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Journal of Applied Philosophy,Vol. 31, No. 4, 2014

doi: 10.1111/japp.12081

Book Review

Consequentialism and Environmental Ethics

AVRAM HILLER, RAMONA ILEA & LEONARD KAHN (eds), 2014
New York and London, Routledge
xvii + 194 pp., £80 (hb)

There is little disagreement about the broad substance of the answers to most questions
about the ethics of environmental policy. It is wrong to choke people with particulates,
wrong to disrupt the climate with greenhouse gas emissions, wrong to undermine the
food security (indeed, the security in general) of the most vulnerable and future gen-
erations, and wrong to cause the extinction of other species. Even the principles that
ought to guide environmental decision making are fairly uncontroversial; hardly anyone
is willing to argue that we should adhere to unsustainable policies, for example. Public
discourse on these matters relies on more or less explicit consequentialist premises. If the
consensus policy orientation is toward sustainability and the most popular ethical view
grounding that orientation is consequentialism, it is surprising that non-consequentialist
approaches to environmental ethics dominate the scholarly literature.
The essays gathered here seek to redress that imbalance. As Hiller and Kahn remark
in their introduction, ‘it is imperative that there be a more intensive focus on
consequentialist environmental ethics. We believe that the consequentialism framework
is the correct one . . .’ (p. 2). Therein lie both the main strength and main weakness of
the volume. Hiller, Ilea and Kahn have given us the definitive source for contemporary
consequentialist environmental ethics with this well-integrated set of essays. Most of the
authors seek to provide a consistently consequentialist account of the ethical reasons for
reaching environmental policy decisions. However, there is already considerable agree-
ment about what those decisions must be, at least in broad strokes. With both the
normative theory and the policy outcomes determined in advance, the contributors to
this volume must accept quite narrow bounds within which to explore ethical ideas and
their consequences.
To see this constraint clearly, one need only compare it with the work of the most
influential utilitarian philosopher writing today, Peter Singer. Mentioned briefly in the
introduction here, Singer at his best follows simple utilitarian principles about the value
of sentient wellbeing to their often demanding conclusions. Admit that sentient well-
being matters, and you will find yourself challenged to give away most of your property,
treat many animals much better than you are used to doing, and stop allocating
moral privilege on the basis of membership in the human species. By contrast, the
contributors here take their conclusions as given for the most part (agreeing, for
example, about the wrong of contributing to climate change, though they disagree about
details like the legitimacy of carbon offsets).Thus, their adjustments take place mostly on
the premises side of the equation, tinkering with the received consequentialist apparatus
to adapt it to reach newly sustainable, mostly non-anthropocentric environmental
outputs.

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438 Book Review

The volume’s eleven essays contribute to this effort in different ways, with a few
offering doubts about consequentialism’s adequacy for environmental ethics while the
rest constructively criticise and adapt mainstream theory. Central here is Avram Hill-
er’s chapter on ‘system consequentialism’, which claims that ‘the goodness of human
ends depends (at least to some extent) on the goodness of the broad system of which
the end is a part’ (p. 59). Since human beings are part of an interdependent system
that includes our environment, harming the environment to pursue an end corrupts
that end, making it less valuable. Hiller uses the example of a consumer good pro-
duced with slave labour, which is less good than one produced without slave labour,
even if the two consumers pursue identical ends in ignorance of the different modes
of production. Hiller thus demonstrates that one can be a holistic environmental theo-
rist and a consequentialist too.
Equally central is Alan Carter’s essay on ‘indirect, multidimensional
consequentialism’. Carter begins by reminding us that morality for Mill was just one
dimension of the ‘Art of Life’. He then proceeds to multiply the dimensions along which
we judge outcomes, using a marginal model to demonstrate that trade-offs among the
various dimensions will require us to find optimal points that maximise no single value.
According to Carter, we need to take into account the contributory values of the number
of worthwhile lives, the level of average utility, equality, and freedom (p. 82). Like many
of the contributors, Carter struggles to present a full argument for his position within the
space of a short chapter, and he does not explain here why these four values ought to be
the ones that count.Why should a multidimensional consequentialist value freedom and
equality and not genius or aesthetic greatness or even fraternity and solidarity? Carter
refers us to work published elsewhere. Two additional interesting arguments are pre-
sented very briefly toward the end of the chapter. Carter claims that consequentialist
decision making must be indirect (aimed at the best practicable world) rather than direct
(governing each instance of action), building on Mill with a defence of morality as
rule-following that frees us from having to calculate consequences on an individual level
at every step (p. 83).Then the chapter concludes with the fascinating suggestion that just
as we can plot optimal trade-offs among contributory values like average utility and
freedom, we could plot out a world in which aggregates of anthropocentric, zoocentric
and ecocentric contributory values were traded off against each other to reach an ideal
point of greatest value for human, sentient, and non-sentient being (p. 86).
Carter and Hiller seek to modify traditional consequentialism to make it better at
addressing questions in environmental ethics; Krister Bykvist defends traditional
consequentialism against the threat posed by evaluative uncertainty. ‘Even if we are
uncertain about which action is morally right, we can still identify the act that is rational,
given the agent’s beliefs and preferences’ (p. 122). He argues that rational analysis aimed
at keeping an agent likely to be right can help us navigate evaluative uncertainty. If, for
example, we are unsure about whether it is right to grant moral privilege to human
beings over members of other species, we can use rational analysis to choose the policy
most likely to put us in the moral right. Like Carter, Bykvist is hampered by space
limitations, and he ends up telegraphing rather than explaining many of his supporting
arguments. Even so, he does demonstrate the potential of this method of dealing with
evaluative uncertainty while responding briefly to some objections to it, the most
powerful of which is the worry that ‘outcome values and severity of wrongness’ may not
be comparable across different moral theories.

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Three of the volume’s chapters (by Driver, Habib and Hale) treat the question within
consequentialist environmental ethics of the possibility of remediation for wrongs, with
Habib and Driver looking directly at the legitimacy of offsets for exhaustion of non-
renewable resources. In ‘Future Generations and Resource Shares’, Habib argues that
even if we presume that generations should enjoy equal opportunities, physical resources
have value only insofar as they can be used to pursue opportunities. Resources that have
use for one generation (say, flint rock) will have little use for a different generation
dependent on some other source of energy (say, fossil fuels); thus resources have
‘windows’ of opportunity. Only the generations that value a resource are in the ‘distri-
bution pool’, and only distribution pool members have rights to equal shares. Previous
generations, Habib argues, do not owe us any flint rock, and those ‘in the fusion future,
aren’t owed anything because they don’t need it, they have their fusion (or whatever),
and thus, the oil is valueless to them’ (p. 143). If Habib’s argument had stopped here, it
would have reached the kind of surprising conclusion that is rare in the environmental
ethics literature. However, the argument moves from the claim that we owe nothing to
those outside the distribution pool to the claim that we have even stronger debts than
previously thought to those generations in our ‘window cohort’. Under Habib’s
consequentialism, we would be obliged to share actual reserves of non-renewables like oil
with the relatively small number of generations in the pool of those who value it. Habib
concludes that we are obliged to build a ‘bridge’ for those we might deprive of the
resource so that they may reach a new ‘window’ beyond fossil fuel dependency. Thus,
Habib, like the other contributors to this volume and unlike Peter Singer, ends up with
policy recommendations well within the norm for environmental ethicists generally.
Julia Driver, in ‘Moral Bookkeeping, Consequentialism, and Carbon Offsets’, argues
that one can remediate at least some environmental wrongs. She compares the fictional
Sylvia, who buys carbon offsets to compensate for emissions related to air travel, with
Bertie — a selfish dilettante who gives to charities representing the animals he hunts and
the people he exploits — and Robert, who is the boyfriend of an anti-Semite but
volunteers at a Jewish community centre. If Sylvia’s effort at moral bookkeeping is as
corrupt as Bertie’s and Robert’s, then we would have reason to doubt the legitimacy of
the institution of carbon offset purchases. However, Driver finds that the wrong that
Sylvia is trying to remediate is an instrumental wrong rather than an intrinsic wrong like
disrespect for persons. If, Driver concludes, one avoids superficiality and other pitfalls,
responsible moral bookkeeping is indeed possible: one can make ‘thoughtful trade-offs’
(p. 172).
In contrast to Driver, Benjamin Hale argues that environmental wrongs cannot be
remediated. Hale sees pollution as a kind of trespass that remains wrong even if the
harms associated with it are remediated. Writing not as a consequentialist, but in the
tradition of ‘justificatory liberalism’, Hale demonstrates that a narrow focus on harms
misses the most important wrongs done in instances of pollution: polluting and
remediating is, Hale argues, like poisoning someone’s tea and then providing an anti-
dote. He offers many other examples, the best of which is the analogy between Sue the
Stripper and the oil-consuming public. Tom wrongs Sue by peeping at her without her
consent even if she is known to volunteer to be seen naked professionally. BP wrongs the
public by transferring the risks of oil exploration to them, even if the public is known to
consume the products of that exploration. ‘Simply because oil consumers effectively
endorse the consumption of oil does not commit those consumers to the acceptance of

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risks associated with the extraction of that oil’ (p. 156). Hale, like the other contributors,
struggles with space limitations, and so offers a series of important arguments in very
quick succession. The wrong of pollution centres not on harm done but on the impos-
sibility of giving acceptable reasons for it. Hale does not have enough space to distinguish
between straightforward Kantian arguments (trespass is wrong because it amounts to
‘not taking them — they as persons, they as ends in themselves — into account’ [p. 159])
and the justificatory liberalism of Forst and Habermas: ‘What distinguishes a wrong
action from a right action . . . is whether the reasons that best explain that action can be
justified . . . undertaken for reasons that would be acceptable to all’ (p. 159). Most of this
volume’s contributors judge actions by their consequences. For Hale, however, we
should not just be concerned ‘that the world is being destroyed in every corner every-
where, but that so many of the actions that we take, individually and collectively, appear
to be taken haphazardly and without good reason’ (p. 161).
Rather than offer a comprehensive alternative to consequentialism as Hale does, Alan
Holland discusses some of its limits. He argues that consequentialism cannot generate
clear policy recommendations because ‘there is no such determinate entity as “the
outcome” ’ (p. 114). Moreover, the worst environmental problems of our time are not
intended consequences but ‘in some sense or other “side effects” ’ (p. 115). It is hard to
take side effects into account, says Holland, listing ‘dispersion of agency’, ‘dispersion of
effects’, ‘temporal dispersion’, and embeddedness of the status quo in the social fabric as
obstacles (p. 115). Finally, Holland notes that we cannot know how the present as an
outcome of earlier decisions would compare to alternative results of decisions not taken
at that earlier time. Thus, Holland concludes moderately, a ‘consideration of conse-
quences will always be relevant . . . to our actions and policies, but it can never determine
them’ (p. 119).
Hale has argued for Kantian justificatory liberalism as particularly suited to deal with
problems like pollution, and Holland argues that consequentialism’s usefulness in envi-
ronmental ethics is limited by the indeterminacy of policy outcomes. Katie McShane
argues against both positions that although Kantian ethics better captures the moral
psychology of relationships, consequentialism ‘is the most helpful for addressing the
kinds of choices that we will face’ (p. 18). According to McShane, the Kantian emphasis
on expressing respect in relationships fits with much everyday morality, but does not
successfully deal with questions of the good that ‘float free of considerations about
particular relationships and particular individuals’ (p. 23). McShane is right that Kantian
ethics is concerned about respect for persons, but she does not mention that for Kant we
are morally obliged to submit to the rule of law so that our actions express respect not
just for ‘particular individuals’ but, crucially, for any other person with whom we might
potentially interact. This is why Kant thought it important to point out that we inhabit
a globus terraqueus — each of us is always in potential interaction with every other
(Metaphysics of Morals, section 62). In his chapter, Hale demonstrates the facility with
which neo-Kantian justificatory liberalism handles large-scale environmental problems
when he argues that what was most wrong with the Deepwater Horizon disaster was that
it was ‘ill considered’: the policy of risky exploration would not have withstood public
scrutiny.
Having read the essays collected here, I am struck by the thoughtful treatment of
difficult issues in environmental ethics by the thoroughgoing consequentialists and the
other contributors alike. The collection certainly does not vindicate consequentialism as

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the ‘correct’ normative theory that Hiller and Kahn refer to in their introduction.
Nonetheless, it does provide a number of compelling arguments about consequentialism
in environmental ethics that no one interested in the topic will be able to ignore.

ELISABETH ELLIS
University of Otago

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2014