Baxter: Heartless Monster or Pragmatist? (Probably a little of Both)

First let me say what I agree with in regard to Baxter’s article. He claims that environmental scientists and activists don’t have a clear objective when it comes to ecological problems – we want “clean air” and “clean water” and “lower pollution,” but it’s not clear what precisely the aim should be. Concreteness, I agree, has to be added to make a goal real. To solve any societal problem people need to know exactly what the goal should be and work logically and sequentially to reach that goal. Indeed, Baxter takes this point further and adds that, in reality, we need to reframe the pollution problem. We’re always going to have some level of pollution, and instead of demanding “no pollution” we should try to reach some “optimal state” of pollution – a stable and manageable level of pollution that can reasonably be achieved and maintained without devastating effects on the environment. Baxter is plainly a realist when it comes to ecological concerns. And while I realize he is talking theoretically, I do think, however, that he is guilty of his own criticism toward environmentalist: he should articulate more concretely (and empirically) what exactly this “optimal state” would look like, and how we could reasonably achieve it.

On the other hand, I completely disagree with Baxter’s attitude on species welfare. While I do believe – though I won’t argue it here – that value does come from humans (the anthropogenic view) I do not think that humans are the only creature which should have a moral status or should somehow be the ultimate measure of value in the universe (the anthropocentric view). He claims that real people, at some level, are really concerned with the safety of other species only insofar as they derive pleasure or some benefit from their existence and that “questions of ought” – that is, ethical questions – “are meaningless [when] applied to a non-human situation” (521). He defends this view by stating that before humans, there was no question whether plants might have been wrong for spreading across the earth and changing the composition of the atmosphere or whether rightness or wrongness even mattered when “the first amphibian…crawl[ed] up out of the primordial ooze” (521). This, to me, is a defense for the anthropogenic view, however, not the anthropocentric view. While I recognize I risk name-calling, I think when Baxter states “I have no interest in preserving penguins for their own sake” he is really confusing his own self-centeredness with the view that all humans are interested in other species only instrumentally. The burden of proof should be on Baxter to show that even if we only cared about species by way of their instrumental value that that is a morally justified way to be in the world. Maybe we naturally view the planet that way, but that doesn’t mean it’s right or that we don’t need to change that perception. I would need to see more information In the end, these arguments (that non-human situations are morally meaningless and that humans are ultimately selfish and that we see other species only in terms of their possible instrumental value) require better defense.