Science, Environmental Ethics, and the Public Sphere

The National Science Foundation sponsors a week-long workshop on Science, Ethics and Public Policy at the Center for Ethics at the University of Montana organized by Dane Scott. As a participant in this workshop, I had the opportunity to meet some very interesting and influential people in the public policy world and also think more deeply about some of the ethical and philosophical issues that we face as scientists, citizens and humans. Here are some of the interesting people and ideas that came out of my attending the workshop:

1. Intrinsic Value as a Heuristic- One of the central questions in Environmental Ethics (and Ecological Economics) is whether nature has intrinsic value or just instrumental value. Because Philosophers love thought experiments, they pose the following: Suppose you are the only human left on Earth, would it be morally wrong to cut down a beautiful, old Redwood tree, just for the fun of it? If you answer yes, it’s likely because you see the tree as having some intrinsic value. If you answer no, you’re probably an Economist. In other words, you see the tree as having instrumental value (providing some fun for the last person on earth) rather than inherent value.

I’m not so much interested in weighing in on the question itself, but I do have something to say about the meta question: Why do so many of us (including me) have the intuition that nature has value independent of what it can do for us? How would this value system come about if humans presumably evolved to use the environment to promote their own survival and reproduction? I’d like to suggest that one possibility is that intrinsic valuation of the environment is a heuristic that preserves long-term instrumental value. Perhaps pure instrumental valuation of the environment makes over-exploitation likely, while intrinsic valuation creates behavioral predispositions that enable a more sustainable long-term instrumental use of the environment. Another interesting feature of the ‘intrinsic value heuristic’ is that it seems to be immune to argument about the best use of a resources’ value. This intrinsic value framing might provide rhetorical power that would not be possible with a position of simply preserving long-term instrumental value.

2. Communicating with the Press, Public and other Disciplines- One of the highlights of the week was meeting and talking with Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post, arguably one of the few remaining investigative reporters covering the White House and Environmental issues. Ms. Eilperin noted that many scientists rarely talk to the public about their research and often lack the skills to effectively communicate about the implications of their work. We talked about the importance of engaging with others outside of your discipline, outside of academia, and outside of the ’socio-educational elite.’ The ability to communicate across these lines can promote both the public good and scientific progress by enabling the dissemination of important information.

3. Spatial and Temporal ‘Gaps’ - Andrew Light of George Mason University and the Center for American Progress, a DC think tank, spoke on a number of topics related to science, ethics and policy, including the challenges inherent in motivating public support for mitigating climate change and the potential risks associated with the prevalent use of nanomaterials in consumer products. (Because nanoparticles can penetrate into the nuclei of cells and cross the blood-brain barrier, their use in consumer products without adequate safety testing is a matter of concern.)

For me, the most interesting aspect of Dr. Light’s work was the emphasis he placed on what he called spatial and temporal gaps in the way humans reason about their effects on the environment, working from data derived from survey responses to questions about climate change. Spatial gaps are the devaluing of the effects that are far away in space and temporal gaps are the devaluing of the effects that are far away in time. This focus on the spatial and temporal dimensions resonates with the new framework for conceptualizing cooperation that I have been working on. In this work, I focus on the spatial and temporal effects that occur when individuals interact with their environments and make decisions that have consequences far away in space and time (download my Spatial and Temporal Assortment paper or check out my Research page). Dr. Light also noted that he’s found strong relationships between attitudes towards egalitarianism versus hierarchy and attitudes about climate change, work that draws on George Lakoff’s approaches to moral cognition and political beliefs.

4. Human Rights, Climate Change and Personal Responsibility- Don Brown of Penn State University spoke about the ethical dimensions of the climate change debate, especially the influence that climate change has on individuals in third world countries and on future generations (again the spatial and temporal issues from #3). His website, Climate Ethics.org, was voted by Time magazine as one of the top 15 Green websites of the year. Brown advocates framing inadequate responses to climate change as human rights violations (of those who will be negatively effected by climate change). When I asked him about the respective roles of governmental versus personal responsibility, he said that human rights theory is very clear on this issue: according to human rights theory, each of us has a personal responsibility to prevent harm to others if we know that harm might occur because of our actions or inactions.