Abstract

This essay explores the tension between concern for the suffering of wild animals and concern about massive human influence on nature. It examines Clare Palmer’s animal ethics and its attempt to balance a commitment to the laissez-faire policy of nonintervention in nature with our obligations to animals. The paper contrasts her approach with an alternative defence of this laissez-faire intuition based on a significant and increasingly important environmental value: Respect for an Independent Nature (RIN). The paper articulates and defends naturalness value and explores its implications for the laissez-faire intuition and for concern about wild-animal suffering.

Highlights

  • This essay explores the tension between two values: concern for the suffering of wild animals and concern about massive human influence on nature

  • Philosophical provocateur Mark Sagoff helped bring to light the tension between animal ethics and environmental ethics (Sagoff,1984)

  • Consider how we differentially evaluate the suffering caused by predators and the suffering caused by humans, or natural death versus murder

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Summary

Introduction

This essay explores the tension between two values: concern for the suffering of wild animals and concern about massive human influence on nature. I will articulate and defend this naturalness value from its critics and explore its implications for the laissez-faire intuition and for our concern about wild-animal suffering. Given recent massive human impact on nature, is it not plausible that even wild animals are entangled with human society in the ways that, according to Palmer, would bring about duties of assistance?

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