Environmental Issues: Deep Ecology

Question 1

Land Ethic

Answer 1

• Hypothesised by Aldo Leopold
• Leopold sought to enlarge the boundaries of the moral community to include soils, waters, plants and animals.
• ‘Land as a community is a basic concept of ecology, but that it is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics’
• Leopold argues that the biotic community needs to be maintained in its natural state:
  “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise”

Question 2

Eight Principles of deep ecology. (4)

Answer 2

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have intrinsic value. These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realisations of these values and are also values in themselves.
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital human needs.
4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.

Question 3

Aarne Naess

Answer 3

• Came up with the term deep ecology.
• Environment has intrinsic value
• Humans do not have any superiority over any other natural beings: they are just one part of an integrated and mutually dependent ecological structure.

Question 4

Richard Routley

Answer 4

• Argued that the prejudicial favouring of humans over other animals is ‘human chauvinism’.
• Rejected the claim that ‘value and morality can ultimately be reduced to matters of interest or concern to the class of humans’
• Harm to any natural object should be limited; individuals should ‘not jeopardise the well-being of natural objects or system without good reason’

Question 5

Bill Devall and George Sessions

Answer 5

• The intuition of biocentric equality is that all things in the biosphere have an equal right to live and blossom to reach their own individual forms of unfolding and self-realisation within the larger self-realisation.
• This basic intuition is that all organisms and entities in the ecosphere, as parts of the interrelated whole, are equal in intrinsic worth.

Question 6

Paul Taylor: biocentric egalitarianism

Answer 6

• Argued for the moral significance of non-sentient beings, since every living thing is ‘pursuing its own good in its own unique way’
• This is the same as how we see ourselves and therefore, we should place ‘the same value on their existence as we do on our own’