these accounts are the main arguments of what Svoboda calls a virtue-oriented environmental ethic.
Before assessing his main argument, it is useful to present, as concisely as possible, the book’s content and structure. Chapter 1 starts with a critical examination of some problems with anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric approaches to environmental ethics. Traditional anthropocentric ethical approaches that are committed to the principle of ‘basic human chauvinism’ must be rejected and replaced. Non-anthropocentric positions can be well-suited to our intuitions regarding moral consideration of non-human nature; however, they also face some problems such as conflicts of duties, the dependency of metaphysical value properties and the difficulty of grounding the intrinsic value of non-human nature. Anthropocentric approaches can avoid these problems but only at the cost of failing to consider the morality of actions regarding non-human nature. Svoboda claims that the Kantian environmental virtue ethic both considers this morality and avoids the problems of standard non-anthropocentric views.
Chapter 2 investigates five contemporary Kantian approaches to environmental and animal ethics formulated by Allen Wood, Christine Korsgaard, Lara Denis, Onora O’Neill and Paul Guyer. Svoboda argues that these approaches can be divided into two main positions. The first states that only after reshaping Kant’s moral theory is it possible to claim respect and direct moral consideration for non-human natural entities. The second claims that, without modification, Kant’s account of indirect duties regarding nature is an adequate ground for an ethic regarding non-human nature. Svoboda considers his own position a variety of this second position.
From chapter 3 onwards, Svoboda’s virtue-oriented environmental ethic is widely developed. He criticizes what he sees as the traditional interpretation of Kant’s account of indirect duties towards non-human nature; that is, that one should not be cruel to animals because this makes one more likely to be cruel to humans. Moreover, it says that moral agents may have duties regarding flora only in the sense that wanton destruction of plant-life tends to weaken dispositions that are useful for fulfilling one’s direct duties to humans. Svoboda sets out some problems in the traditional interpretation. For instance, it relies on an alleged psychological tendency for humans to reflect the way they treat non-humans in the way they treat one another. However, he maintains that Kant’s account is considerably more sophisticated and does not rest on such a tendency. Instead, it rests on the idea that cruelty ‘is intimately opposed to a human being’s duty to himself’ (AA, 6: 443). Svoboda argues that the duty in question is the obligation to increase one’s moral perfection. Contrary to the traditional interpretation, he claims that we should read Kant’s account as both proscribing unnecessary harm to non-human organisms and grounding moral reasons for us to benefit organisms and to value their flourishing: ‘Rather than merely discouraging animal cruelty and wanton destruction of plant-life on the basis that such behaviour might create obstacles to being moral, Kant’s position actually proscribes such behaviour as morally impermissible’ (p. 89). Following Robert Louden, Svoboda argues that a virtuous person is someone who approximates a good will through strength of mind, acting out of respect for the moral law despite inclinations to the contrary. This implies that we are morally prohibited from cruelty to non-human organisms and we have good reason to benefit them and to value their flourishing for its own sake. Then, our possession of virtues and vices is intimately tied to our treatment of non-human entities.
As we can see, Svoboda’s position takes into account the idea of non-human flourishing. Based on Kant’s Critique of Judgement, he argues in chapter 4 that Kant’s account of teleology as a reflective mode of judgement grounds a framework for considerations of non-human flourishing. According to him, ‘in order to make sense of our experience of non-human animals and plants, we must reflectively judge such entities as if they were naturally purposive, although we should abstain from attributing teleological properties or relations to nature itself’ (p. 94). We need to take an organism as being directed toward a telos (some end or set of ends) constituted by ‘natural goods’. In his framework ‘an organism’s natural goods are all and only those functions that, given sufficient time and resources, a relevant community of experts would identify as belonging to the normative standard for the kind of organism in question’ (p. 117). Thus, we should view plants and non-human animals as susceptible to being harmed or benefited through inhibition or promotion of their natural goods. Svoboda argues that his Kantian interpretation allows us to use the resources of teleology without facing the standard objections (the ‘spookiness’ objection and the incompatibility-with-Darwinism objection); that is, it avoids attributing teleology to nature itself and affords us a plausible way of grounding judgements about organisms’ flourishing. One perhaps still unsatisfactory point for animal rights defenders is that, in Svoboda’s reconstruction, it does not automatically follow that non-human organisms have real moral standing.
In chapter 5, he develops an environmental virtue ethic based on his previous interpretation of Kant’s account of indirect duties and the natural goods of non-human organisms. He argues that our actions and attitudes regarding non-human entities are tied both to the virtues that constitute our moral perfection and to the vices that oppose that perfection. We are morally prohibited from causing unnecessary harm to non-human organisms because they are entities that we must reflectively judge as capable of flourishing and thus being harmed or benefited. That we must view organisms in this way opens a wide range of virtues and vices. It is, then, possible to be benevolent or malevolent with respect to plants and animals, but Svoboda’s argument does not seem to extend this virtue or vice toward landforms, ecosystems, species or nature itself. This is because we have no basis for judging these things teleologically or taking them to have natural goods that we could be disposed to promote or to inhibit (p. 147). However, the Kantian environmental virtue ethicist still has good reason to preserve threatened species or ecosystems, even when genuine virtues toward such wholes are not in play. The extinction of species and the collapse of ecosystems will reliably harm the individual plants and animals that need them.
In chapter 6, Svoboda claims that we have good reason to prefer the Kantian environmental virtue ethic. It works better than many standard approaches to environmental ethics, and it avoids the difficult problems found in the approaches analysed in chapter 1, such as problems related to intrinsic value and deontic conflicts. He claims that his Kantian environmental ethic can preserve intuitions concerning environmental cases while also relying on intuitively plausible moral principles.
This book is well worth reading and has the merit of making a careful study of Kant’s position on human duties to non-human nature. Svoboda’s interpretation of indirect duties shows that Kant’s moral theory as a whole is not a failure, and more importantly, it is not simply a form of human chauvinism. It implies a more robust position and can provide reasons to show why cruelty to animals and the destruction of the natural world in its own right are morally forbidden. In addition to this interpretation of indirect duties, Svoboda develops his environmental ethic taking into account the direct duty to increase one’s own moral perfection by cultivating virtuous dispositions. This makes the book insightful, and it may even contribute to the revival of Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue and consequently of his theory of virtue, which has been neglected in recent studies of Kantian moral theory.
