Environmental Philosophy

What it asks

Imagine the last person alive, who before dying destroys every remaining living thing on earth. No one suffers, since no one is left to suffer.

Almost everyone judges that this would be wrong. But every standard ethical theory locates wrongness in effects on beings who can be affected, and there are none. So either the intuition is confused, or value extends beyond experience.

That thought experiment, put forward in 1973, defines the field. Everything else - climate obligations, species loss, wilderness, sustainability - depends on whether nature has value in its own right or only instrumentally.

The recurring problems

Intrinsic value. If ecosystems and species matter independently, what makes them matter? Value has generally been understood as value TO someone, and extending it beyond that has proved hard to do rigorously.

Which things count. Sentient animals, all living things, species, ecosystems, landscapes. Each boundary has a rationale and none is obviously right, and holism about ecosystems can license sacrificing individuals in ways that alarm those who arrived through animal ethics.

Wilderness. The concept of untouched nature has been criticised as a construction that erases the people who lived in and shaped those landscapes for millennia. That criticism came from within environmental thought and reshaped it.

Collective harm. No individual's emissions make a measurable difference to any outcome, and the aggregate is catastrophic. Standard moral theory struggles to explain what an individual does wrong, and this may be the most important unsolved problem in practical ethics.

How it developed

Aldo Leopold's land ethic in 1949 proposed extending moral consideration to the biotic community as a whole - the founding statement, written by an ecologist rather than a philosopher.

The field formed in the early 1970s. The last-man argument set the central question. Deep ecology argued that the whole framework of human interests was the problem and called for a different self-understanding rather than a policy adjustment.

Through the 1980s the field divided between individualists, largely arriving from animal ethics, and holists concerned with systems and species. That division has never fully healed.

The wilderness critique in the 1990s forced a reckoning with the field's own assumptions, particularly its treatment of landscapes as pristine when they were inhabited and managed.

Climate change then reorganised everything. It brought in obligations to future generations, the non-identity problem, questions of historical responsibility between nations, and the collective action problem - none of which the intrinsic value debate had prepared anyone for.

The positions within it

Anthropocentrism, sentientism, biocentrism and ecocentrism divide over what has moral standing. Deep ecology, social ecology and ecofeminism offer diagnoses of the underlying cause. Environmental pragmatism argues that the theoretical dispute delays action that all sides support. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

Climate ethics is now most of the field, and it has become a discipline with its own problems: discounting, historical responsibility, loss and damage, and what individuals owe when their contribution is undetectable.

The intrinsic value question has not been settled and has become less central, partly because the practical arguments mostly go through either way - which environmental pragmatists say was the point and their critics say is a change of subject.