COST AND BENEFITS:The Ethics of Conserving Depletable Resources

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Business Ethics MGT610

LESSON 31

Because of these problems, some contend that utilitarianism cannot lead our pollution control

policy. Perhaps absolute bans on pollution are more adequate. Some writers even suggest that

when risk cannot be reliably estimated, it is best to steer clear of such projects. Others maintain

that we should identify those who will bear the risks and take steps to protect them.

It holds that until those patterns of hierarchy and domination are changed, we will be unable to

deal with environmental crises. In a system of hierarchy, one group holds power over another

and members of the superior group are able to dominate those of the inferior group and get

them to serve their Many thinkers have argued that the environmental crises we face are rooted

in the social systems of hierarchy and domination that characterize our society. This view, now

referred to as social ecology, ends. What literally defines social ecology as "social" is its

recognition of the often overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise

from deep-seated social problems. Conversely, present ecological problems cannot be clearly

understood, much less resolved, without resolutely dealing with problems within society. To

make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many

others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today--apart, to be

sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.

If this approach seems a bit too "sociological" for those environmentalists who identify

ecological problems with the preservation of wildlife, wilderness, or more broadly, with "Gaia"

and planetary "Oneness," it might be sobering to consider certain recent facts. The massive oil

spill by an Exxon tanker at Prince William Sound, the extensive deforestation of redwood trees

by the Maxxam Corporation, and the proposed James Bay hydroelectric project that would

flood vast areas of northern Quebec's forests, to cite only a few problems, should remind us that

the real battleground on which the ecological future of the planet will be decided is clearly a

social one.

Indeed, to separate ecological problems from social problems--or even to play down or give

token recognition to this crucial relationship-- would be to grossly misconstrue the sources of

the growing environmental crisis. The way human beings deal with each other as social beings

is crucial to addressing the ecological crisis. Unless we clearly recognize this, we will surely

fail to see that the hierarchical mentality and class relationships that so thoroughly permeate

society give rise to the very idea of dominating the natural world.

Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive

imperative of "grow or die," is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will

falsely tend to blame technology as such or population growth as such for environmental

problems. We will ignore their root causes, such as trade for profit, industrial expansion, and

the identification of "progress" with corporate self-interest. In short, we will tend to focus on

the symptoms of a grim social pathology rather than on the pathology itself, and our efforts will

be directed toward limited goals whose attainment is more cosmetic than curative.

While some have questioned whether social ecology has dealt adequately with issues of

spirituality, it was, in fact, among the earliest of contemporary ecologies to call for a sweeping

change in existing spiritual values. Such a change would mean a far-reaching transformation of

our prevailing mentality of domination into one of complementarity, in which we would see

our role in the natural world as creative, supportive, and deeply appreciative of the needs of

nonhuman life. In social ecology, a truly natural spirituality centers on the ability of an

Business Ethics MGT610

awakened humanity to function as moral agents in diminishing needless suffering, engaging in

ecological restoration, and fostering an aesthetic appreciation of natural evolution in all its

fecundity and diversity.

Thus social ecology has never eschewed the need for a radically new spirituality or mentality in

its call for a collective effort to change society. Indeed, as early as 1965, the first public

statement to advance the ideas of social ecology concluded with the injunction: "The cast of

mind that today organizes differences among human and other life-forms along hierarchical

lines of 'supremacy' or 'inferiority' will give way to an outlook that deals with diversity in an

ecological manner--that is, according to an ethics of complementarity."1 In such an ethics,

human beings would complement nonhuman beings with their own capacities to produce a

richer, creative, and developmental whole-not as a "dominant" species but as a supportive one.

Although this idea, expressed at times as an appeal for the "respiritization of the natural world,"

recurs throughout the literature of social ecology, it should not be mistaken for a theology that

raises a deity above the natural world or that seeks to discover one within it. The spirituality

advanced by social ecology is definitively naturalistic (as one would expect, given its relation

to ecology itself, which stems from the biological sciences), rather than supernaturalistic or

pantheistic.

To prioritize any form of spirituality over the social factors that actually erode all forms of

spirituality, raises serious questions about one's ability to come to grips with reality. At a time

when a blind social mechanism, the market, is turning soil into sand, covering fertile land with

concrete, poisoning air and water, and producing sweeping climatic and atmospheric changes,

we cannot ignore the impact that a hierarchical and class society has on the natural world. We

must earnestly deal with the fact that economic growth, gender oppressions, and ethnic

domination-not to speak of corporate, state, and bureaucratic interests-are much more capable

of shaping the future of the natural world than are privatistic forms of spiritual self-

regeneration. These forms of domination must be confronted by collective action and major

social movements that challenge the social sources of the ecological crisis, not simply by

personalistic forms of consumption and investment that often go under the rubric of "green

capitalism." We live in a highly cooperative society that is only too eager to find new areas of

commercial aggrandizement and to add ecological verbiage to its advertising and customer

relations.

Until these systems (such as racism, sexism, and social classes) are changed, we will be unable

to deal adequately with the environment. Eco-feminists, a related group of thinkers, sees the

key form of hierarchy connected to the destruction of the environment as the domination of

women by men. They believe that there are important connections between the domination of

women and the domination of naturepatterns of thinking, which justify and perpetuate the

subordination. This logic of domination sets up dualisms (artificial and natural, male and

female) where one of the pair is seen as stronger and more important. To solve our ecological

problems, we must first change these destructive modes of thinking.

According to the ethics of caring, the destruction of nature that has accompanied male

domination must be replaced with caring for and nurturing our relationships with nature and

other living things. Nature must be seen as an "other" that must be cared for, not tamed or

dominated. Thought-provoking as these approaches are, they are still too new and undeveloped

to give us specific direction.

Business Ethics MGT610

The Ethics of Conserving Depletable Resources

Conservation refers to the saving or rationing of natural resources for later use. In fact, even

pollution control can be seen as a form of conservation, since pollution consumes air and water.

However, generally, conservation refers to the saving of finite, depletable resources. The only

source of such resources is what has been left over from previous generations.

As we deplete the world's resources, there is unavoidably a smaller amount of them left for

future generations. If future generations have an equal right to the world's resources, then by

depleting them we are stealing what is actually theirs.

A number of writers have claimed that it is a mistake to think that future generations have

rights. They advance three main reasons to show this:

First, future generations cannot intelligently be said to have rights because they do not now

exist and may never exist. I may be able to think about future people, but I cannot hit them,

punish them, injure them, or treat them wrongly. Future people exist only in the imagination,

and imaginary entities cannot be acted on in any way whatsoever except in the imagination.

Similarly, we cannot say that future people possess things now when they do not yet exist to

possess or have them. Because there is a possibility that future generations may never exist,

they cannot "possess" rights.

Second, if future generations did have rights, we might be led to the absurd conclusion that we

must sacrifice our entire civilization for their sake. Suppose that each of the infinite number of

future generations had an equal right to the world's supply of oil. Then we would have to divide

the oil equally among them all, and our share would be a few quarts at the most. We would

then be put in the absurd position of having to shut down our entire Western civilization so that

each future person might be able to possess a few quarts of oil.

Third, we can say that someone has a certain right only if we know that he or she has a certain

interest that that right protects. The purpose of a right, after all, is to protect the interests of the

right holder, but we are virtually ignorant of what interests future generations will have. What

wants will they have?

John Rawls, on the other hand, argues that though it is unjust to impose heavy burdens on

present generations for the sake of the future, it is also unjust for present generations to leave

nothing for the future. We should ask ourselves what we can reasonably expect they might

want and, putting ourselves in their place, leave what we would like them to have left for us.

Justice, in short, requires that we hand over to our children a world in no worse condition than

the one we received ourselves.

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