Newsgroups: ca.environment

Given that the woodwork of ca.environment always seems to be crawling with
Randoids, liberloons, and other species of the cryptonazi pop philosophy
fauna, thought it would be amusing to post this piece about "rights"
for nonhumans. 

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Stein Sigurdsson has raised an objection to environmental ethics which
many people may find crushing, namely that it is based on a "slippery-slope"
argument which threatens to land us in silliness:

>... if this new guiding moral
>principle of extended rights is real then why the gradualist approach?
>Is it not inherently unethical to continue denying these rights to
>groups identified as potential future rights-groups? Do it all now.
>Rights for Rocks! Liberate the H-atom! Free the confined quarks ;-)
>

I don't actually care much for rights-based approaches to environmental
ethics myself, but I find that most people (especially in the United States)
are unable to conceive of ethics based on anything other than "rights",
so for the sake of argument I will assume that we have to approach the
matter in this way. 

Animal liberationists do want to extend individual rights to individual 
animals, but the ecocentric position is quite different. To an ecocentric,
a fundamental "right to be there" belongs to ecosystems and their components,
including nonbiological components such as rocks, rivers, and landforms.
This "right to be there" is simply a result of the fact that ecosystems 
are enduring vital enterprises that have demonstrated their own tenacity
-- it is a right won by evolutionary tenure and by the "added value" of 
speciation and coadaptation created during that tenure. Constituent species 
and nonbiological components participate in that "right" as essential to its 
maintenance: e.g.  the rocks in a stream where salmon spawn are critical 
components of the habitat and should not be removed -- which could decrease 
or destroy that salmon population, among other populations. The rocks do 
have a "right to be there" as a vital part of the whole ecosystem's 
functioning, providing essential microenvironments. They have a job to do,
and should be left in peace to do it.

>Personally I feel that with rights must come responsibilities. Most
>rocks I find are incredibly callous.

One answer to this is the one Michael Tobis gave, namely that we do give
rights to people who have diminished responsibilities. But that answer
doesn't go to the heart of the matter, which is that it is irrational to
define "responsibilities" in human terms for ecosystems. Just as we extend
the concept of "rights" we must also extend that of "responsibilities":
the "responsibility" of an ecosystem is to go on carrying out its numerous
vital functions, making more salmon, cycling nutrients, locally adapting and
coadapting more species, replacing extinct species, etc. Those are terribly
important responsibilities -- maybe even more important than most social 
responsibilities of humans. 

These are the kinds of "responsibilities" we should expect from ecosystems in
return for our recognition of their "right to be there".  To some of us,
that is more than enough in return, even from the standpoint of a "bargaining"
conception of how rights arise.

One objection which might be raised to this "tenure" approach to environmental
ethics is that it is dreadfully conservative: if a thing has a right to be
there just because it has always been there, then any oppressive social
institution, such as slavery, which existed for a long time might have a
right to continue. But this supposed analogy between cultural institutions 
and practices and ecological communities is not well thought out. Cultural
institutions change on the generally much shorter time scales of cultural 
evolution. Granting a "right to be there" to ecosystems implies neither that 
ecosystems cannot change on evolutionary time scales nor that culture may not
change on social time scales for societal reasons: it *does* imply that the 
time scales and social principles of cultural change should not generally be 
imposed on ecosystems as a replacement for their own dynamics, as they cannot
continue their historical enterprise on those terms. In short, "rights" for
ecosystems means respecting *their* terms and pace of existence. It does *not* 
mean pretending that their terms are the same as ours, *much* less forcing them
to be the same as ours. It's because people usually think of extending rights 
in the latter anthropomorphic sort of way that I don't care for the 
rights-based approach, but prefer to talk about "respect".

This anthropomorphic approach to environmental ethics leads to such stupidity 
as the pronouncement by a certain PETA official that in future humans
would "intervene whenever two animals fight". To an ecocentric, such an idea 
conveys a total lack of respect for the essential roles of predation and 
competition in weaving the fabric of nature. It says that human social 
principles should replace the operations of evolution everywhere, that our
way must dominate and replace all others. This is no different from the 
ethic of the developer, or than the human-supremacism which animal 
liberationists say they abhor. Equally stupid are the anti-environmental 
jibes about polling animals or running them for office -- as if the whole 
structure of life depended for its validity on some status to be assigned 
by human social conceits. In much the same way we once thought that 
our immense and self-evident social importance assigned the shape of the 
heavens, with ourselves at the center. 

Finally, what about the bottom of the slippery slope, where we supposedly grant
rights to quarks? "Rights" are a restriction on someone's activity to ensure
the possibility ("liberty") of someone (or something) else's activity. To date,
we have chosen to grant rights mainly as a reciprocal social bargain, which is
why it seems silly at first to talk about "rights" for nonhumans -- until we 
understand what it is really appropriate to expect as reciprocation from the 
nonhuman side of the "bargain". 

But this historical fact about how rights have been granted does not mean
that they must be granted only as a reciprocal social deal in the future:
we can choose to grant rights for other reasons, e.g. to ensure the rich 
continuance of the Earth's evolutionary enterprise, which produced ourselves
and all our living companions. Such granting of rights *would* imply 
restrictions on our actions. It is necessary in order to establish enough 
liberty for ecosystems to continue their evolutionary work. It's crucial
that this be understood: a right *always* implies a limitation of someone's
liberty. One person's property right to a backyard is a limitation on another
person's freedom of movement and freedom to pick the flowers. To grant a "right
to be there" to an ecosystem is not much different in principle: it means that 
no one can bulldoze it, for example. That would interfere with its right to
go on about its own evolutionary business.

Human actions do not restrict the "liberty" of elementary particles or
distant galaxies in any way, and no restriction of human actions will affect
them or increase their "liberty". Hence the question of rights for them doesn't
arise. But it does arise for ecosystems and other species, because our actions 
do affect and restrict them.  [A terribly humourless answer to a joke, I know, 
but it needs to be given all the same.]

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Alan McGowen