Abstract

Utilitarianism and related decision-making methods including cost-benefit analysis, consensus calculations, and other instrumentalist approaches are inadequate as a guide to environmental ethics because their structure and quantitative method lead reasoning in a direction away from such long-term concerns as respect for living systems. Preference-satisfaction utilitarianism fails to disqualify false-consciousness preferences; average utilitarianism justifies environmental destruction if it happens with minimal suffering. As Peter S. Wenz explains, the Price-Anderson Act is an example of how utilitarian reasoning functions as a current of thought flowing away from policies of protection of the environment. However, people at liberty to fulfill their deepest desires and exercise their most basic faculties, who are not oppressed and mystified by compartmentalizing roles will have respect of the planet's communities of life, as Theodore Roszak explains. The nature of freedom is an important source of environmental ethical theory since theories based on other sources have inadequacies, of both instrumentalist and noninstrumentalist basis: the noninstrumentalist are weak in how their ideals are applied. Yet, insofar as centrally organized industrial economies based on techniques invasive of natural processes and controlled by hierarchies of downward-flowing power oppress people, they are likely to oppress their natural surroundings: oppressed nature deprives people: the two oppressions are biconditional. The manipulation of basic natural processes to rechannel energies toward artificial compromises of qualities, producing more of a marketable resource tends to be paralleled by manipulation of social compromises among those employed in the more-centralized process. There are ethical theories that take respect of living wholes as basic, but they are subject to objections: that they involve insufficient respect of individuals, as Tom Regan objects, describing such theories as fascist; and that they tend to permit individually held values to command sacrifices of the whole, as Jim Cheney points out, describing such as egoist. The concept of oppression as biconditional captures respect both of individual people and of their natural surroundings