In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 Beyond Considerability: A Deweyan View of the Animal Rights–Environmental Ethics Debate Ben A. Minteer In environmental ethics, philosophers have made much hay from the deep gulf dividing the moral foundations of animal rights/welfare approaches and the ecologically oriented ethical stances that constitute the mainstream of the ¤eld’s discourse.1 Indeed, it is a common practice, especially when introducing students to the main positions and debates in the ¤eld, to dwell on this division and its import both for philosophical argument and for environmental practices and policies. The consensus view still appears to be that the two projects are in most important respects mutually exclusive, though as we will see below, an increasing number of essays challenging this conclusion in one way or another are perhaps the beginnings of an interesting shift in the discussion. Yet I think it is still safe to say that most environmental ethicists believe that there are at the very least serious tensions between the two bodies of theory, tensions that, especially in the founding years of the debate, were ratcheted up by the exchange of some overheated rhetoric on both sides. In this chapter, I wish to examine how an explicit pragmatic perspective on the animal rights–environmental ethics debate—speci¤cally, a Deweyan model of moral inquiry—might offer a new way of framing the general philosophical question over the “moral considerability” and comparative moral signi¤cance of animals and ecological wholes (i.e., natural systems and processes). In fact, I will argue that this approach implies a distinct movement away from the presumption that the debate is best resolved on these grounds; that is, through the articulation and defense of any particular claim based on an attribution of moral standing and signi¤cance. As I see it, part of the pragmatic legacy (and John Dewey’s work in particular) is the attempt to wean us from these theoretical and methodological predilections in the search for authoritative moral standards , rules, and principles. Yet it seems that most environmental ethicists and animal welfare/rights philosophers continue to insist on the primary signi¤cance of these questions of moral considerability and the duties they impose in adjudicating environment-animal con®icts, despite the philosophical train wreck this approach seems to have caused between the two projects. Instead, I will suggest in this chapter that we should recognize the virtues of an environmental ethical approach that moves beyond attributions of considerability , one that focuses more of its attention on the experimental method of moral inquiry and dispute resolution that ¤gures prominently in Dewey’s work. I will claim not only that this pragmatic reframing of the animal rights– environmental ethics debate is more philosophically sound, but also that it opens up a number of new and signi¤cant possibilities for intelligent problem solving in speci¤c animal-environment con®icts. Indeed, I believe this Deweyan approach makes good on the early promise of “environmental pragmatism” as an especially useful and effective style of practical ethical reasoning, offering a number of advantages over its main rivals in environmental ethics (see Light and Katz). I will ¤rst examine how the question of moral considerability in the animal rights–environmental ethics debatehasbeenfeaturedinthe work of philosophers such as Peter Singer, Tom Regan,J.Baird Callicott,and Holmes Rolston III,¤nding that this historical emphasis on moral standing leads to irresolvable questions that would best be avoided in a pragmatism-oriented environmentalethics. In the following section, I will consider a few notable and more recent attempts at reconciling environmental ethics and animal rights that have focused on bringing the two positions together at the level of moral principle. While these efforts are signi¤cant in their attempt to establish normative compatibility between the two sets of positions,I do not believe that they pay suf¤cient attention to the role of experimental moral inquiry and problem-oriented thinking in speci¤c con®icts. Accordingly, I will discuss, in the next section, how a Deweyan reconstruction of the debate—moving from general defenses of moral considerability to a recognition of the ethical weight of speci¤c “problematic situations” involving practical contests between animal rights positions and environmental commitments—is a better way to conceptualize and address the contests between them. In the fourth section, I will make a suggestive case for the similarities shared by this Deweyan approach to ethics and some of the better-known projects appearing in the contemporary dispute resolution literature. I will conclude by arguing...

Share