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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Utilitarian ethics cannot straightforwardly serve as an adequate environmental ethic.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 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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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.Non-sentient objects such as plant species, rivers, mountains, and landscapes have no intrinsic value under utilitarianism, only instrumental value.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 3.Environmental ethics requires attributing moral concern to non-sentient natural objects and processes.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Utilitarianism's aggregative logic permits trading the destruction of entire ecosystems against sufficiently large accumulations of trivial human pleasures.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 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.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 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.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 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.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 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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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 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.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

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