Rolston, Chap. 4, CNV: Wildlife Values
- HIGHER AND LOWER ANIMALS (section 1)
- Some animals are higher in sense of
- Greater intrinsic (not instrumental value-lower animals often
of more instrumental value to ecosystems)
- More valuable evolutionary achievements
- Have subjectivity, sentience, consciousness, neural
complexity, learning
- Eagle versus a mussel, octopus versus a ant
- Rolston worried by the objection: "We say they are higher only
because they are more like us (and this is self-centered false pride)"
- He claims this is not what he is doing
- But we shouldn't value them to the extent they are like us;
- Don't judge animals by standards of what is excellent in human
life
- If we did, monkeys would be valuable because they are like
retarded humans
- Do not value animals as poor imitations of what later is
achieved in humans
- Even Martians who came to look at the earth before humans arrived
would say eagles are of greater value than mussels
- HOW VALUE APPLIES TO ANIMALS
- Two different types of value: moral and nonmoral value
- 107: Nature is amoral (not right or wrong), though valuable (good,
not bad)
- Two ways of valuing
- Morally evaluating (right/wrong)
- Non-morally evaluating (good/bad)
- For example,
- Push bolder on a person -- wrong
- Boulder fall on a person - bad
- Ice closes around whales (or wolf eats a deer, or deer gets a tree on its
leg)
- Makes no sense to say right or wrong, but could be evaluated
as good or bad.
- Animals can value things non-morally (not morally), so it is false to say
that without humans there would be no value in the world
- Coyote values the field mice, monkeys enjoy cooling down in a river
on a hot day
- Refutation of idea man is the measurer of all things, that all value
depends on humans valuing (because animals can value)
- Beings can be morally important (in own right) and not be moral agents
(who know the difference between right and wrong, values things as right
and wrong, and can be held morally responsible)
- Animals are morally important in their own right (as are plants,
ecosystems, etc), but they are not moral agents
- Animals are not moral agents, but the values in their lives are morally
important
- Humans must consider those values when they decide how it is right
and wrong to act.
- Animal may have virtues (praiseworthy characteristics), though not
moral virtues
- Dif moral/nonmoral virtues:
- Honesty/dishonesty are moral virtues/vices; Being a good
guitarist is a nonmoral virtue, being unable to appreciate music
is a nonmoral vice
- Moral virtue/vices deserve moral praise/blame; Nonmoral
virtues and vices deserve admiration or disdain, scorn,
contempt.
- Animals excellences include resolve, endurance, courage, cleverness,
even wisdom
- Dominant wolf expresses virtues to be admired and perhaps females
that mate with him sense this
- If positively value animal excellences, must negatively value animal
vices
- ANIMAL RIGHTS
- Rolston values animals, but does not accept animal rights
- Instead, we have moral obligations to consider animal's welfare, goods,
interests and may not compromise them w/o sufficient justification
- Why no animal rights?
- Deficient arguments for the no animal rights view
- Animals can't claim their rights (but neither can retarded people and
they have rights that others can claim for them)
- Rights protect personal and political values and these animals lack
(but infants also lack personality and political freedom and we allow
they have rights)
- There are no rights in nature because human (or other moral agents)
must be present to bear the duties those rights involve (but given that
human moral agents are present against whom right claims can
apply, it is possible that animals in nature have rights)
- Rolston's strongest argument against animal rights: Animal rights are in
tension with conservation of natural value
- If animal rights are like human rights in requiring saving the rights
holder from natural dangers
- Animal rights would involve massive human intervention in nature
and that would undermine the conservation of natural value.
- But it is not clear that we must conceive of animal rights as having the same
content as human rights
- If animal rights were negative only (rights against interference by
moral agents), and not positive (rights to assistance), massive
interference in nature to protect animals would not follow
- ROLSTON'S VIEWS ABOUT HOW TO TREAT WILDLIFE
- (Chap. 4, Sec 3, Conserving Natural Value: Animal Welfare and
Managed Wildlife)
- Five Cases
- Do not rescue cases:
- One: Point Barrow Gray Whale Case (stranded several miles from open
ocean with shrinking holes of ice from which to breathe, Russian ice
breaker broke open path to the sea, 1 million dollars spent) p. 110
- Two: Yellowstone Bison Drowning/Freezing Case: Snowmobilers,
against Park orders, tried to rescue it p. 110-11
- Three: Yellowstone bighorn sheep who caught pinkeye causing partial
blindness and starved or fell from the slopes and 60% of herd died (officials
refused to let wildlife veterinarians treat them) p. 112
- Reasons not to help (not to act on our compassion)
- May make us feel good, but fails to best conserve all values
present
- Harming other animals who would have fed off of the death
- Harming the species by helping the weak survive
- Rescuing the animal harms the animal's wild integrity
- Let's nature take its course
- These considerations suggest it is good for animal individuals
(generally) and animal species for humans to not intervene
- Do rescue cases:
- Four: Park Service mercy killing a bear that was hit by a truck
- We should extend sympathy for animals that have been involved in
culture
- Letting the bear suffer on the road would not be letting nature take its
courseIt does take away food from scavengers.
- Compromise the animal's wild integrity? (Yes? Already been
compromised? Does compassion outweighs this value?)
- Five: Park Service rescued a grizzly and her cubs when they became
stranded on a island in Yellowstone lake
- Harming other species (scavengers)
- Harming grizzly species (weakening the gene pool of grizzlies by
rescuing those who got themselves into trouble)
- Undermining wild integrity of the animals
- Not letting nature take its course
- Reasons to rescue
- Biodiversity value (unlike the bison or bighorn sheep, grizzlies are
an endangered species in Yellowstone)
- Despite appearances, wildness value or the principle to let nature
take its course can be seen as supporting the rescue
- Humans endangered the grizzly; and by helping to insure we
don't drive it extinct we do more to let nature take its course
(globally and in the long run) even though we
intervene/interfere with nature in the local, short run
- In this case, wildness value and biodiversity value seem to coincide
- Promoting biodiversity that conflicts with wildness value occurs
when, for example, we prevent non-anthropogenic (nonhuman caused) extinction or
enhance biodiversity
- ROLSTON'S MORAL PRINCIPLES CONCERNING ANIMALS
- Different concerns for wild & domestic animals:
- Significant differences between how we should treat wild animals and
animals in culture (only for the latter should we act on compassion)
- Wild animals do not have rights to be saved from natural dangers
- Whereas humans and domesticated animals do
- Human style sympathy and compassion (e.g., attempts to minimize
suffering) is not appropriate toward wild animals, though it is toward
animals captured in human culture
- Is the feeling okay, just not the action?
- We should respect a (wild) animal's wild integrity
- Rolston suggests that the animal's wild integrity (in addition to
the integrity of wild nature) is harmed by some intervention
- Compassionate intervention severs the animal from their wild worlds
- Animal's welfare is entwined with its wildness
- This wild ecological integrity harmed by human intervention
- Compassion treats them unnaturally and fails to value them for what
they are in the wild.
- Good (in one respect) for the individual animal for humans not to
intervene
- Is it good for them or only good for our conception of them as wild
animals (as one critic claims)?
- Don't harm other individuals or species:
- So-called "helping" individual
wild animals who are in trouble often harms other individuals or the species.
- U.S. Park Service Policy of "let nature take its course" (respect for natural
processes-"wildness/naturalness value") is a good one and is unfairly
criticized by those who believe it manifests a cruel indifference to animal
welfare
- The let nature take its course Park Service policy allows for
intervention when an animal's plight is a function of humans
- Concern for biodiversity is significant in deciding how to treat wild animals
and this concern can conflict with wildness value (letting nature take its
course)
- MORE PRINCIPLES
- Killing individuals to help species is permissible (and even required)
- Acceptable as species are more important than individuals
- Examples:
- Killing inbred Siberian tigers in zoos to open up space for more
genetically diverse tigers whose breeding and restoration would
improve the prospects of this endangered species.
- Shooting goats on San Clemente to protect endangered species of
plant
- Rolston ranks the integrity of ecosystems over welfare of feral animals.
- E.g., Mustangs degrading Western range
- Escaped from European domestic stock
- Not native to western land
- Were horses in north America many thousands of years earlier, but went extinct on own (presumably no longer fit for
altered landscape) and western landscapes developed without them
- That they can survive there doesn't make them good adapted fits on today's western range, even though many now feel
that "the belong on" the western landscape.
- Policy issue: Until 1970, were 2,000 as they were hunted for dog food or shot as nuisance
- Now protected, there are 50,000Congress protect them as (cultural) living symbols of historic and pioneer spirit of West
- Range over grazed (only partly by the horses whose number is 1/50 of # of cattle, sheep, and goats grazed) and
in so far as it is, they should be removed
- Rolston believes that human introduction of species into new places
might enhance overall natural values
- Introducing mammals to Hawaii
- Introducing fish to barren upper reaches of waters of western rivers
where fish couldn't get due to sheer contingency of a big waterfall might increase natural value
- Sinking old boats to form wildlife habitat on bottom of oceans
- Considerations
- If admire superior evolutionary achievements of higher animals
(charismatic megafauna), introducing them would enrich the
landscape (add to natural value)
- Here Rolston is willing to weigh increasing evolutionary
achievements value more highly than wildness value
- So if we genetically engineered a species with superior
skills/sentience and added it to certain places in nature it could
enhance natural value?
- Does this show that Rolston undervalues wildness value?
- Must avoid destroying already present biodiversity, so these
introductions should be considered only where nature has not
generated alternative natural histories
- Are their any such places?
- Doesn't Rolston needs to say that these natural histories are
unique and special and add to diversity since if they are not,
then adding the higher life forms in place of lower already-well-represented species would increase natural value?
- Must be introduced in places where wildlife is absent by sheer
contingency
- For sheer contingency is not something one always needs to
value
- Do we not need to value a wild natural process/event that happens by sheer contingency?
- MONGOOSE ON HAWAII EXAMPLE
- Should we introduce Mongoose on Hawaiian islands?
- At first an artifact, but now wildness returned
- Why doesn't he say this of feral horses?
- Where there are no terrestrial reptiles, amphibians or mammalsIntroducing these would be to put there what we take to be major evolutionary achievements (the
charismatic megafauna) that enrich landscapes in other places
- Granted introducing any species is likely to diminish the resources of local species, but since these
are mammals (which represent higher ecological achievements according to Rolston), the loss
might be more than made up for?
- If it were by sheer contingency/accident that they weren't on Hawaiian islands,
- Perhaps should introduce them
- But not sheer contingency: Hawaii as a remote test of oceanic mobility
- Hawaii as nature testing and developing skills that couldn't be developed in any other place (or at least many
other)
- Biodiversity concerns: Also all the ground nesting birds on Hawaii with reduced powers of flight that took up niches
otherwise occupied by mammals are being threatened by introduced predatory mammals (compromises biodiversity
value)
- 2/3 of endemic birds of Hawaii are extinct or nearly soMany plants that didn't develop thorns or chemical defenses against mammal grazers are also going extinct
- More plants and birds know to have goon extinct in Hawaii than in all North America
- So introductions to Hawaii not adding to but subtracting from richness of life on earth
- Tension here between Rolston's concern to help nature with its "evolutionary achievements" and his
concern for biodiversity
- Rolston's qualified support for hunting if eat what one kills
- And if we see it as participation in a fundamental natural process
- "We may participate in our ecology and have no duty to remake nature"
- Rolston opposes exploitation of wildlife that is blatantly disrespectful to the
animals
- Examples of deplorable commercial exploitations of wildlife
- Prairie Dog shoots in Colorado when done for amusement of
contestants and cash into local economy (they can prosper by
other means)
- Sweetwater Texas Rattlesnake roundup (give to charity)
- Rolston opposed commercial use of wildlife for frivolous purposes
- Using elephants tusks for piano keys and feet for ashtraysUsing snow leopards for fur coats and fashion
- Using alligators for chic purses and shoes
- Some commercial exploitation of wildlife is acceptable as a pragmatic
means to preserve species
- E.g., End ban on trading elephant ivory
- To have wild animals in culture means that sometimes it is justifiable to
kill them
- Minnesota wolves example
- 1,200 wolves in a territory with 12,000 livestock ranchesEach year about 30-40 problem wolves (who kill livestock) are killedIf want this mix of nature/culture, if want to have wolves, we must
kill some of them.
- We ought to do both (have wolves and kill some)