William Baxer: People or Penguins

William Baxter is an anthropocentrist and with that I can agree with him. He believes that only humans hold intrinsic value and therefore everything else on this planet can only hold value if we assign it such. However, I believe that while he is correct in seeing humans as the self-centered creatures that they are he himself is overly self centered and projects his own biases onto his view. Non-human organisms can hold more value to humans than I believe he is willing to admit, I do not take him for an out-doorsy type of person. In that same light I think he is grossly underestimating the importance of a cleaner environment.

This piece is dated and so the environmental crisis that we are assuming in this class might not have been so easily assumed when he was writing. However, the pollution we have created has reached a point where is threatens us with major, life threatening issues. Our problems are way bigger than DDT and penguins. If we are to use his theory of working on the environmental crisis only enough to live comfortably I am not convinced that we will survive. He might argue that we will, each generation will survive by doing enough to keep the environment stable enough for human existence. But is this enough? The question has arisen of the extent of our responsibility to future generations. Do we owe prosperity anything?

I am not sure what Baxter’s answer here would be. Here we can see his theory of “trade-offs” becoming more complicated. “As a society we would be well advised to give up one washing machine if the resources that would have gone into that washing machine can yield greater human satisfaction when diverted into pollution control.” Would the “human satisfaction” of future generations be applicable? We can consider this through thinking first of people already in existence. I would love my children and want to do all I could to make the world livable for them; this could be minimalistic on my part. However, I also love my grandchildren, which would require a little more work to insure their safety and happiness. Yet, if I am concerned with their happiness, their “human satisfaction”, then I would want them to see their grandchildren living in a safe and healthy environment. Reaching this optimal level of pollution is not the answer because as self-centered a species we are we care about fellow human beings. It is for their sake that we should work for high standards of environmental improvement. However, I again agree with Baxter that we need to find figure out what we mean by this.