Tragic Moral Conflict and Endangered Species Recovery

Given the state of the art of conservation, and given the rapidity with which species are disappearing as the result of human economic activities, members of the societies that encourage and benefit from these activities, and that undertake the species recovery process, often face a terrible choice: either 1) intensively manage species populations and ecological communities by killing, harming, making vulnerable to harm, or controlling the most important aspects of the lives of many individual animals; or 2) allow entire species to go extinct. I call situations in which people face this kind of choice recovery predicaments. Such predicaments seem to be tragic moral conflicts, or situations in which whatever one does—even the right act that is right on the whole—will be seriously wrong. This dissertation explores whether working from within Kant’s deontology, Ross’s deontology, or utilitarianism excuses environmental ethics for neglecting the problem of tragic moral conflict, or for failing to recognize recovery predicaments as tragic moral conflicts. It asks three questions of each theory. Does it have what it takes to admit that the right act can be wrong in some way? If so, does it have what it takes to admit that the right act can be seriously wrong? And if it does, can it interpret recovery predicaments as situations in which whatever one does will be tragically wrong? The dissertation argues that, for each theory, the answer to the first two questions is yes. None of the theories excuses us for ignoring the problem of tragic moral conflict. For both Ross’s and Kant’s deontologies, the answer to the third question is also yes, but for utilitarianism, the answer is indeterminate. This means that from within utilitarianism, we cannot say whether a recovery predicament is a tragic moral conflict, but from within the other two theories we can say that it is.

Department dc:contributor.department

Philosophy

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Bryant, Rachel

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Sumner, Wayne
• Walsh, Denis

• animal ethics
• endangered species
• Immanuel Kant
• moral conflict
• utilitarianism
• W.D. Ross

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/91790

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/91790