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The Ethics of Species: An Introduction
RONALD L. SANDLER
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012
xii + 235 pp., ISBN 9781107023468, £50.00, US$85.00 (hardback); ISBN
978110 7658707, £18.99, US$29.99 (paperback)
Ronald L. Sandler’s The Ethics of Species: An Introduction offers rich and carefully constructed views about crucial issues bearing on his topic: the nature and value of species
and their members; how to address the goals of conservation in light of global climate
change; and ethically salient questions at the border zones of species. This last set of
issues includes whether species boundaries are morally significant (including for the
species Homo sapiens) and how we ought to value artefactual species. Altogether,
this volume offers much more argumentative support for the particular positions
that Sandler takes on these issues than one might expect from an introduction to
the ethics of species. However, Sandler’s prose is remarkably clear and the volume is
so well organized that it can also easily serve as an introductory text. In what
follows I will summarize some of Sandler’s key points and offer a few critical
remarks and questions along the way.
Regarding how we ought to understand species, Sandler suggests a helpfully pluralistic approach to the various competing biological explanations (as at least potentially interbreeding populations; as a lineage of ancestral–descendant populations; as
a population occupying an ecological niche; as genetically similar; as sharing anatomical features, 4). He writes, ‘That there is a multiplicity of species concepts that are
used productively to study and explain the biological world provides support for
species pluralism’ (5). However, Sandler also introduces a guiding notion of
species for his purposes as ‘groups of biologically related organisms that are distinguished from other groups of organisms by virtue of their shared form of life . . .
[or] how individuals of the biological group typically strive to make their way in
the world’ (6).
The notion of species as forms of life echoes Sandler’s general commitment to a
virtue ethical perspective (see, e.g., Sandler and Cafaro 2005; Sandler 2007), wherein
consideration of flourishing for a kind of being plays a crucial role (Hursthouse
1999, 197–205). In the context of addressing normative moral theory, it is helpful
to be able to appeal to notions of ‘good specimen of its kind’ (Hursthouse 1999,
205) without begging any questions regarding how we ought to understand its
species membership. Sandler’s further move to cast forms of life as species, rather
than as a substitute for species talk, raises some interesting questions. For example,
on some anthropological accounts of human societies, we humans vary radically in
how we make our way in the world. If those forms of life diverge enough, would we
have more than one human species? Sandler is clear that genotype and phenotype
go a long way towards determining a being’s ‘form of life’ (7); however, humans are
remarkably creative both in how they construct their lives and in how they re-structure
ways of life for other species, as will be considered below.
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Armed with the somewhat controversial theoretical views (argued for in chapter 2
and discussed below) that species do not themselves have inherent worth but that the
individual organisms making up species each do have such worth, Sandler moves on to
address the practical questions of how we ought to engage with that worth in the
context of foregone global climate change. In chapters 3 and 4, Sandler argues that,
whatever approach we take now and in the future to climate change, the ‘locked in’
effects are such that neither in situ preservation of at-risk species nor assisted colonization of these species into new ecosystems is likely to be successful or appropriate.
Sandler argues instead (in chapter 5) for a two-pronged approach: protect parks
and preserves against over-use or manipulation by humans, but implement goals
for manipulated and engineered landscapes that are in keeping with how people
value these spaces, including, where appropriate, ‘intensive species conservation
efforts’ (113).
Sandler’s argument for protecting parks and preserves is not that this will better
shore up at-risk species against extinction, but that protecting such areas can help
to promote ‘human independent adaptation and reconfiguration’ (109). As Sandler
points out, species that may adapt better to climate change include those that are
flexible with respect to diet and habitat and that reproduce rapidly and abundantly
(54–55). However, it is important to note that these species are often not the
species that human beings value highly. In this vein, Sandler addresses the Pleistocene
re-wilding vision for the North American great plains and western USA, which aims to
replace the ‘“pests and weeds” (rats and dandelions)’ that have come to populate these
areas with animals that approximate the extinct large vertebrates that roamed these
landscapes once upon a time (91, quoting Donlan et al. 2005, 913). While Sandler
argues against this project on multiple grounds, perhaps the most telling for us as
we contemplate Sandler’s vision of the future given global climate change is that
‘Rats and dandelions are not primarily pests and weeds. They are forms of life with
ecological profiles and evolutionary potentials’ (98). Hence, it would seem, Sandler’s
pragmatic positive vision is that we come to embrace the species that are better able to
adapt to foregone global climate change.
But what of those not yet extinct species, such as polar bears, which we do value
greatly? For Sandler, the plight of this beloved animal exemplifies his message regarding global climate change (57–59). Protection of the bears’ habitat is not possible since
human intrusion takes the form of global climate change. Beyond this sad state of
affairs, we may consider the example of polar bears in querying Sandler’s vision for
manipulated and engineered landscapes as well as, again, his view of species membership. If the goals for these areas of high human use and occupation are to be developed
with an eye to what we subjectively value, including species conservation efforts, then
it seems Sandler’s vision of an ethic of species could include preservation of polar bears
(and other highly valued species) in zoos alone. This despite the fact, as Sandler notes,
that it is polar bears in the Arctic that people find most valuable (66). Perhaps more
odd—but not morally so—would these zoo-bound polar bears constitute a new
species of animal? There is no denying their way of life would be radically different
from those of their historical relative—the Arctic polar bear.
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While Sandler’s vision of a world in which we may come to value rats and dandelions
offers a kind of pragmatic optimism, the implications of his view for species like polar
bears brings more of a sense of resigned inevitability. The interesting questions on the
dark side of this book may be the extent to which we may (morally) manipulate and artificially preserve species to suit our own interests. Sandler takes up related issues in
chapters 6 and 7, wherein he argues that species boundaries are not objectively
morally significant (for either human or non-human animals and organisms) but that
nonetheless, the subjective ‘view that species boundaries are ethically significant can be
part of reasonable comprehensive . . . worldviews’ (156). Thus, while it is reasonable to
require labelling of food containing genetically modified crops so that people may
eat in accordance with their values, an outright ban on such crops is untenable
(154–155). As there are no ‘intrinsic’ moral problems with species manipulation, the
ethical questions for such manipulation redound to the welfare of the individual
members of the species. In this context, Sandler writes, ‘animal disenhancement—that
is, genetically modifying (or selectively breeding) animals to have diminished capacities
so as to reduce animal suffering in agricultural or other animal use contexts—is not
intrinsically problematic’ (146). The individual reader may consider whether this is an
optimistic pragmatic view or one that resigns us to inevitable ‘progress’.
And how shall we apply these lessons to the human case? Here, Sandler argues that
our Homo sapiens membership does not demarcate any special moral status (161) and
that, moreover, pushing the boundaries of that species through enhancement or trans(or post-)human endeavours is not inherently problematic (though individual such
projects may be extrinsically problematic, 167–179). This picture of humanity
makes sense given Sandler’s ethic in which the following holds: neither species themselves nor species boundaries have inherent moral value, the ethical questions about
permissible species manipulation redounds to the interests and well-being of their
individual members, and future individuals of a modified species would not themselves have existed but for the modification (i.e. the non-identity problem, Parfit
1987) (120, 145–146).
Yet, again, there is a potential dark side to this picture. While we may forge ahead
with rosy views of enhancement for humans, we should also hark back to the notion
that disenhancement for pigs seems morally permissible on Sandler’s view. The great
sorrow of our time is not that the already socially advantaged must do without a bit of
extra brain power, but rather that a far greater number of humans bear the tedium of
jobs that do not engage their creative or intellectual faculties. What would Sandler say,
one may wonder, about human disenhancement to meet the needs of our (inevitable)
capitalist economy? His view, it seems, must appeal to ‘extrinsic’ problems for such
disenhancement on a case-by-case basis thus leaving open, in principle, that such
projects would be morally permissible.
Thus far in this review, I have trodden very lightly on the undergirding moral theoretical positions that Sandler supports. In part, this is because I think much (though
certainly not all) of the work of his book can be accomplished without these ballasts.
And in part, it is because such a consideration would take up its own review. Sandler
offers a complex view of value (subjective and objective; final and instrumental) and a
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unique, if not entirely satisfactory, view of moral status wherein all organisms have
equal inherent worth (108) but differential responsiveness is warranted both
between and amongst them based on ‘capacities that the individual possesses and
his or her social (and ecological) situatednesss’ (163).
Here I examine only one aspect of Sandler’s picture of value. He argues that species
as such have no inherent (interest-based objective final, 34) value, but may be valued
subjectively as final ends (i.e. non-instrumentally). Individual members of species
(even artefactual members), however, do have inherent value and have a good of
their own by virtue of being ‘an internally organized goal-directed system, the
product of some selection etiology’ (39). Sandler is forthright in recognizing that
having a good of one’s own is not reason enough to ground inherent worth: it must
also be shown that we ought to value that good (40). Sandler’s strategy here,
however, seems to be to rely on the inherent worth of human beings as a given (40)
and then to argue that there is no non-arbitrary capacity-based reason to deny the
inherent worth of all other organisms (44). Still, one may be left feeling bereft of
any particular reason to value the ‘goal orientation’ of a flu virus.
Sandler’s book offers its readers a complex and yet remarkably clear picture of the
ethics of species. It is well worth a close read.
References
Donlan, J., H. W. Greene, J. Berger, C. E. Bock, J. H. Bock, D. A. Burney, J. A. Estes, et al. 2005.
“Rewilding North America.” Nature 436: 913 –914.
Hursthouse, R. 1999. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parfit, D. 1987. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Sandler, R. L. 2007. Character and Environment: A Virtue-oriented Approach to Environmental Ethics.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Sandler, R. L., and P. Cafaro, ed. 2005. Environmental Virtue Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield.
REBECCA L. WALKER
Department of Social Medicine and Department of Philosophy
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
# 2013, Rebecca L. Walker
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02698595.2013.813258
Science Transformed? Debating Claims of an Epochal Break
ALFRED NORDMANN , HANS RADDER , & GREGOR SCHIEMANN (Eds.)
Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011
x + 222 pp., ISBN 9780822961635, US$29.95 (paperback)
The idea of the book, Science Transformed? Debating Claims of an Epochal Break, is to
reclaim the idea that science can be described by epochal breaks. Or as the editors,