The Moral Status of Non-human Beings and Their Ecosystems

Dion, Michel

doi:10.1080/713665891

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…The conflict between environmental protection and timber exploitation in the Pacific Northwest of the USA has involved a contested 'moral terrain' and 'moral landscape' (Proctor, 1995;. The place of animals has been examined within 'moral geographies of wilderness' (Whatmore and Thorne, 1998), highlighting the significance of the human/nonhuman interface to a hitherto largely anthropocentric environmental ethics (see also Lynn, 1998;Dion, 2000).…”

Section: More Moral Geographiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geography and ethics: progress, or more of the same?

Smith

2001

Progress in Human Geography

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This final review has been deferred for a year, as an invitation to deliver the Progress in Human Geography lecture enabled me to cover some relevant issues (Smith, 2000a). There has also been publication of the first edited collection of contributions on geography and ethics (Proctor and Smith, 1999), with sections on ethics and space, ethics and place, ethics and nature, and ethics and knowledge. And I have written a book exploring the moral significance of those familiar geographical concepts of landscape, location and place, proximity and distance, space and territory, along with social justice, development ethics and environmental ethics (Smith, 2000b).All this left me wondering what was left to cover. So I followed my earlier practice of circulating possible sources for relevant work, especially in geography, with explicit attention to ethics or moral philosophy. The paucity of replies gave the impression that I might have exaggerated the 'moral turn' (Smith, 1997), perhaps misreading yet another transient twist in the tortuous disciplinary trajectory which we take to be progress. However, one particular respondent provided a timely if inadvertent reminder of the need for continuing cultivation of the interface of geography and ethics. I was told that 'much geographical work is filled with elements of ethics and moral philosophy, although usually presented as assumed absolute truth'. This was followed by the claim: 'I write about certain things being right or wrong. I think that is "ethics", but I also realize that no Moral Philosophy department would consider it as such' (Paul Treanor, email, January 2000).As individuals, or groups, we act on particular conceptions of right and wrong, good or bad. Moral philosophers pose and try to answer such questions as what moral values are, how they arise and how they might be defended: what it means to engage with ethics. Thus, my respondent's ethics would be subject to critical scrutiny. Moral philosophers would doubtless agree that writing about certain things being right or wrong

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Section: More Moral Geographiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geography and ethics: progress, or more of the same?

Smith

2001

Progress in Human Geography

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“…Furthermore, intrinsic value is described as independent of being valued or recognized by a (human) valuer (e.g., Dion 2000 , Hovardas 2013 , Gale and Ednie 2019 ). This includes reference to inherent properties of an entity and to the objective value of nonhuman nature that exists regardless of human preferences, attitudes, or even their existence (Sheng et al.…”

Section: Findings From the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Why nature matters: A systematic review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values

Himes,

Muraca,

Anderson

et al. 2023

BioScience

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In this article, we present results from a literature review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values of nature conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as part of the Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuations of Nature. We identify the most frequently recurring meanings in the heterogeneous use of different value types and their association with worldviews and other key concepts. From frequent uses, we determine a core meaning for each value type, which is sufficiently inclusive to serve as an umbrella over different understandings in the literature and specific enough to help highlight its difference from the other types of values. Finally, we discuss convergences, overlapping areas, and fuzzy boundaries between different value types to facilitate dialogue, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the methods for valuation of nature's contributions to people, including ecosystem services, to inform policy and direct future research.

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“…Moreover, if killing animals is impermissible because they display preferences that conduce to their flourishing, it may also be impermissible to kill many other living creatures 9 ; for example plants, 10 since these too display goal-directed behavior. The relation between mental sophistication and moral status is vulnerable to the charge of vagueness, however, 11 and I do not have a perfect answer to this challenge.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Do We Owe to Novel Synthetic Beings and How Can We Be Sure?

McKeown

2021

Camb Q Healthc Ethics

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Embodiment is typically given insufficient weight in debates concerning the moral status of Novel Synthetic Beings (NSBs) such as sentient or sapient Artificial Intelligences (AIs). Discussion usually turns on whether AIs are conscious or self-aware, but this does not exhaust what is morally relevant. Since moral agency encompasses what a being wants to do, the means by which it enacts choices in the world is a feature of such agency. In determining the moral status of NSBs and our obligations to them, therefore, we must consider how their corporeality shapes their options, preferences, values, and is constitutive of their moral universe. Analysing AI embodiment and the coupling between cognition and world, the paper shows why determination of moral status is only sensible in terms of the whole being, rather than mental sophistication alone, and why failure to do this leads to an impoverished account of our obligations to such NSBs.

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The Moral Status of Non-human Beings and Their Ecosystems

Cited by 8 publications

References 40 publications

Geography and ethics: progress, or more of the same?

Geography and ethics: progress, or more of the same?

Why nature matters: A systematic review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values

What Do We Owe to Novel Synthetic Beings and How Can We Be Sure?

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