Existence Value, Preference Satisfaction, and the Ethics of Species Extinction

Existence value refers to the value humans ascribe to the existence of something, regard­less of whether it is or will be of any particular use to them. This existence value based on preference satisfaction should be taken into account in evaluating activities that come with a risk of species extinction. There are two main objections. The first is that on the preference satisfaction interpretation, the concept lacks moral importance because satisfying people’s preferences may involve no good or well-being for them. However, existence value can be based on a restricted version of the preference satisfaction theory, which is not vulnerable to the skeptical arguments about the link between preference satisfaction and well-being. The second objection is that even if preference satisfaction can be linked to well-being, understanding existence value in terms of individual preference satisfaction is incoherent, because existence value reflects disinterested preferences that involve no benefits to the individual. However, the fact that existence value may involve disinterested preferences does not threaten the coherence of the concept, but suggests that it does not fit smoothly into the “utilitarian” or “welfarist” framework it is commonly considered within. A pluralistic normative approach based on prima facie duties can be an alternative to standard utilitarian-style approaches for considering existence value in concrete cases involving a risk of species extinction, such as through deep sea mining

Precaution and Fairness: A Framework for Distributing Costs of Protection from Environmental Risks

While there is an extensive literature on how the precautionary principle should be interpreted and when precautions should be taken, relatively little discussion exists about the fair distribution of costs of taking precautions. We address this issue by proposing a general framework for deciding how costs of precautions should be shared, which consists of a series of default principles that are triggered according to desert, rights, and ability to pay. The framework is developed with close attention to the pragmatics of how distributions will affect actual behaviours. It is intended to help decision-makers think more systematically about distributional consequences of taking precautionary measures, thereby to improve decision-making. Two case studies—one about a ban on turtle fishing in Costa Rica, and one about a deep-sea mining project in Papua New Guinea—are given to show how the framework can be applied

What our hopes and fears tell us about our values

This open issue of the Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics consists of four papers that discuss topics covering fetal diagnostics ethics, value conflicts in the use of artificial intelligence, abortion and population ethics

Constraints on the Precautionary Principle and the Problem of Uncertainty

Kramer and colleagues (2017) propose three constraints on the precautionary principle (PP)—consistency, avoidance of counterproductivity, and proportionality—which should be observed in any application of PP (Kramer et al. 2017 ). I do not examine these here in detail. Instead, I take them for granted as reasonable constraints, while drawing out what I see as a potentially devastating implication of Kramer and colleagues’ proposal to let “opportunity costs,” that is, costs in the form of foregone opportunities to spend resources differently, count as harms threatening the consistency of PP. My argument is that under a standard definition of uncertainty, the consequence of this proposal is that one must either (1) reject PP as a sound principle of policymaking and decision making, or (2) reject the constraint of consistency. Since the second solution would be contrary to reason, while the first might be ethically undesirable, I propose instead to redefine uncertainty so as to better capture what is at stake in situations calling for some sort of precautionary approach

Existence Value, Preference Satisfaction, and the Ethics of Species Extinction

Existence value refers to the value humans ascribe to the existence of something, regard­less of whether it is or will be of any particular use to them. This existence value based on preference satisfaction should be taken into account in evaluating activities that come with a risk of species extinction. There are two main objections. The first is that on the preference satisfaction interpretation, the concept lacks moral importance because satisfying people’s preferences may involve no good or well-being for them. However, existence value can be based on a restricted version of the preference satisfaction theory, which is not vulnerable to the skeptical arguments about the link between preference satisfaction and well-being. The second objection is that even if preference satisfaction can be linked to well-being, understanding existence value in terms of individual preference satisfaction is incoherent, because existence value reflects disinterested preferences that involve no benefits to the individual. However, the fact that existence value may involve disinterested preferences does not threaten the coherence of the concept, but suggests that it does not fit smoothly into the “utilitarian” or “welfarist” framework it is commonly considered within. A pluralistic normative approach based on prima facie duties can be an alternative to standard utilitarian-style approaches for considering existence value in concrete cases involving a risk of species extinction, such as through deep sea mining

Hard Environmental Choices: Comparability, Justification, and the Argument from Moral Identity

In decision-making based on multiple criteria, situations may arise where agents find their options to be neither better than, worse than, or equal to each other with respect to the relevant criteria. How, if at all, can a justified choice be made between such options? Are the options incomparable? Exploring a hypothetical case illustrating how this situation can arise in the environmental context –that of an ethics committee which is to make a choice between recommending or not that a deep-sea mining project is allowed to proceed –this paper argues that the case is best understood as involving options that are comparable in the sense of being ‘on a par’. On the background of a critical discussion of Ruth Chang’s ‘self-governance’ theory of choice in cases of parity, it is suggested that in the environmental context, the idea of choices expressing a ‘moral identity’–reflected in statements about what kind of people or society we ideally think we should be –may lead us in the direction of a plausible solution to these hard cases