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    Utilitarian ethics cannot straightforwardly serve as an a... — Carmelics
    Home/Environmental Ethics
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Utilitarian ethics cannot straightforwardly serve as an adequate environmental ethic.

    Environmental Ethics
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    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Utilitarianism's aggregative logic permits trading the destruction of entire ecosystems against sufficiently large accumulations of trivial human pleasures.
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    • 2.Rawls's separateness of persons objection extends to species: moral mathematics that dissolves individuals into aggregate welfare cannot capture what is distinctively lost when a species or ecosystem is permanently annihilated.
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    • 3.Irreversible ecological losses resist utilitarian commensurability because no future pleasure-surplus can restore what is categorically gone, exposing a structural gap between utilitarian calculation and genuine environmental concern.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Holmes Rolston III's account of systemic value holds that ecosystems generate and sustain value independently of any sentient valuer, grounding intrinsic natural value in biological and evolutionary processes rather than in felt experience.
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    • 2.Utilitarian frameworks are by design experience-dependent, requiring a sentient subject to cash out value claims, and thus systematically misrepresent the moral significance of valuational processes that predate and operate independently of sentience.
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    • 3.An adequate environmental ethic must assign non-derivative moral standing to evolutionary and ecological processes; utilitarianism's experientialist foundation structurally prevents it from doing so.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Utilitarian ethics attributes intrinsic value only to the experience of pleasure or interest satisfaction, not to the beings who have the experience.
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    • 2.Non-sentient objects such as plant species, rivers, mountains, and landscapes have no intrinsic value under utilitarianism, only instrumental value.
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    • 3.Environmental ethics requires attributing moral concern to non-sentient natural objects and processes.
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    Topics

    Environmental Ethics

    Related

    An adequate environmental ethic must assign non-derivative moral standing to evo...Environmental ethics requires attributing moral concern to non-sentient natural ...Holmes Rolston III's account of systemic value holds that ecosystems generate an...Irreversible ecological losses resist utilitarian commensurability because no fu...
    +6 moreShow less
    Non-sentient objects such as plant species, rivers, mountains, and landscapes ha...Practices like whale-hunting or killing elephants for ivory, which cause non-hum...Rawls's separateness of persons objection extends to species: moral mathematics ...Utilitarian ethics attributes intrinsic value only to the experience of pleasure...Utilitarian frameworks are by design experience-dependent, requiring a sentient ...Utilitarianism's aggregative logic permits trading the destruction of entire eco...

    Similar

    Virtue ethics need not be unavoidably anthropocentric and can support ...83%Environmental ethics requires attributing moral concern to non-sentien...79%Virtue ethics grounds moral reasons in character traits rather than mo...75%A wider consequentialist approach may be more compatible with environm...75%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: ethics-environmental
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    As the utilitarian focus is the balance of pleasure and pain as such, the question of to whom a pleasure or pain belongs is irrelevant to the calculation and assessment of the rightness or wrongness of actions. Hence, the eighteenth century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1789), and later Peter Singer (1993), have argued that the interests of all the sentient beings (i.e., beings who are capable of experiencing pleasure or pain)—including non-human ones—affected by an action should be taken equally
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit