The Future of Ethics by Jenkins Willis;

Author:Jenkins, Willis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

WICKED PROBLEMS

I have argued that a generally pragmatic approach needs to incorporate religious modes of inquiry into the interpretation and management of sustainability problems. In order to treat the most difficult problems it also needs to involve religious communities—and not only because they are important political constituencies. Religious communities might in fact help vindicate the hope of environmental pragmatism. Working from specific problems with the moral values resident in a community (the pragmatist counsel) need not rule out transformative cultural reform (the cosmological promise), if communities can use their moral inheritances to invent adaptive responses to problems. For the problem of managing the Chesapeake Bay, which seems to overwhelm current competencies of responsibility, a pragmatic approach needs what cosmological and religious ethics can do: criticize social dysfunction and make transformative claims. It must show that ethics can transform what Leopold called the “foundations of conduct,” while yet evolving from available values in critical experience of practical problems.

Consider first the problem of invasive mute swans in the Chesapeake. Managing invasive nonnative species usually involves both cultural and ecological uncertainty, and the resulting dilemmas have generated heated exchanges among philosophers and scientists. Philosopher Mark Sagoff claims that xenophobic metaphors illicitly drive research description (alien invaders!), which in turn drive aggressive control policies that do not make long-run evolutionary sense. Why should swans be prevented from living in the Chesapeake simply because they arrived recently? Biologist Daniel Simberloff retorts with bodies of evidence showing that invasives often increase extinctions of other species and degrade ecosystems, thus warranting strong disvalue.80 Mute swans deplete underwater grass beds and drive away other birds, including endangered species. Simberloff seems to win the exchange but Sagoff’s argument shows why policy debates over invasives can become polarized: describing the facts at hand always involves evaluative language, for which “nature” no longer offers an objective standard or an uncontroversial goal. The debates become animated when a management plan involves killing animals—especially when the public sees scientists shooting swans in the name of conservation. Why do native species warrant destruction of outsiders? Do holistic ecological goals cancel any moral claim that individual swans might make on human responsibility?81 Taking responsibility for ecological change thus presses communities to decide what changes they should try to control and how to think about human power in relation to ecological communities and to individual organisms.

The moral implications of invasives management run broadly, but they may not require rethinking worldviews. An inclusive model of adaptive management focused on discrete cases of decision making offers promise for improving practical deliberations over invasives management. Philosopher Kristen Shrader-Frechette and biologist David Lodge argue that, by clearly discriminating descriptive and normative claims, scientists can at least help communities understand how invasives policy depends on incomplete scientific knowledge as well as independent cultural ideas. Patiently and carefully informing contextual deliberations can improve pluralist policy debates. With moral intuitions and scientific uncertainty acknowledged, a civic community can develop risk indicators responsive to accurate research and expressive of values that the community (over time) recognizes and accepts.

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