Agricultural Intensification, Environmental Ethics and Sustainability: Some Ethical Observations

Abstract

Clare Palmer offers a detailed, clear and balanced account of the issues which are raised for environmental ethics by agricultural intensification, and I am in broad agreement with most of the many significant points she makes. I only take issue with her on a number of small points of detailed exposition which I discuss in the second half of the paper, and on the general way she sets up the discussion in terms of her understanding of environmental ethics which I take up first. For the purposes of her paper she takes environmental ethics to be about what is considered to be of intrinsic value in the environment, and discusses the impacts, positive or negative, on four cases of carriers of value in the environmental – individual sentient things, individual living things (respect for life); species of living things and whole ecosystems. Palmer’s paper focuses then on environmental ethics as about the intrinsic value of things in nature and the impact of agricultural intensification. But given the general title of her paper included ‘environmental ethics’, I feel that before I turn to her particular points in the second half of this paper, I should like to look at the issue of environmental ethics more broadly as concerning the impact of human activity on the environment from the point of view of the well-being of human beings.