Get it While It's Hot - Free Sustainability Webinar

Peeps, sorry for the late notice, but I just remembered that Earthscan Publishers is hosting a free webinar this morning,

Sustainability in Every Day Life: Institutional & Cultural Change.

It's happening at 9 a.m. Arizona time, which is 11 a.m. CST, or 8 a.m. for you West Coasters. 

Click here to register:  http://www.earthscan.co.uk/Earthcasts/tabid/101760/Default.aspx

Not one more minute to spare.  Have to get the message out!

Philosophers Philosophizing Deux

"Do species have a right to exist?"

This past weekend, I posted the beginnings of a dialogue on this question, instigated by two environmental philosophers, Phil Cafaro and Win Staples.  Today I begin posting the responses.
I want to point out that the question, to be answered properly, must be dissected before it can even be discussed.  As you read, keep in mind these three sub-questions:


What is meant by the term "species"?

Do species have rights?

If so, is the "right to exist" one of the rights species enjoy?


By the way - before we get started - I used the french "a deux" above in honor of yesterday's high energy proton beam collision achieved by scientists using the high energy Large Hadron Collider [LHC], an $18 billion particle collider designed to replicate the conditions of Big Bang.  The LHC is located in a 17-mile tunnel along the France-Switzerland border.  Scientists are hoping the LHC may help them discover new properties of physics, like the so-called theoretically anticipated Higgs Boson or "God" Particle.  If this isn't exciting enough, the project has been plagued with so many set-backs that two scientists on the project have theorized that the Higgs Boson particle may be so antithetical to nature that it is finding its way back to destroy itself, or conversely, humans from the future may be attempting to sabatoge the project for similar reasons.  Wow!  Science or science fiction?  It gives me goose bumps!


Here we go - deux.

# # #


Mike Vandeman to ISEE-L
====== This message is from the ISEE-L electronic mailing list. =============


I have no idea if anyone has rights. A right is a specific type of relationship: it can only be granted by other people.


BUT, if humans have rights, then there is no good reason to exclude any other living things. We are genetically 98.6% identical to chimpanzees. That doesn't leave room for differences in rights. The same goes for all other species, all of which are our relatives and with whom we share a huge amount of our genome.


I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8 years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)


Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you are fond of!
http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande


# # #

Don Maier to ISEE-L

subject Re: [ISEE-L] Do species have a moral right to exist?


===== This message is from the ISEE-L electronic mailing list. ============= 
 Hi Phil, Win,


I'm always rooting for some such argument as this to be convincing. Unfortunately, I think that critical premises for your general case are based on confusions. The force of other arguments (based on interests) has, I think alarmingly limited penetration into the living world.


My notes follow. 

Regards,
Don Maier

[Ed. note: Red text is copied from Phil & Win's article.  Black text is Maier's commentary.]

1) 
So the right to life is the first and most important right for persons.

Just so, the right to continued existence is the first and most important right to assert on behalf of other species.

The rights of a species (if any) are not the same as the rights of individuals. Individuals and species are two very different sorts of entities. Establishing a right for a human or non-human individual to live in itself says nothing about the right of its species to survive. "Surprisingly" would be a lot more appropriate than "Just so".

2) 

Non-rights-holders are not members of the moral community and may be treated as things: mere means to community-members’ ends.

Having rights is (I believe) not at all a necessary condition for being morally considerable and therefore not to be treated as a "mere thing". Your assumption to the contrary seems to have its root in confusing moral agents with moral patients. It think that it should be easy for a virtue theorist (such as yourself) to admit environmentally productive virtues, including ones that tend to preserve species, without admitting species to the inner moral ring of rights bearers.

3)
You cannot advocate Leopold’s “land ethic” without including, as a fundamental component, a right to continued existence for nature’s other species.

This seems false to me, for the reason just cited.

4)
... people should refrain from activities (particularly economic activities) that endanger species...

What, exactly, is an "economic activity"? Or, more to the point, what isn't -- to some degree -- an economic activity? I think that, to a first order approximation, the correct answer to that last question is "very little". Is "economic" here being used as a synonym for "behavior connected with satisfying crass, materialistic, frivolous desires"? Or does "economic" include "growing food to sell to my neighbor"? Of course, both have (or can have) major effects on non-human species.

5)
Because all these human qualities can be stunted or even snuffed out entirely, through neglect and injustice.

In the same way, we can argue that we should respect other species for what they are.

This reprises the confusion noted in 1).
 6)
...species are the primary examples and repositories of organic nature’s creativity and diversity; they represent thousands and often millions of years of effort and achievement...

every species’ achievement of organic existence and persistence in the face of life’s challenges is a great achievement, well worthy of our respect.

This text exposes possible sources for the underlying confusion. Humans are creative. A species, including the human species, is not creative. Evolution did not "take effort" and it was not an "achievement" in any sense that relates to the kind of purposive struggle that (one might legitimately argue) commands moral respect. I would say that whatever cogency there is here rests on a teleological premise regarding evolution and natural selection. Anyone embracing the naturalistic premise would (or should) reject such a premise.

7)
...opening the floodgates to anything and everything having intrinsic value and a right to exist.

While I think that the case for the value of species has yet to be made, I would also embrace species egalitarianism. However, the implications are not so rosy as you portray. For one major example: There are all kinds of microbes and parasites whose flourishing makes human lives less flourishing. There are just as many creatures that aren't making people miserable yet, but are entirely capable of it -- upon jumping over from their current, non-human hosts (zoonotic diseases). How happy are we about these organisms? Not in my backyard? Except our backyards are inexorably creeping towards theirs. To paraphrase some nearby text, can you "believe" that Leishmania spp. don't have the right to invade your spleen?
8)
I can’t believe that I am so wonderful, or you either, frankly. And I can’t believe that other species are so unimportant.
Here's yet another reprise of confusing species with individuals. Actually, putting aside your species affiliation and considering you as an individual, I have no doubt that you are wonderful! But that is entirely different from saying that the human species deserves moral respect. It might. But what's the case for it? Does it derive from respect from individual humans? Does this argument transfer to other species via their individual members?


9)
...is it still possible to treat our existence as the one miracle in the world, and not value the existence of the millions of other species on Earth?

My position would be that we should value the existence of millions of other species. But this has nothing to do with rights. Nor does your "absence of evidence for material difference" argument have any apparent connection to your claims about the rights of non-human (or even human) species. The case for human rights (as distinguished from human species rights) does not rest on the human species being a "miracle".
10)
The alternative is to acquiesce in an economic and political order in which species do not have such a right and in which humanity continues to exterminate other species, because their continued existence is not particularly important, compared to the various economic interests that are driving them to extinction.

This picture of "evil economics" versus "the miracle of species" is an unhelpful caricature. You might know that I argue vociferously against the presumption that neoclassical economics gives us a viable general theory of value. But unfortunately, human interests that have little to do with "value in trade" (i.e. economic value) often conflict with the survival prospects of other creatures on the planet. The need to grow enough food is perhaps the single best example of this.
11)
... it seems we can make sense of at least some nonhuman organisms having interests, welfare, happiness, capabilities, or freedom, and of their possessing rights which protect or enhance these things. It is a further question, whether we can speak of whole species (as opposed to individual nonhuman organisms) having interests, welfare, happiness, capabilities, or freedom, either simply or in some extended sense.

Should we take this to express agreement that none of the preceding arguments is relevant to species' rights? Of course, your discussion omits myriad difficulties with the "interests" approach. For example: What level of consciousness is required for a creature to have interests? Do trees have interests? Leishmania? Are there good interests (worthy or moral respect) versus bad interests (not so worthy)? My personal sense of this is that the initial plausibility of these interest-based arguments (if any) fades rapidly when one considers the vast majority of creatures on the planets (insects and microbes).

12)
... puzzles and difficulties... could perhaps be surmounted if we simply stipulate that existence is good (esse qua esse bonum est, Augustine said, striking what he took to be bedrock).


Unfortunately, it seems false that, simply, all that exists is good (by virtue of merely existing). That view might make sense to a theologian who wishes to justify the Creation. But the appeal ends there. In fact, I'd say that what makes moral philosophy interesting is precisely that not all existence or ways of existing are good. (In fact, the great theologians recognized this, too. There is a rich theological literature that contends with the existence of evil in the world.) The questions remains, what are the good ways of existing and what reasons are valid ones for making such judgments?
13)
We can be reasonably sure that such an action is not in that species’ interests. In fact, conservation biologists routinely speak of various actions helping or harming a species, where they mean: helping or harming its odds of survival.


I, for one, am reasonably sure that species have no interests. Nothing in this text or elsewhere persuades me otherwise. So I, for one, am "reasonably sure" that this species' interests have no bearing on the matter.
I would cite a conservation biologist only if she gives good reasons for taking a stance on values, not by virtue of her membership in that profession. Conservation biologists are as capable as philosophers of characterizing (some would say "anthropomorphizing") species as "having interests" -- without any solid grounds for saying this.


14)
Given the great intrinsic value of individual species or biodiversity generally, we might be justified in acknowledging a species moral right to exist.
In fact, this last approach seems the straightforward and promising.


It seems to be anything but. My book on What's so good about biodiversity? conducts an extensive survey, but fails to find a single convincing reason why biodiversity, as such, is valuable. One would have thought that if it were straightforward, someone would have figured it out by now. I do hope that someone does. But I would suggest that the fact that no one has a decent theory on this is a strong hint to look for other approaches.
15)
... the widespread acceptance of group rights for human groups suggests that there is nothing conceptually confused or practically impossible about affirming group rights.


I think that a careful analysis shows that these are the rights of individuals to maintain their association with a group, as an important part of their human identity.
16)
the US Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1969, creating a de facto species right to exist; a right which was explicitly stated to trump mere economic rationales for extinguishing species.


This rights-based interpretation is, I believe, your suggested interpretation, not something in the ESA. Certainly, the ESA, as originally drafted, reflected a sense of the value of non-human species that goes beyond species-as-economic-resource. However, it is a long leap from there to species rights. If you are going to make that leap, then you owe us the reasons that launch it.
17)
... rights are the moral and legal coin of the realm.

The reasoning behind the reasoning here seems to be:
"If species had rights, then environmentalist good will prevail.  Therefore, we must establish that species have rights."

Unfortunately, this doesn't give us good reasons for believing that species have rights. Of course, if there were a convincing argument for species rights, then that would be a formidable political weapon. But convincing arguments are precisely what we lack. So long as this is true, arguments from species rights will be entirely unconvincing. Or worse. They will reflect badly on those who proffer them and will ensure that they are marginalized in the wider debate.

=========================================================================== ISEE-L is a discussion list for the International Society for Environmental Ethics. Its creation was authorized by the ISEE Board of Directors in December 2000.

Eavesdrop on Philosophers Philosophizing

Do species have a right to exist?

This is the question being discussed by a group of  environmental philosophers on a listserve I follow. The discussion is fascinating me at three levels.

First is the substance of the debate itself.  The two philosophers who launched the discussion, Phil Cafaro and Win Staples, probably want to make the best possible philosophical argument they can that species "have rights," so they can assert these rights against (or at least give them a place in the mix of) other rights during negotiations for the use of our natural resources.  It will come out here that there already exists a legal precedent that grants such rights to species (through the Endangered Species Act).  However, explicating a sound philosophical basis for such rights can be thought to put such rights on even stronger ground - moral ground.  Laws presumably can change.  Morality is generally seen to be less relative.

The second level of interest has to do with semantic acrobatics.  Words can shape a debate.  Sometimes we want to question the appropriateness of the terminology being employed.  For example, during the discussion, a couple of people asked whether the idea of "species" is accurate enough for the assignment of rights.  This person points out that there are no true species, that "species" is a "close enough" term used by scientists as a convenience for categorizing organisms for all the reasons that scientific categorization is useful.  Similarly, another writer notes that "rights" are a particularly human invention, and asks whether we should be focusing on such a human-centric perspective, or should be using our time to discuss the larger picture, where humans are just another species co-existing within the biosphere.

The third point of interest has to do with the distinctions between ethics generically, and environmental ethics.  Generically, we tend to look at ethical categories, e.g. consequences and utility (who will be helped or harmed and in what ways), principles at stake (how does something fit into my world view?), and virtue (what would a "virtuous" person - e.g. Ghandi, Jesus, Andy of Mayberry - do in this situation).  But when we are discussing ethics in a more narrow context, in this case the context of the ecological integrity of the planet, maybe the ethical considerations need to shift a little to fit the discussion.  Like, have to be bigger in scope.  Who is helped and who is harmed may need to be viewed from a very long-term, very broadly interspecial perspective.  Principles to apply may need to be drawn from beyond brotherhood or neighborhood - to emerge from concepts of ecohood.  And what constitutes virtue may need to be redefined in terms of ecological integrity rather than individual or even communal integrity.

Somewhere else I have written about the convergence theory, offered by environmental philosopher Bryan Norton, which says... we really don't need to focus on whether we should be managing our planetary resources for human utility or for ecological integrity, because if you spin out a plan to ensure the on-going availability of these resources to humans, the plan is going to be the same plan for maintaining ecological integrity along the way.  Anything less will result in decreased availability of those resources at some future point. 

Even so, we need a way to argue for the preservation of natural resources, whether to ensure their availability to our great-grandchildren or to ensure the integrity of the ecosystem.  Since we humans are very anthropocentric critters, and mostly talk about things in the context of human cultural institutions - in this case, "rights" - Phil & Win's question becomes important.

So, I thought you might like to read this debate for yourself... The entire discussion is VERY MEATY (and long), so I won't present it all at once.  Instead, today I post Phil and Win's original post.  In future days I will post the replies.   And, if you have something to add, please leave comments here on the blog (not on facebook, as Phil and Win are not there, to my knowlege).  I will forward your comments to the conversants.

By the way, most of photos here are from the BBC series Life that ran last year in Great Britain, and premiered in the U.S. this last week.  The U.S. version features a voice-over by Oprah Winfrey.  Couldn't find a link to the Oprah version, but this one will take you to the original BBC page for the UK, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lbpcy

====== This message is from the ISEE-L electronic mailing list.


Dear Colleagues,


Win Staples and I are trying to work through whether or not wild species have a right to exist free from anthropogenic extinction. Below is an attempt to grapple with this: an extended argument that such a right does exist. It is sort of the rough first half of a paper, maybe, in the second half of which we would consider objections to such a right from Norton and Rolston. Any comments would be greatly appreciated!
Phil


Philip Cafaro, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, 80523 USA. Website: www.philipcafaro.com


For a Species Moral Right to Exist


Rights (defined):

ENTITLEMENTS (1) that people behave in certain ways towards us; and (2) to key resources, that we need for survival. They are...

JUSTIFIED CLAIMS on others, with correlative...

DUTIES that they act (or refrain from acting) in certain ways. They promote and preserve certain...

INTERESTS AND ACHIEVEMENTS that we judge to be of great value. Rights also promote...

FREEDOM (1) to be what we want to be; and (2) from unwanted or harmful actions of others.

Finally, rights are...
TRUMPS, powerful claims that outweigh non-rights claims.
 I think this captures the essence of rights.
*

There are two main ways that philosophers typically try to justify rights and determine which rights people have: status theories and interest theories.


Status theories argue that because of what people are, we should respect them, by accepting rights that limit how we may treat one another.

Interest theories argue that rights are tools for protecting, maximizing, or fairly distributing something that we want to preserve, maximize, or fairly distribute; candidates include: utility, primary goods, capabilities, and resources.

I would argue that status theories and interest theories both capture important aspects of rights, and that they can and should be brought together in a eudaimonistic theory of rights. On this approach, rights are key tools for enabling human flourishing. We should uphold rights (rights have normative force) because of what people are and can be, as in status theories. People as people deserve respect, and we show that respect by respecting their rights. But we only get a full understanding of the value of rights and of which rights we should uphold, by pressing on to specify a full account of human flourishing, and by showing how protecting rights furthers this flourishing in various ways.


When rights conflict, arguably, we should adjudicate claims based on how different answers would affect overall human flourishing. If we want to know what restrictions to place on freedom of expression, when it lapses into slander; or what amount of redistribution of property to engage in as a means to promote economic security; it is hard to see how we could do better than to consider how our answers will further the well-being and well-doing, understood as comprehensively as possible, of all the people involved. (This is not to claim that such generalities will answer these questions by themselves, without further work, or that they will lead to clearly and unambiguous answers in all cases; merely to say that this is probably the best we will be able to do, by way of giving principled answers to such questions.)


We value human beings, their lives and achievements, and want to further their interests and well-being. Therefore, we affirm human rights. We affirm human rights in order to affirm human flourishing.

Of course, “flourishing” is an organic metaphor. We can plant a field to potatoes, corn, or peas, and all can “flourish.” In order to do so, however, we will have to weed the field, and uproot other plants. Human beings have been planting fields in this way for perhaps ten thousand years, deciding what will flourish, temporarily, in particular fields, and then using the produce to flourish ourselves. We’ve displaced an awful lot of other organisms in this way, and have permanently extinguished many competing species. Humanity displaces an awful lot more organisms now than we did ten thousand or even two hundred years ago, and we are ramping up the economic activities which are causing the sixth great extinction event in planetary history.


In a world where people engross more and more of the habitat and resources all species need to flourish, an obvious question becomes: do we want other species, besides people and our domesticated species and commensals, to continue to flourish on the Earth? If the answer is “yes,” then we arguably need to affirm their right to do so.
*
I would thus amend the claim, “rights are key tools for enabling human flourishing,” as follows: “rights are key tools for enabling human flourishing and the flourishing of nonhuman species.” I would further assert that wild species have a right to continued existence free from anthropogenic extinction.


In his 1981 article “Are There Any Absolute Rights?” Alan Gewirth argues that all persons have an absolute right against unjust killing, or homicide. Whether such a right really is absolute, in theory or practice, is debatable, but clearly the right to life is a fundamental human right. Without it, our lives and projects hang by a thread; without it, other rights have little point or purpose. Before we can talk about how rights improve our lives, we must secure life itself. So the right to life is the first and most important right for persons.


Just so, the right to continued existence is the first and most important right to assert on behalf of other species. A true commitment to this right entails others, which we may go on to specify: a right to a certain amount of resources and habitat; a right to continue to evolve without human interference; etc. But the right against untimely extinction is paramount.

The possession of rights defines membership within modern societies. Rights-holders are members of the moral community and must be treated with respect and restraint. Non-rights-holders are not members of the moral community and may be treated as things: mere means to community-members’ ends. The proposal to recognize a species right to existence is thus also a proposal to extend the bounds of our moral community, as Aldo Leopold advocated in his “land ethic.” My claim would be that no such widening of the moral community is possible without extending a species existence right in this way. They mean essentially the same thing. You cannot advocate Leopold’s “land ethic” without including, as a fundamental component, a right to continued existence for nature’s other species.
*
To return to our overview of rights, asserting a species moral right to exist means asserting:


ENTITLEMENTS (1) that people should refrain from activities (particularly economic activities) that endanger species; and (2) that all species should be secured the habitat and resources they need to survive. It means making...

CLAIMS on people which we take to be rationally JUSTIFIED, with correlative...

DUTIES that they act through their governments to secure the habitat and resources needed by other species to survive, that they refrain from consuming in ways that threaten other species’ essential resources, and that their governments and the corporations which provide them with goods and services likewise act with restraint. It means recognizing an...

INTEREST of other species in their continued existence—or at least their persistence in reproducing and refining a natural kind that we recognize as a good of its kind—and recognizing this as an...

ACHIEVEMENT of great creativity and lasting value. It involves promoting other species’...

FREEDOM (1) to be what are and to evolve into what they will be, free (2) from untimely human extinction or unnecessary human interference. Finally, such a right to continued existence is a powerful...

TRUMPING claim, that should outweigh non-essential human interests. Just as the presence of a starving man outweighs my right to eat the dinner I have just prepared—I owe him that dinner, even if I’m hungry—so the presence of an endangered species, reduced to its last population or last few members, outweighs a real-estate developer’s right to build on a plot of land, or a community’s right to dam a river or build a new power plant.

Recall that there are two main ways that philosophers typically try to justify rights and determine which rights people have. Both can make a place for a species right to exist.


Status theories argue that because of what people are, we should respect them, by accepting rights that limit how we may treat one another. Key characteristics which many philosophers have argued mandate such respect are human rationality, free will, autonomy, and creativity. These are indeed wonderful capacities and characteristics that deserve to be respected, preserved and enhanced, through securing people rights. Because all these human qualities can be stunted or even snuffed out entirely, through neglect and injustice.


In the same way, we can argue that we should respect other species for what they are. In general, species are the primary examples and repositories of organic nature’s creativity and diversity; they represent thousands and often millions of years of effort and achievement. In particular cases, species are what they are: keystone predators or humble detritivores; flashy birds-of-paradise or exquisitely camouflaged sparrows; towering redwoods, home to myriads of other species, or diminutive mites, inhabiting the interstices of the bristles of a particular bird species’ feathers. We should preserve the cheetah’s right to exist because it can run up to seventy miles per hour and bring down a gazelle. We should preserve chimpanzees in the wild because they engage in complex social interactions, tool-making and the rudiments of language, in addition to being our closest nonhuman kin. We should preserve horseshoe crabs because of their extreme longevity as a species, perhaps hundreds of millions of years in essentially the same form; and the Arctic Tern, because its annual peregrinations tie together the Arctic and Antarctic regions; and Leatherback sea turtles because each one roams the oceans for up to one hundred years, tracking food and natal beaches with the same level of accuracy as wolves track the details of their land habitats.


All these species are what they are, and what they are is good. It is a fatal mistake to take human beings as the template for all natural goodness, and decide what has important or ultimate value, what shall live or die, based on these things’ similarities to us. It is simply another form of unjustified self-partiality and anthropocentrism to do so.

At this point, even a sympathetic reader might protest that I am undermining all standards: opening the floodgates to anything and everything having intrinsic value and a right to exist. However, it seems to me that every species’ achievement of organic existence and persistence in the face of life’s challenges is a great achievement, well worthy of our respect. Over the years, I have learned a little bit about many species, and cannot think of one that did not reward continued observation and study. There is not a bird, insect or grass species that I have finished looking at, only to say “pffui! What a waste of time!” Nature is wonderful—full of wonders—and I fail to see how we can go wrong in appreciating it, and restraining ourselves so as to allow its natural kinds to continue to thrive and evolve.


Besides, the alternative, to restrict intrinsic value and rights-bearing to those beings (surprise!) that are similar to us, seems obviously ad hoc and suspiciously convenient. How could it be possible that only our species deserves its place in the sun? I deserve to continue to have the opportunity to think (perhaps about whether or not Kentucky will make it to the Final Four at the NCAA tournament this year, or whether the latest Twilight movie was as good as the previous one) and to act autonomously (including choosing to have Chinese or Thai food when I go out to dinner with my wife next week). But polar bears have no right to hunt seals, wolves have no right to bay at the moon, kangaroos have no right to graze thorn trees, and peregrine falcons have no right to come screaming out of the sky and “thwack!” the life out of an unwary duck. I can’t believe it.


I can’t believe that I am so wonderful, or you either, frankly. And I can’t believe that other species are so unimportant.


Isn’t this exclusive valuing of human beings an echo of cramped worldviews that we should have discarded long ago? Now that science has opened up wider views of the universe and provided greater knowledge of the history and nature of the other species with who we share this beautiful world, is it still possible to treat our existence as the one miracle in the world, and not value the existence of the millions of other species on Earth?
*
A detailed case can be made that just as human beings’ reasoning powers, freedom, autonomy and creativity grounds our status as rights-bearers, so organic species’ natural free creativity and their ability to “lock in” order (logos) many times more complex than anything found in inorganic nature grounds their status as rights-bearing entities. In both cases we may find special value in freedom, creation, and rational order.


Yet any such argument is bound to stretch our intuitions, which have been formed, after all, around paradigm arguments regarding human rights. Indeed, the fact that the extension of rights to all humans represents great moral progress to all of us engaged in this debate, might make it that much harder to think creatively or objectively about the proper criteria for rights-bearing status. ”We don’t want to undermine the case for universal human rights; perhaps it is better, then, to just focus, laser-like, on the wonders of human nature, and emphasize their uniqueness and unique value.” In this way, a commendable humanity may aid a less commendable anthropocentrism.

Yet this anthropocentrism seems a mistake, both because it undervalues wild nature and because it is untrue to our human nature, which, after all, looks outward, understanding (and valuing) much that is not us. And we may doubt whether moral conservatism will serve us well in this case, in a world where economic, demographic and technological radicalism hold sway, and where a substantial percentage of the world’s species may be extinguished by humanity in the next few centuries.


Environmental philosophers should not kid ourselves. The alternative to defending other species’ right to exist is not to debate the question of their moral status at our leisure for another thirty or forty years. The alternative is to acquiesce in an economic and political order in which species do not have such a right and in which humanity continues to exterminate other species, because their continued existence is not particularly important, compared to the various economic interests that are driving them to extinction.


Discussions of the proper moral status of species are bound to be inconclusive. Yet they are necessary, because ascribing rights necessarily involves valuing rights-bearers for what they are in themselves. This is not the only reason for granting an entity rights; as I argue in more detail below, ascribing rights to particular individuals or classes impacts society as a whole, and these impacts must be taken into account in deciding whether to grant particular rights to particular entities, what weight to give these rights, etc. However, valuing and preserving things for what they are in themselves is a fundamental aspect of rights ascription. Rights are not merely instrumental, but involve assertions of intrinsic value and respect for what something is. Having said this, however, it is important to add that rights do have great instrumental value and this aspect, too, needs to be addressed in a complete argument for a species moral right to exist.

As stated previously, interest theories of rights justification see rights as tools for protecting, maximizing, or fairly distributing something that we want to preserve, maximize, or fairly distribute. They thus see rights as instrumentally valuable in the effort to protect or increase what is intrinsically valuable, or taken as good without need for further defense. Candidates for such intrinsic or grounding value include happiness, utility, or the general welfare; the preservation, expansion or actualization of human capabilities; and human freedom to act and choose our individual paths in life.


As with status theories, interest theories have been developed with a primary focus on human interests. However, they seem amenable to broadening the community of rights-bearers, as other philosophers have argued.


Utilitarian theories that define utility in terms of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain typically take the pleasure and pain of nonhuman sentient beings into account. Hence they may support animals’ (instrumental) rights against mistreatment. Furthermore, the lives of animals and plants can go better or worse, and be more or less successful; hence it makes sense to speak of human actions harming (helping) their welfare or furthering (undermining) their interests. Given this and a sense that the welfare or interests involved are important, there seems to be no conceptual barrier to granting other organisms rights to secure their welfare, utility, or interests.


Capability theories such as Martha Nussbaum’s take the development of full human capabilities as the great good and proper goal, in life and in ethics. Nussbaum sees rights as instrumental to providing the wherewithal to allow all people to further such development. But other organisms have capabilities, too. Although this aspect of the approach has not been much developed, it seems that capability theorists should be able to support the rights of individual organisms to develop their capabilities—again, provided such development is seen as important.


Interest theories which seek to maximize human freedom see rights as instrumentally valuable for this purpose. Such theories are often libertarian, valuing political and civil rights and scorning economic and social rights; however, recently developed “left libertarian” approaches support extensive economic and social rights, based on the need for sufficient resources to allow people to be free. The main point to make here is that other organisms besides people may be free or constrained: wild, or tamed or domesticated. If we value freedom as such, we may assert that other organisms, too, have a right to their freedom. In practice, many a prickly wilderness advocate does just that, happily singing “Don’t Fence Me In” for himself and for wildlife.

It is possible to hone a metaphysical, rationalistic conception of freedom, such as Kant’s, which reserves free action for human beings. But it also possible to develop more down-to-earth conceptions of freedom, which perhaps better capture why people actually love and value it in their own lives: conceptions sensitive to our feelings of satisfaction when we do (1)what we want to do, (2) what expresses our nature and uses our powers, or (3) what achieves our larger purposes or longer-term goals. Such freedom is not absolute, godlike, or metaphysical; however, it is real. The fact that human beings may (sometimes!) exhibit a few more degrees of freedom than baboons or bats need not preclude us from recognizing their proper freedom. (A coyote will gnaw its leg off to escape a trap, while a paralegal may drag herself to an air-conditioned box for twenty years to pay the rent on another air-conditioned box. Which one is free?) And once again, we can affirm other organisms’ right to live free from interference from us and their corresponding freedom to be what they will (or perhaps, their freedom to be what they are)—provided we see preserving such freedom as important.


In all these cases, it seems we can make sense of at least some nonhuman organisms having interests, welfare, happiness, capabilities, or freedom, and of their possessing rights which protect or enhance these things. It is a further question, whether we can speak of whole species (as opposed to individual nonhuman organisms) having interests, welfare, happiness, capabilities, or freedom, either simply or in some extended sense. Thus, it is a further question whether species, as such, possess rights or could plausibly be granted rights, as a means to furthering their interests, welfare, happiness, capabilities, or freedom.


One way to deal with this issue would be to build on the idea that individual organisms have interests, can feel pleasure or pain, can utilize their capabilities, and can live freely, in order to assert their individual rights to do so. This might support stringent limits on human interference with and overutilization of the natural world, thus preserving many species.


Another way to deal with the issue might be to assert that species have an interest in their own continued existence, manifested through their successful efforts to reproduce and perpetuate new individuals of their own unique kinds. They show freedom and creativity in doing so, all of which might ground a right to continued existence.


Bryan Norton considers such an alternative, only to reject it:


It might be suggested that rights of species are somehow generated from the interests of species, but the concept of interest of species is not at all clear. Individual lives are bounded by birth and death, and these parameters guide judgments of individual interest. Anything that threatens to cause the death of an individual is clearly against that individual’s interest, other things being equal. But suppose a species is suffering a slow but steady decline in population because of competitive pressure from another species (human or otherwise). Would it be in the interest of the species to come under steady adaptational pressure that both fuels its decline in population and, simultaneously, increases the likelihood that it will speciate before it becomes extinct? That is, there is no single manner in which the ‘life’ of a species is terminated. Also, it is not obvious whether having a large population is in the interest of a species or not. Is a species ‘better off’ if it has larger population? Or is a small, robustly healthy population preferable? Is it better for a species to be moving toward more specialized adaptations, or are more opportunisitic adaptations preferable from its point of view? It is not just that these questions have no ready answer. Rather, they seem to be odd questions as it is unclear whether or not they are to be answered in terms merely of the likelihood of the species being perpetuated. Without guidance concerning the ‘interests’ of the species, there is no sense of how to proceed toward an answer to them.


. . . To apply the concepts of rights and interests to nonhuman species as collectives is not only to expand the application of the concepts; it radically alters their very logic as no reasonable analogies exist for reconstructing them. We are left without any clear guidelines for deciding what rights a species has because one cannot generate such rights from interests in any meaningful sense of that term. (Why Preserve Natural Variety? pp.170-1)


Norton certainly points to real puzzles and difficulties. Yet many of these could perhaps be surmounted if we simply stipulate that existence is good (esse qua esse bonum est, Augustine said, striking what he took to be bedrock). To some degree, we have to do this in human ethics as well, for who is to say that some people, or perhaps most people, might not be better off dead than alive? Coherent philosophies have been built around the idea that life is suffering and that our main goal should be to make an honorable surrender from the field. Once we stipulate that ethics should help us to live, in this world, however, we can leave such solutions to life’s problems aside, and go on to specify concrete ways to live better lives, which will include specifying particular rights which secure and improve human existence. Presumably, even with a full complement of rights, there will remain many puzzles about how to live well, and many forks in the road between radically different alternatives, which reason may not clearly adjudicate between. Nevertheless, we will almost certainly want to preserve a right against homicide, and other rights which render our existence more secure.


Norton suggests that puzzles regarding species’ interests might make it impossible to specify their rights. Yet if we are unsure what degree of competitive pressure is beneficial to a riverside plant species, or whether more specialized adaptations might further or undermine its survival and flourishing, or whether “it” really still is “it” after a hundred thousand years or so of evolution, we can be reasonably sure that ripping up the last remaining individual plants to build a marina will harm the species. We can be reasonably sure that such an action is not in that species’ interests. In fact, conservation biologists routinely speak of various actions helping or harming a species, where they mean: helping or harming its odds of survival. We need not specify a species right to a certain amount of competition, or a species right to a certain degree of specialized adaption, in order to assert a species right to continued existence free from anthropogenic extinction.


Human beings need many things from other human beings in order to survive and thrive; other species mostly need us to leave them alone and not pave over their habitat, poison them with our effluents, or monopolize any of their essential resources. We may leave it to them to work out the details of their lives and continued evolution. We may take the hint that species themselves give us, as they strive to perpetuate their own particular kinds, and affirm their right to do so.

Yet, it may still sound funny to say that species take an interest or have an interest in their own continued existence. So a third way to deal with the issue of whether species, as such, can plausibly be granted rights as a means to further their wellbeing, would be to argue for species’ intrinsic value, based on a naturalistic description of what they are, a la Holmes Rolston or Nicholas Agar. As in Kantian arguments for rights and duties toward human beings, if a case can be made that species as such have intrinsic value, then this intrinsic value might ground species’ rights to continued existence and human duties to ensure it. Given the great intrinsic value of individual species or biodiversity generally, we might be justified in acknowledging a species moral right to exist.


In fact, this last approach seems the straightforward and promising. It argues that in addition to valuing human beings’ happiness, freedom and development, we should value the happiness, freedom and development of other species. In other words, just as we value Homo sapiens, we should value other species, for what they are and what they may become. We should use rights as tools to ensure other species continued existence and well-being, as well as our own.
*
Again: status theories and interest theories both capture important aspects of rights. I believe they should be brought together in a eudaimonistic theory, in which rights are key tools for enabling the flourishing of all life: human and nonhuman. The flourishing of life is the great value that our own lives and our ethical and legal systems should preserve and enhance. Living beings deserve respect, in virtue of what they are. We show that respect by upholding their right to survive and thrive. We get a fuller understanding of the value of rights and which rights we should uphold, by specifying fuller accounts of human and nonhuman flourishing, and considering how asserting rights might further this flourishing in various ways.
*
Let me make three brief points in closing. First, individuals are clearly our paradigmatic rights holders, both in theory and practice. But the widespread acceptance of group rights for human groups suggests that there is nothing conceptually confused or practically impossible about affirming group rights. The post-war International Convention against Genocide, legal protections for minority group rights in various national constitutions, and passage by the UN General Assembly of the “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” in 2007, all indicate a felt need for group rights. There is no reason to limit the beneficiaries of such group rights to human groups or aggregations—unless we believe that only human groups or aggregations are important. Such an assertion would itself stand in need of rational justification.


Second, as Cass Sunstein puts it, while the philosophical justification of rights is complex and many paths to such justification are possible, “in practice, rights are a product of concrete historical experiences with wrongs” (The Second Bill of Rights, pp. 35-6). Mindful of past losses and faced with the immanent extinction of the bald eagle and many other species, the US Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1969, creating a de facto species right to exist; a right which was explicitly stated to trump mere economic rationales for extinguishing species. A subsequent Congress weakened the Act, allowing such economically-motivated extinctions in limited circumstances. Yet the manner in which this was hedged about (the need to convene a cabinet-level “God Squad,” etc.) suggests unease with this backsliding. It is deeply wrong to extinguish another life form unnecessarily, as even many philistines will acknowledge, when pressed. It is this wrong which grounds a species right to continued existence. Philosophers should not stray too far from such wrongful acts themselves, when considering whether or not we can make sense of a species right to exist, or whether such a right should be affirmed.


Third, in modern constitutional democracies, rights are the moral and legal coin of the realm. They affirm who is in and who is out of the moral and legal community. They determine how essential resources will be distributed. They determine who lives and dies; who lives well and who scrapes by. If environmentalists want to do all we can to prevent species extinctions, we need to mobilize rights in the effort. Both to make our case to the general public, which understands such matters in terms of rights; and in the courts, where rights (not intrinsic values) do indeed tend to be “trumps.” If the power of the law can give life to bogus corporate “people” with a right to “speak” politically, we should not doubt that it can also destroy life, helping to wipe real species off the face of the Earth.


=========================================================================== ISEE-L is a discussion list for the International Society for Environmental Ethics. Its creation was authorized by the ISEE Board of Directors in December 2000.

Slow Change: Don't Ask, Don't Tell

First email of the morning:  a friend of mine had just listened to an announcement by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the new Don't Ask, Don't Tell regulations [DADT] and was somewhat livid about the contents of the new regulations.  In case you live under a rock, DADT is the military policy for coping with gay and lesbian service members in their midsts.  If homosexuality gets discovered, out you go.  But if you can keep it under your hat, why, no problem at all.  My pal - who by the way, is not gay but simply cares about this stuff, but who made me take his name out of this blog because "his people" told him being discussed this way in public makes it sound like he's gay - was bent out of shape because he had hoped DADT would simply go away.

The reason for my nameless friend's expectation:  ending the discrimination and hypocracy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell was high on President Obama's campaign promise list.  So here we are, well into President Obama's term in office, and the Department of Defense is finally issuing some promised change.  Only, according to my friend, it's a luke-warm change indeed.  He says they've only offered a new version of the same old DADT. 

Drat!  I missed the announcement.  I was on a conference call with my department chair, Dave Renz, trying to convince him to convert me from a graduate teaching fellow's pittance to a regular salary.  It was kind of important. 

So - pardon a quick digression because my mom is going to be more interested in my success with Dr. Renz than the Department of Defense announcement.  Mom, Dr. Renz made no promises but he did make all the right sympathetic, caring noises, and promised he was looking for money.  Meanwhile, he encouraged me to hang around the department post-dissertation and use the time to publish - it will set me up better to get hired, and most importantly perhaps, allow me to hang onto my excellent student health insurance.  Ok, Mom?

Getting back to my friend's complaint, at first I thought about googling Secretary Gates' announcement to see what was what, but quickly remembered a much better source: Chuck Blanchard, currently General Counsel to Air Force, formerly (among other things) Arizona state senator, and general counsel to the Army and chief counsel to the drug czar's office under Bill Clinton.  I count him among my friends, but better than that, I have instant access to him because he is an active facebooker!  Chuck personally worked on the DADT regulatory changes. 

Chuck made himself instantly available on facebook.  He's just that sort of guy. 

His fuller explanation is below, but loosely for those of you who've had too much coffee,  the new regulations are promulgated under the original DADT statute, so the extent of change is bounded by what is permissible within the language of that law.  And no, they obviously don't repeal DADT and they cannot be the end of the story, but even so, the new regs represent positive change.  

These regulations are said to be temporary, until Congress can change the underlying law.  I suppose that will be one big hurdle (God only knows why it should be), but Gates has launched a study to provide leadership with the information it will need to begin that process.  Here is the text of a speech given by Gates about the steps being taken by the military in that direction: http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1419.

In the meantime, a couple of highlights:  an anonymous report will no longer trigger an investigation, third paraties will not be allowed to testify, and investigations will require a higher level of review before a discharge can occur. 

If you have further questions, I highly recommend you friend Chuck on facebook and ask him.  Chuck is very approachable.  Here's the blurb from our facebook exchange:


Sandy: I am one of the authors so I am not an objective source. We were limited to what we could do under the existing statute. While I understand the frustration that it does not go far enough (and again, we are limited by statute as to what we could do), it does make some significant change in favor of servicemembers. There is no way in which we made it worse (especially since many of these ideas came from organizations favoring a repeal) Indeed, I know of at least a few pending Air Force cases that will likely go away as a result of these changes:


• Raise the level of the officer who is authorized to initiate a fact-finding inquiry or separation proceedings regarding homosexual conduct to a general or flag officer in the Service member’s chain of command.


• Raise the level of the person who conducts a fact-finding inquiry regarding homosexual conduct to the level of O-5 (Lieutenant Colonel or Navy Commander), or above.


• Raise the level of the officer who is authorized to separate an enlisted service member for homosexual conduct to a general or flag officer in the service member’s chain of command. (Under current policy, the separation authority for officers is the Service Secretary.).


• Revise what constitutes “credible information” to initiate an inquiry or separation proceeding, by, for example, specifying that information provided by third parties should be given under oath, and by discouraging the use of overheard statements and hearsay.


• Revise what constitutes a “reliable person,” upon whose word an inquiry can be initiated, with special scrutiny on third-parties who may be motivated to harm the service member.


• Specify certain categories of confidential information that will not be used for purposes of homosexual conduct discharges:


     o Information provided to lawyers, clergy, and psychotherapists;


     o Information provided to a medical professional in furtherance of medical treatment or a public health official in the course of a public health inquiry;


     o Information provided in the course of seeking professional assistance for domestic or physical abuse;


     o Information about sexual orientation or conduct obtained in the course of security clearance investigations, in accordance with existing Department of Defense policies.

Hats off to Chuck, both for his accessibility, and for the photos, which I nabbed right off his facebook photo album!

I DIG NATURE'S DRUG

When I was lobbying, escaping into the Phoenix Mountain Preserve on the weekend for hours at a stretch - literally, three to five hours - was the only way to expunge all that adrenalyn coursing through my body the rest of the week. 

Half the year I reside in Kansas City.  I make frequent trips back to Phoenix during those months, in part just to get myself onto the mountain.  I always come away with the realization that I must live by a mountain.  I need to be in the mountains.  I am emotionally and physically healthier - I do not merely live in Phoenix, I thrive there - and the health differential is a palpable reality that pulls me back to Phoenix over and over.  Of course, it doesn't hurt that most of my long-term friendships are in Phoenix, but in truth, the mountains feel like life to me.  Sorry if that comes across as melodramatic, but it's my reality.

Today my friend Linda Ramo shared a blog post by her friend Debbie Wohl Isard (right), who apparently also thrives in the preserve.  Her post discusses the health implications of being out in nature for individuals with Attention Deficit Disorder.  Since it is no secret that I am A.D.D. - nobody who knows me ever asks whether I might slow my life down a bit;  they all know that if my life isn't naturally moving at 100 mph, I'm going to rev it up intentionally - this post was of great interest to me.  In case there's anyone in your life who's a 100 mph junkie, I'm sharing a link to the post.  Here's a tidbit to wet your whistle:

"Dr. Frances Kuo, Ph.D. and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Landscape and Human Health Laboratory conducted a study involving approximately 100 families throughout the mid-west. The participants were ages 7-12 with a ratio of 3:1 boys to girls, which reflects the typical gender distribution of ADD. Additional research was conducted with another group of almost 500 families with children ages 5-18. These research studies focused (pun intended!) on inattentive ADD rather than the hyperactive type. There are some findings that point to a similar positive effect of GREEN with hyperactive type ADD kids, but further testing is needed.

When asked by ADDitude magazine frequent contributor Carl Sherman, Ph.D. if perhaps it’s the types of activities typically done outdoors that promotes the attentional functioning benefits, Dr. Kuo responded,”I don’t think so. We compared the same activities in all three settings — for instance, you can play basketball indoors, in an asphalt schoolyard, or in a park — and there was a clear advantage to the most natural environment.” Maybe our parents were right afterall when they told us to, “Just go out and play!” "

My thanks to Debbie for bringing to light what my body knew naturally.  To read the rest of the article, or to see the rest of Debbie's blog, here is a link:  http://rakadd.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/connection-between-add-and-green-play-settings/. 

All visuals from Debbie's blog, Attention Debbie Dear (ADD)

THAT RASCALLY GUT FEELING!

Today, something a little different.  We're going to take a look at the idea of "trusting your gut," or "using your intuition." 

This semester I am teaching "Public Service Ethics: Toward Ethical Engagement."  Actually, K-State insists on calling the course "Administrative Ethics."  Yawn...

I thought I'd bring a lesson from class into my blog.  Although it has absolutely nothing to do with the environment or sustainability or even the health care bill (that was a joke), I want to present some interesting new-ish research:  That we are not rational decision-makers, but, rather, jump to conclusions based on subconscious memories, and then defend our conclusions as "rational," by dubious means.  I hope you enjoy this, and I am, as always, very interested in your feedback.  I know many will leave feedback on facebook because that's where my most vociferous friends hang, but have a heart and copy it here too, for my non-facebook readers.

Last week, my students were each given a simple scenario and asked to analyze it first with the ethical tools I've taught them, and then again, using just the provisions of a Code of Ethics.  One of my students, Suzanne, had roughly the following scenario:

The Exec Director [ED] of a nonprofit organization saw that a former employee was maligned in a newspaper article. Although the ED was not particularly close to the former employee, based on years of experience with the man, he nevertheless felt the article’s description of the former employee was so far off the mark that the negative description had to be inaccurate.  The ED was considering whether to step forward, we assume because it bothered him that the article might harm his former employee’s reputation without merit, to challenge the article's veracity.

Rather than doing the ethical analysis for you, my intent is to deal with my apparently harmless little assumption – that the ED’s motivation was human decency or perhaps loyalty to an old employee, or some such motivator. One of Suzanne’s questions for analysis was:

Why is ED is considering “doing something?”" Is he concerned about correct reportage from the newspaper? Is the report damaging [the former employee] and/or the organization by which he is employed? How is ED a stakeholder in this issue?

Suzanne’s question, "Why is ED considering doing something?" calls into question the motivation of the ED, leaving open the possibility that my assumption might not be the only possible reason for the ED's behavior. 

Until Suzanne posed her question, I would wager (and I only wager when the odds are overwhelmingly in my favor) that most of us automatically assume the ED is considering action because he has some urge - human decency or whatever – to right a wrong - to tell what he knows - to suggest that the article might be an unfair and harmful mischaracterization.  I'll leave you to ponder for now why most of us make that assumption.

While you're pondering - assuming you can do that and read at the same time - I want to discuss why it is VERY IMPORTANT to take a few minutes to question such seemingly harmless assumptions, to ask ourselves whether these assumptions might be in error.  Might there be other reasons at play?

I am through for the moment with the actual scenario.  We don't have enough information in this small snippet of a case study to figure out what the ED's motives might have been.   And in fact, they might have been exactly the motives we assumed.  But that's not the point! 

The point is that this scenario is a great jumping off place for making a BIG DEAL out of the idea that we often act from/with underlying assumptions, or intuition about people's behavior.  

Recent neurobiological research suggests an interesting phenomenon is at play in our ethical (and actually all) decision-making. This research seems to contradict our long-standing cultural belief that we are “rational man,” (or woman) and that we make “rational decisions” based on the facts.  In fact, the old line of thinking suggests that if we make erroneous decisions, it is because we lacked some of the facts – not all facts are always knowable or known to us. But recent research suggests something entirely different is going on in human decision-making. Recent research suggests humans are “pattern seekers.”  Madrazo Jr. & Motz, 2005. When a situation presents, our brain begins a fast review of past experience and/or knowledge of similar situations, subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) looking for patterns. These patterns serve as “heuristics,” short-cuts to understanding a situation and knowing how to move forward. This amounts to making a “snap judgment,” and mostly serves us well because there is not enough time in life to start over considering each situation independently.

If you’ve ever taken a math class where you’ve been taught to quickly approximate “close enough” answers, you have experienced a similar concept at play, and know that “close enough” answers are sometimes all you need to make a decision.

Unfortunately, using pattern heuristics isn’t always wise. You can get into trouble if the facts that establish similarity between the current situation and past experience(s) are either not a close enough match, or are not the critical facts for the current decision axis.   If you use the pattern as decision-making precedent, but upon closer inspection the facts don't really overlap as much as you felt they did (and the feeling thing will become critical in a moment), you've got, as Desi Arnaz, Jr. would say "some 'splainin' to do." 

This is particularly important to public servants (those who work in government or nonprofit agencies) because we have a lot of legal obligations, and a duty to consider the ethical, fiduciary and equity ramifications of our actions - in otherwords to be able to explain ourselves beyond our gut.  It is also important to anyone who encounters ethical dilemmas in the course of their work - which is almost everyone from child care worker to president of the United States (are you listening, President-depends-on-what-your-definition-of-"is"-is-Clinton and President-weapons-of-mass-destruction-Bush?  No, I suspect you're not.). 

These days no one is immune to becoming the next headline on the front page of the newspaper.  And even though many people who are called out on ethical issues did try to make the best decision they knew how under the circumstances, sometimes that's not enough.  Understanding the way your own thought patterns might trip you up and employing additional tools to outsmart these potential pitfalls can help you avoid the front page.  I’m going to give you a working example in a moment, but first let me make one more point about our subconscious use of pattern heuristics for decision-making.

Now here comes the "feelings" part.  We apparently have “emotional heuristics” too.  From Roberston, et. al., 2007: "[t]he observed posterior cingulate cortex activation may reflect the dependence of moral sensitivity on access to one's emotional, cognitive and somatic experiences related to previous moral conflicts.  In other words, not only do we subconsciously (and consciously) hang onto fact patterns, but we also have emotional memory connected to these past fact patterns. If a past experience was unpleasant, we have a negative emotional response. If the past experience was positive, we would have a corresponding positive emotional response. Depending on the story, we may have associated feelings of disgust, frustration, anger, disappointment, abandonment, rejection, etc., or feelings of pleasure, pride, gratefulness, humility, excitement, success, acceptance, etc.

Researchers from the fields of neurobiology and cognitive psychology tell us that these emotional memories often propel us to snap “emotional” decisions. Thus, rather than a cool review of the facts prior to decision-making, researchers say we look around at the available facts, and pick and choose from among those facts the ones that tend to support and buttress our emotion-driven snap decision.

All this is generally (but not always) subconscious. We choose facts with which to build a defense of our emotional decision and call it a rational decision – after all, we have collected supporting facts to point to. You might most clearly recognize this tendency in the highly polarized world of politics, where each side uses facts selectively to buttress their ideological reasoning. 

I keep mentioning that these heuristic-driven decisions can sometimes be conscious - we are aware of them. When they are, that is what we call “intuition” or "gut feeling," or, for our purposes, “intuition ethics.” Our gut is telling us that something is right or wrong. When we decide to listen to our gut, and then consciously look around for facts to support that gut feeling, we bring the usually subconscious process to the surface.

This is why, when we discuss “intuition ethics,” I will always tell you, “Treat your gut feeling like you would treat pain. Pain is only a secondary symptom of an underlying (primary) disease or injury. Rather than just treating the symptom (pain), go looking for the underlying diagnosis.  Anger offers a similar parallel. When anger flares, it is a secondary symptom of something gone wrong. But rather than acting on your anger (a secondary fix), we would rather unearth the underlying trigger and try to find a permanent fix for this primary problem.  Intuition is the same. Your “gut” doesn’t have a brain. Your gut feeling is simply an emotional memory device that clues you into something deeper.  In truly important matters, do not just “go with your gut” unless you have absolutely no time to explore the underlying driver for its relevancy.  Treat your gut reaction as a warning bell, then explore the reasons that bell is ringing by using the extensive collection of ethical tools you are learning in class.

EXAMPLE: Let’s look at one case. Consider a situation where the state has determined that a north-south transportation corridor needs to be expanded, to ease traffic from the southern suburbs into downtown (north). This actually happened in Kansas City, Missouri.  Unfortunately, the proposed highway (Highway 71) would tear through parts of an established minority community, or as one of my students told me, “They cut the highway through my uncle’s vegetable garden.”

That’s personal!

Some of my students grew up in or still reside in the impacted community, while others didn’t have a stake in the highway decision one way or the other. Yet, incredibly enough, even my students who had no connection with the impacted community, and even those who use and benefit from Highway 71 (which was already built by the time we discussed it) - these students did have all sorts of (mostly negative) emotional reactions based on other experiences – sometimes their own, sometimes drawing from injustices all the way back to the American Indians being kicked off their lands!

In class, we consciously outed their emotional responses.  We worked to separate the facts of the transportation decision from their emotions.  We looked at the specific past experiences that the students drew upon when first thinking about the Highway 71 decision, and compared the two situations for similarities and differences.  In what ways is the federal taking of Indian land and sending Native Americans to reservations like and not like using the tool of eminent domain to "take," i.e. condemn and purchase, lands for the highway?   How, if at all, does understanding these distinctions change the way I feel about the proposal?

Every group I have done this exercise with ultimately condoned the transportation corridor as a beneficial thing overall - this surprised me, by the way - even those for whom the impacted community was home. The woman whose uncle’s garden was taken said, “I never would have believed it could be a good thing for the community, but it has ultimately been beneficial.”  As an aside, while I taught some students to unearth their heuristics around the highway project, a second group was carrying out an "old-style analysis."  I noticed that the group I brought into touch with their emotions spent more time than the old-style group generating ideas to mitigate additional negative community impacts.  I don't want to assume they did it because they were feeling the project impact, but I'd like to think so.

In sum, assumptions operate silently, hidden within our subconscious, or sometimes they rise to a level of urgency, emerging as a strong "gut feeling."  These memory-driven beliefs and feelings propel us to act.   It is important to identify and recognize our human tendency to operate from past patterns.  And because what motivates us is not always obvious, rational or conscious, identifying our assumptions and questioning our "gut" is good practice.  It's good to be aware of the way our minds work, and be prepared with some additional analytical tools.
 
Madrazo Jr, G. and L. Motz (2005). "Brain Research: Implications to Diverse Learners." Science Educator 14(1): 5
 
Robertson, D., J. Snarey, et al. (2007). "The Neural Processing of Moral Sensitivity to Issues of Justice and Care." Neuropsychologia 45(4): 755-766.
 

Intuition vs Rational Thought photo, by Martin Pyper, from http://www.behance.com/ 
Brain illustration from http://www.sixthman.net/.
Executive decision illustration from http://www.flattland.com/.
Highway 71 photo from http://www.interstate-guide.com/index.html