PROCESS ECOLOGICAL ETHICS
 (continued)

Introduction

The Process Relational Metaphysical Vision

The Passage to Ethics


Some General Features of Process 
Ecological Ethics

Intrinsic and Extrinsic or Instrumental Value

This is a fairly straightforward distinction.  Value is the good in the 
context of action.  Something or some process has intrinsic value if it 
ought to be valued in and of itself apart from its usefulness to other 
things or processes.  Something or some process has instrumental 
value if it is useful to the existence or thriving of other things or 
processes, and in proportion to its contribution to such existence or 
thriving. The extension of intrinsic value beyond the human sphere is 
important for two reasons.  It makes processes outside the human 
sphere valuable quite independently of their contribution to human life.  
Also and just as importantly, it prevents extrinsic value from cashing 
out eventually as value for human beings.   Of course, extrinsic value 
does include value for human beings: we are part of it all after all.

In a typical case, value is assigned usually to a connected series of 
natural events or processes within a certain total context, e.g. a koala 
colony in an old growth forest in fair ecological equilibrium.  This would 
involve weighing up of both intrinsic and instrumental value.  However, 
in practice I don't think anyone does a Bentham like calculation.  It is 
more a matter of global intuitive response sharpened up or perhaps 
changed by further investigation of the details, with certain strong 
process-motivated convictions about what the world is like in mind.   
Eventually, there is no decision procedure.  Eventually it takes a 
degree of phronesis, wisdom chiselled out in practice that comes from 
being in the right way and knowing how to use our knowledge. But see 
later.



Degrees of Intrinsic Value

It's uncontroversial that instrumental value has degrees.  Process 
ecological ethics typically makes intrinsic value also to have degrees, 
versus deep ecologists and some eco-feminists and other advocates of 
ecological egalitarianism or ecological democracy.  

One way forward would be to assign intrinsic value in proportion to 
quality of natural event, that is, quality of reception, transformation and 
transformation etc.  That is, the multi-layered or differentiated ontology 
maps onto a multi-layered or differentiated deontology.  This has a 
certain elegance about it.  Every actuality or series of actualities or 
compound individual has intrinsic value, though sometimes it is 
negligible.  There are no vacuous actualities, nor are there any 
intrinsically valueless actualities.

Some process people do give the impression of wanting to go this way, 
for example, Jay McDaniel, Susan Buck, and some earlier work by 
Cobb and Griffin.

The problem with this is precisely the other side of its strength: it is 
altogether too interlaced with the metaphysics.  In addition there is a 
dilemma.  If 'intrinsic value' is extended all the way to sub-atomic 
particles its assignment is either massively counter-intuitive or else 
seems to rob the notion of 'intrinsic value' of any useful meaning.

So process people in practice sometimes talk of sentiency or the 
capacity for feeling or something like that as the ground for intrinsic 
value, being careful to extend this sentiency or capacity for feeling or 
whatever as far as they plausibly can, though not necessarily all the 
way.



Reinstitution of hierarchies??

Either way we are in trouble.  It is not so much the extension of intrinsic 
value that worries however but the admission that it has degrees 
combined with the apparent implication that they are degrees on the 
same spectrum.  Human beings almost inevitably end up as having the 
highest degree we know of apart from God.

There are at least two considerations that might be invoked to escape 
the charge of continuing anthropocentrism.

Firstly, a high degree of extrinsic value can well go with low degrees of 
intrinsic value.  This is typical indeed of creatures at the bottom of a 
food chain, e.g. plankton.

Secondly it doesn't follow just from A is more valuable than B that A 
can do what it likes with B.  No, we need another premise.  In addition, 
B has to be necessary for the life of A or something like that.  However 
interpreted, in affluent Western countries where one can buy 
wholesome vegetarian food at reasonable prices in supermarkets and 
health food stores, this is not enough even to justify meat eating.  
Whereas it quite smoothly allows eskimos and aboriginees in traditional 
environments to eat meat, which latter is an advantage I suspect.  An 
alleged anthropocentrism that can't justify meat eating is not much of 
an anthropocentrism.

The present author is still a bit uncomfortable with it.  It is at this point 
that one might be better off talking in terms of a differentiated rather 
than a multi-layered or multi-level ontology, mapping on to a 
differentiated deontology or value assignment.  It is not necessarily the 
case that anything they can do we can do better.  While all events have 
a certain common event structure (everything is a more or less creative 
etc. etc.), there may be specific differences in how this event structure 
is instantiated, which differences need not in all cases map onto the 
same spectrum.  (Cf. Plumwood 1993.) In such situations we should 
not talk of high and low, just different, both ontologically and 
deontologically.  This rather spoils the possibility of calculation in case 
of conflict.  But it never was a genuine possibility anyway.



Individuals and Ecosystems

This is another little problem that some people have with classic 
Whiteheadian or Hartshornean process.  It seems that only individuals 
have intrinsic value, that is to say, individual actualities and compound 
individuals.  Ecosystems as such have only instrumental value, as 
providing a context for the thriving of the individuals.  This may in many 
cases be rather high, but it is only instrumental.  It is not as if 
ecosystems as such are valuable in themselves.

The present author empathizes with the critics on this one.  It seems 
counter-intuitive.   Ecosystems have a species of beauty all their own.  
It is not just their use value for their membership that seems to count 
for us.

There is at least one other revisionist version of  Whitehead-derived 
process thinking which has some prospects of solving the problem, 
namely the metaphysics of energy events and fields of Joseph 
Bracken.  According to this metaphysics, fields are equiprimordial with 
events.  There are no fields without events, and events constitute 
fields.  On the other hand, there are no events without fields, events 
put themselves together on the basis of the fields in which they find 
themselves.  Fields carry contributions made by events through time, 
and events clue into the fields rather than past events themselves 
which are not there any more to be clued into after all.  Moreover, it is 
the fields which carry the structure across time through changes of the 
elements. If fields are ontologically equiprimordial, which not 
deontologically?  This would introduce two equiprimordial species of 
intrinsic value, I think, and allow us with good conscience to give 
ecosystems as such intrinsic value.  

A further way, not inconsistent with either of the above,  might be to 
build on Whitehead's distinction in Adventures of Ideas between 
Beauty and the Beautiful.  Beauty is the harmony and intensity of 
experience.  The Beautiful is what contributes to the harmony and 
intensity of experience.  One may then ask a version of Plato's famous 
question (or one of his many famous questions!): is the Beautiful 
beautiful because it contributes to the harmony and intensity of 
experience, or does it contribute to the harmony and intensity of 
experience because it is beautiful?  (See the Euthyphro.)

The bottom line, I suppose, is that it may be possible to give 
ecosystems value in their own right, without departing too much from 
even the Whiteheadian process tradition. 



The Problem of Marginal Cases

Our little Process Ethics group sometimes noted this as 'the Singerian 
Paradox' after Prof. Peter Singer.  According to this idea, the effort to 
widen moral concern beyond the human species can have the effect of 
lessening moral concern for certain 'marginal' members of the human 
species, such as babies, severely handicapped people, people with 
senile dementia. Babies and pigs, considered as here and now 
actualities, have a similar place in the scale of being, so should be 
treated similarly.  What makes it interesting for this paper is that 
process people can also fall into this paradox (see Cobb 1991).  

What makes this especially paradoxical is that people on the so-called 
margins are precisely the ones whose dignity requires to be defended.  
The ones in the main line, the fully-fledged 'persons', can typically look 
after themselves.

The process thinker Daniel Dombrowski, in two closely argued works 
(Dombrowski 1988, 1997) has shown that the argument can be pushed 
in the other direction.  Instead of saying, babies are like pigs, therefore 
should be treated no differently from pigs, Dombrowski proposes, pigs 
are like babies and therefore should be treated no differently from 
babies.  It is not even necessary to know why we reverence babies, 
just that we do so (Dombrowski 1988).  Given this we should also 
reverence pigs.  Logically we should all be vegetarians, though 
Dombrowski admits doing the right thing in this situation may require 
from some saintly virtue.

Charles Birch in his recent Living with the Animals (Birch, 1987, p. 56) 
is careful not to commit himself, regarding it as a complex and 
contentious issue which it is not his purpose to go into.

I would go one step further and argue that it is a needless complication, 
which tends to bring the environmental movement into disrepute 
among otherwise sympathetic people, derived mostly from taking our 
theories too seriously and thinking we can totalise the field with a single 
system.  We human beings are into all kinds of practices that we may 
not understand, e.g. burying the dead.  Should we stop doing that, 
merely because we haven't been able to rationally appropriate it?  Or 
only bury people who have living relatives perhaps?  We should try for 
overall consistency in our various practices, but probably all that is 
needed is speculative consistency rather than provable consistency, 
that given certain not totally implausible considerations our various 
practices might be consistent.  (For the idea, compare Peter Forrest, 
God without the Supernatural, Cornell Univ. Press, 1996.  Or Greg 
Moses, "Hume's Playful Metaphysics"...)

There are indeed I think a number of considerations consistent with the 
process tradition which added together might give us the appropriate 
pause, even apart from turning us into vegetarians.  For example, 
process people can't blithely dismiss potentiality.  Potentiality is of the 
essence of a Whiteheadian or a Hartshornean actual entity.  Being is a 
potential for all future becoming, "the many become one and are 
increased by one" etc.  The future events and environment will 
determine whether and how that potentiality is realized, but potentiality 
as such is an element of what that event is.  Secondly, reverence in 
any case is rarely for individual events, more usually for connected 
systems of events taken in total context.  We reverence Mr. Smith and 
Mrs. Jones and continue to require them to be respected even when 
they end up in a nursing home not know where they are or why they 
are there.  It is still Mr. Smith there and Mrs. Jones, they haven't simply 
disappeared off the face of the earth.  Finally, there is Dombrowski's 
distinction between the criteria for moral agency which would 
presumably exclude the so-called 'marginal' individuals and the criteria 
for moral patiency which might well include them.

However, let's assume that this needless distraction can be taken care 
of some how or other, and get back to our main line of widening in 
practice our ethical concern well beyond the human species.

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