Baxter sets the bar too low

William Baxter addresses pollution from a human centered viewpoint in his essay. As he says, he has “no interest in preserving penguins for their own sake.” Though I think he is wrong in not valuing the penguin for their own sake, I will not focus on that here. He lays out four “criteria” that he uses to solve “problems of human organization” and he then gives six reasons why the four criteria are a good starting point. I disagree with one of his criteria and with a few of the reasons that follow. Baxter’s fourth criterion says that a person should always be able to “improve his share of satisfactions” and all people should receive some part of the wealth so that they do not become so poor that they cannot improve themselves on their own. He also states that keeping the poor at this viable level may be achieved through redistribution of wealth. I agree with this second part of the criterion, but I think the two parts are at odds with each other. The first part says that a person should always have reason to and should always be capable of obtaining or consuming more, whether it be money, food, resources, etc but the second part puts some limit on this through concerns for the well-being of other humans. Why should this endeavor to obtain and consume more goods not be limited by other things? Even if Baxter could not be convinced that animals are intrinsically valuable, there is something morally wrong with destroying animal populations and the environment for our own selfish, unnecessary consumption.
Moving on from the criteria, Baxter says that they are the only sound starting point for six reasons. The first of the six claims that it is the only view that coincides with the way most people think and act. I think that moral goals should not be relaxed just because most people are not meeting them. That’s like saying it’s ok to set a lower moral standard for rapists because it corresponds to reality. We should in no way relax moral expectations to cater to their twisted behavior. The second supporting point says that these criteria do not advocate for destruction of nature because man needs nature in the long run. However, current events prove otherwise. Corporations, in their unending endeavor to maximize profit, use and abuse nature with total disregard for how their actions harm nature and other, typically poor, people. His third point says that what is good for humans is often good for nature. But I disagree with this. What humans view as a good thing is often detrimental for nature. Humans view eating a lot of food as a good thing, but the food industry is creating huge problems. In factory farming animals are treated horribly and forests and ecosystems are destroyed to make way for even more factory farms and for more plant-food to feed the animals. Overall, Baxter’s fourth criterion is contradictory and about half of the support he presents for the criteria is wrong.