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ContentsIntroduction

Moral Theories

Ethics of the Soil

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44

Reading Parfit: On What Matters ed. by Simon Kirchin

Bioethics: The Basics by Alastair V. Campbell

The Spirit of the Soil, 2nd Edition by Paul B. Thompson

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Derek Parfi t’s On What Matters is a striking intervention into modern moral philosophy and was, it is fair to say, one of the most eagerly anticipated works of analytic philosophy published for a long time.

Parfi t published Reasons and Persons , his fi rst book, in 1984. This infl uenced a whole generation of thinkers, both within moral philosophy and far beyond it, in its arguments, its ideas and its style of working through philosophical prob-lems. As such, whatever book Parfi t published next would have found itself in the spotlight. However, On What Matters (hereafter OWM ) deserves to be con-sidered and admired on its own terms and for its own reasons. There are a num-ber of distinctive and arresting views that Parfi t articulates within its covers, with many topics discussed and numerous arguments offered that range from the subtle to the direct. Indeed, it is probably worth lingering on one detail. Although we may talk of OWM as a book, it is a book that, when it was originally published, came in two volumes that ran to just over 1,400 pages (a third volume was published in 2017). 1 Further, it is split into six parts (one comprising commentary from Barbara Herman, T. M. Scanlon, Susan Wolf and Allen Wood) plus appen-dices. One can justly describe it as ‘a work’ that is, in fact, a few books.

In this short introduction I do no more than offer a fl avour of the topics and ideas that Parfi t covers in OWM 1 and 2, roughly in the order in which he discusses them, whilst also summarizing the chapters in this volume.

Parfi t begins by thinking about reasons. For him a reason is something concep-tually fundamental, something that cannot be explained in, or reduced to, further terms and concepts, even if one can get a sense of what a reason is from various examples and by seeing how it sits with similar normative and evaluative terms and concepts. His key aim throughout Part One is to argue against subjective theories of reasons and to argue in favour of objective theories. Subjectivists about reasons think that what we have most reason to do is (solely) a function of our desires and aims. These may be our actual and present desires and aims, or some desires and aims we would have if we more carefully considered the

INTRODUCTION

Simon Kirchin

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S I M O N K I R C H I N

known facts or were made aware of facts that we do not know. In contrast, objec-tivists about reasons think that what we have most reason to do is (solely) a function of the facts. For example, we may well have most reason to act in a particular way because it is this action that will bring about the most good. It is clear that subjectivism and objectivism will deliver different conceptions of what we have most reason to do and clear how they can diverge in their fi nal recom-mendations across a number of situations. For instance, whilst you may think you have most reason to choose a certain career path because it is what you desire to do or be, in fact choosing a different career path would produce the most good. In this case, at least as described in this bare manner, subjectivism and objectivism would differ as to what you have most reason to do.

There are a number of arguments that Parfi t offers against subjectivism, some of which parallel his thoughts in Part Six. One line of argument begins by simply stating that subjectivists need to ensure that they are making substantive claims about reasons. They can fall into the danger of dealing in concealed tautologies, moving from the target phrase to be understood (1) ‘we have most reason to act in some way’ to the phrase (2) ‘this act would best fulfi l our present fully informed telic desires’ (and hence giving sense to ‘reason’) and then giving a spin on this latter phrase by saying that (3) ‘we have most reason to do what would best fulfi l our present fully informed telic desires’. 2 If subjectivists use ‘have most reason’ in the desire-fulfi lment sense, then (3) is shown to be a concealed tautology, not a substantive claim: ‘the act that would best fulfi l our present fully informed telic desires is the act that would best fulfi l these desires’. So subjectivists need to use words such as ‘reason’ in a normative sense and not just as a synonym for the descriptive or factual ‘what is most desired’. This immediately creates trouble for them. We can construct scenarios involving the adoption of a course of action in which agents suffer a large amount of pain but where, for whatever reason, they desire to suffer in this way. Subjectivists are then committed to saying that there is most reason (in the normative, substantial sense) for the agent to adopt such a course of action, even when it seems obvious that experiencing such pain is dangerous, bizarre or just plain bad. It strains credulity to think that we would really, sensibly want to say that the agent has most reason to choose this course in most scenarios, and thus subjectivism fails.

Taking himself to have established objectivism’s truth through a number of arguments, Parfi t moves, in Parts Two and Three, to consider how normative ethicists might seek to advise us as to what we should do. 3 What principles and theories should we adopt in deciding what reasons we, in fact, have? His thoughts here are arguably the single most important contribution that OWM makes to modern debate. In the words of Samuel Scheffl er, from his introduction to the whole work, “Parfi t aims to rechart the territory of moral philosophy”. 4

Students and scholars alike routinely think that the normative ethical theories of consequentialism and Kantian deontology offer fundamentally different views of what we should do in our moral lives. Consequentialists are typically cast as thinking that the rightness of one’s actions is (solely) a function of their

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consequences. In contrast, Kantian deontologists are typically cast as eschew-ing consequences and favouring instead a set of principles or maxims that forbid and encourage certain action-types in accordance with the overarching idea or ideas expressed by the Categorical Imperative. So, to take a simple example, we should not lie because lying treats another person as a means to an end.

Across Parts Two and Three Parfi t challenges the assumption that we have fundamental opposition and argues instead that normative ethics contains far more unity than most assume. In order to do this he further refi nes the theories he is interested in, arguing that his refi nements present the best of the broad positions that are part of normative ethics.

He deals with three positions: rule consequentialism, Kantian deontology and contractualism, specifi cally Scanlonian contractualism. He argues that these three positions will recommend and justify the same, more specifi c moral prin-ciples and actions, and blends them into what he calls the Triple Theory :

TT: An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some princi-ple that is optimifi c, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable.

He goes on to say:

We can call these the triply supported principles. If some principle could have any of these three properties without having the others, we would have to ask which of these properties had most importance. But these three properties, as I have argued, are had by all and only the same principles. 5

To be clear, Parfi t does not advocate that by coincidence these three positions pick out all of the same specifi c moral principles. Rather, there is something about the nature of these theories and the high-level principles and ideas that are at their core which means they converge on the same specifi c principles. He thinks there are good reasons to believe the Triple Theory to be true.

Parfi t focuses in Parts Two and Three on engaging with Kant’s philosophy, Kant being one of the philosophical heroes of OWM . Despite his admiration for Kant, Parfi t reworks Kant’s position, often in radical ways. He rejects or reimagines many points that some commentators think of as central to Kantianism, most notably (I think) the notion of a maxim. 6 A maxim is assumed to be, roughly, the subjective principle or policy on which agents act. ‘Subjective’ here does not mean what it means above: we are not discussing desire-based principles. Nor is ‘subjective’ synonymous with ‘relativistic’. ‘Subjective’ here means that something is primarily the agent’s. Maxims are those fundamental aims and policies that guide the agent’s actions or, to use a shorthand, they are the fundamental motives of the agent that help to explain – indeed help to constitute – his or her action. Kant thinks, roughly, that we can judge the wrongness of the act by whether the maxim

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can be universalized. However, there are notorious problems with this. First, if one makes the maxim narrow and detailed (Parfi t’s example is the theft of a wallet from a woman dressed in white who is eating strawberries whilst reading the last page of Spinoza’s Ethics ), then one can easily universalize without fear that any-one else will act in this way, thus providing oneself with an exception. Yet the action is clearly wrong. In contrast, some maxims are ‘mixed’, often because they are worded more generally: for example, ‘Do what is best for me’ and ‘Never lie’. Sometimes acting on such maxims can be wrong, but often not, and Kant failed to account for this, according to Parfi t. Parfi t attempts to show through various examples that the best version of Kantian deontology should eschew maxims, at least on one understanding of that term. We should instead focus on what the morally relevant description of the action is. Focusing on what people are inten-tionally doing in a particular circumstance will help us to get at such a descrip-tion, suggests Parfi t. For example, in the fi rst example above the person is intending to steal; the other details are irrelevant. In a different case, although I am doing what is best for me by putting on a jumper, I am doing so only to keep warm and hurting no one in the process. Acting in this way can hardly be consid-ered to be wrong. And so on.

As mentioned, Part Four sees four thinkers engage with Parts Two and Three. Susan Wolf claims that in arguing for the Triple Theory Parfi t misses much that is of value within the various theories he tries to bring together, for their differ-ences are essential and important to them. Allen Wood raises profound worries about Parfi t’s philosophical methodology and also disagrees with him about Kant. Whereas Parfi t thinks that the Formula of Humanity is not a practically useful principle, Wood disagrees. Barbara Herman also focuses on Parfi t’s Kantian exe-gesis, with much of her discussion revolving around the relation between an agent’s motive and an act’s effects on others. Whilst she is not against trying to see connections and even combinations between theories, she thinks Parfi t goes too far in ignoring the importance of motives to the moral worth of actions and brings into question how we arrive at a morally relevant description of an action. Lastly, Scanlon claims that he is not a Kantian and that his position cannot be subsumed into the Triple Theory. He concludes that Parfi t takes the production of optimifi c results to be most morally basic, whereas he himself thinks that what is most morally basic is agreement amongst people. Despite his discussions, thinks Scanlon, Parfi t does not capture this type of agreement in the right sort of way. Part Five sees Parfi t engage with these four colleagues in which he deepens his view, especially with regards to Scanlon’s criticism. He argues that his recasting of Scanlon’s view provides Scanlon with a more plausible theory that in turn makes possible the Triple Theory as Parfi t conceives it.

This brief summary of Parts Four and Five comes nowhere near doing justice to the material therein and the differing viewpoints one fi nds. Whilst the details undoubtedly matter, it is worth stressing two themes that emerge strongly from these parts. First, the critics worry that Parfi t’s position is too consequentialist (that is, too concerned with the production of results) to accommodate the

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insights of the other theories satisfactorily. Parfi t profoundly disagrees with this, arguing that the best versions of the other two theories are more concerned with the production of moral effects than many people acknowledge. Second, Parfi t may well think as he does because of his style of moral reasoning: the main con-cern of moral philosophy, it seems, is to develop principles to guide our specifi c actions across all situations. We often refi ne such principles in the light of the results we get in certain situations (real or imagined) that we test them against. Wood in particular doubts whether this is the best way of proceeding.

In Part Six Parfi t switches tack away from normative ethics and towards metaeth-ics. He is a realist and cognitivist about value and normativity and also a staunch non-naturalist. So, for him, normative properties exist and can be things we can know. Furthermore, they cannot be reduced to natural phenomena that are, for example, studied by the natural and social sciences. They are sui generis . Parfi t considers a number of metaethical positions and writers that seek to offer alterna-tive views, and he argues against all of them. The leading three opposing views are all Ns: noncognitivism, naturalistic realism (both analytic and non-analytic) and nihilism (which incorporates error theory).

Like many other philosophical areas, metaethics has a huge amount of detail and complication as well as a number of chief positions that compete against each other to explain roughly the same phenomena. What is refreshing about Parfi t’s Part Six, in my view, is that much of the detail and complication is stripped away. He looks at the essential bones of each position in an attempt to make progress.

Parfi t begins by echoing his thought from Part One. He argues that we have external reasons for acting – reasons that do not depend for their existence on any agent’s desires or aims – and against those who think that the only reasons that exist are internal reasons – reasons that do so depend. He then moves to provide a battery of ideas and arguments against the positions listed above. A notable argument – the Triviality Objection – employed against non-analytic naturalism mirrors one from Part One. 7 To say that we ought to do something is to make a substantive normative claim. Non-analytic naturalism renders such claims trivial. How so? Take the following claim, which appears to be philosoph-ically substantive:

(U) when some act would maximize happiness, this act is what we ought to do .

U can be claimed by all sorts of utilitarians. Non-naturalist utilitarians such as Sidgwick (the other main philosophical hero in OWM ) would claim that the property of maximizing happiness makes the act have the different or further property of being what we ought to do. Naturalist utilitarians claim that the max-imization of happiness is the same property as the property of being what we ought to do. If this latter identifi cation is made, says Parfi t, then it renders a seemingly substantive claim such as U trivial, for we are then saying only that

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when some act would maximize happiness it is an act that would maximize happiness.

At the heart of this move is Parfi t’s general idea that some other metaethicists incorrectly conceive the subject matter they are trying to explain fi rst of all. If one does not start in the right way, then one can be led into all sorts of failure, as Parfi t attempts to show throughout Part Six. Fellow thinkers may render seem-ingly substantive claims trivial, as above. Or they may fail to explain what it is to disagree with others or how we can improve morally. (These are ideas he raises against noncognitivism.) Or they may have a curious account of reason that fails to do justice to our ethical lives and intuitions. (This is Parfi t’s main worry with Bernard Williams’ thought, echoing the ideas of Part One.) Parfi t’s overriding concern is that unless one adopts the sort of cognitivist non-naturalism he espouses, then one cannot capture the idea that life and our existence matter, and it is surely right that we do this.

Throughout the whole of OWM there is a boldness in style and orientation which receives two main expressions. In Parts One and Six, where Parfi t deals with conceptions of reasons and normativity, he presents an uncompromising account of the reality of the moral and the practical, and of what it takes for things to matter. In Parts Two, Three and Five he is similarly bold. In fashioning a position that seeks to remodel three main normative ethical theories so as to bring them together, he stakes out a position that shakes up the theoretical land-scape. In doing so, he begins to give us some idea of how we can decide which things matter ethically. Given the boldness of these aims we will undoubtedly have to measure the success of OWM over a long period of time.

What of the commentators in this book? 8 We begin with my chapter. I discuss the commentary of Wolf and Wood, and Parfi t’s replies to them. I restate and further Wolf’s criticism that the Triple Theory overlooks or unjustly eschews much that is valuable in the three theories Parfi t considers. In doing so, I consider the few comments that Parfi t makes in his defence. I then turn to Wood’s attack on Parfi t’s philosophical methodology, in part because it strikes at the heart of Parfi t’s project, and also because Parfi t himself prefers to focus on Kant in his reply. I bring the themes from both commentators together (whilst acknowl-edging their differences), showing how they can lend support to the other, devel-oping points that Parfi t needs to answer in order to show that the Triple Theory, or anything like it, is plausible.

Next up is David Copp’s chapter. Normative naturalists hold that normative properties and facts are natural, contending that these are similar in all metaphys-ically important respects to other natural properties and facts. Parfi t argues, how-ever, that if normative naturalism were correct, normativity would be illusory and that normative naturalism is close to nihilism. Parfi t’s most direct argument for this is his Soft Naturalist’s Dilemma. From this he concludes that normative naturalists are committed to Hard Naturalism. According to Hard Naturalism, we could get rid of normative terms and concepts without any cognitive loss. Copp argues that this is wrong, focusing on the idea that the naturalist can say,

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for example, that even if the property wrongness is identical to a natural property, N-wrongness, the proposition that torture is wrong is distinct from the proposition that torture is N-wrong. Hence if we lacked the normative concept of wrongness, there are true propositions we would be unable to believe, including the proposition that torture is wrong. Indeed, we would be unable to formulate the thesis of nor-mative naturalism. There would be a cognitive loss. There is, moreover, argues Copp, additional complexity in our ‘ways of thinking’ (WOTs) of normative properties that is crucial to normative belief playing its characteristic role in motivating action. To explain this, Copp introduces the idea of an internal WOT of a normative property where ‘internally represented’ normative beliefs have a characteristic bearing on the motivation of action. This is a feature of internally represented normative beliefs that is not had by naturalistic beliefs, not even if the naturalistic belief has the same truth conditions as the internally represented belief. The upshot is that the naturalist can reject Hard Naturalism. Properly understood, Copp concludes, naturalism does not eliminate normativity. It aims to explain what normativity consists in.

In her contribution Julia Markovits notes the consensus-building of Parts Two and Three and contrasts it with Parfi t’s total rejection of subjectivism in Part One. She argues both that the difference between objectivism and subjectivism may not be as deep as Parfi t presents and that any consensus-building should push us towards subjectivism. A crucial part of her project is to argue that we can have reasons for our desires and that identifying these is a collective project. This leads to an ‘optimistic subjectivism’, whereby we attempt to identify aims and goals we all have reasons to share, where such reasons are based on desires that we have in common.

In Part One Parfi t mentions in passing his commitment to a buck-passing account of goodness, although he disagrees with Scanlon, its most notable defender. In short, Parfi t endorses the positive thesis of buck-passing (roughly, that if X is good, then the properties that make X good give us various reasons to act in relation to X) but denies the negative thesis (that goodness itself is never reason-providing). In his contribution, Philip Stratton-Lake also considers buck-passing, and focuses in great detail on the refi nement Parfi t makes. He also discusses work on this topic by Mark Schroeder. The best case to be made on behalf of Parfi t is of understanding X’s goodness as a non-additive reason. Stratton-Lake argues that Parfi t’s view fails and that there is as yet no good reason to reject the negative thesis.

David McNaughton and Piers Rawling in their wide-ranging, joint chapter concern themselves with an overarching idea that emerges across all of OWM , namely Parfi t’s ‘two-tier’ view of practical reasoning. According to this view, practical reasons are cast as facts. Consider, for example, the following: the fact that you are hungry is a reason to eat some food. There are two facts here, hence why it is two-tier: the fact that you are hungry and the fact that you being hungry is a reason. McNaughton and Rawling trace Parfi t’s thought across a variety of topics: for example, whether normative notions other than reasons can be central

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and irreducible, and the issue of moral constraints in normative theory. This leads them to argue that Parfi t should not be a constructivist about morality and should adopt a thoroughgoing non-constructivist two-tier theory.

Kieran Setiya focuses on Parfi t’s Kantian Contractualism – a crucial part of the Triple Theory – and asks how and whether it can guide action. Kantian Contrac-tualism states that ‘everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance everyone could rationally will’. This provides us with a clear sense of which acts are wrong: an act is wrong if it is deemed wrong by those principles that one accepts under this formula. Through a series of moves, most notably a focus on the idea of a Wrong-Making Reason, Setiya worries whether we can apply the Kantian Contractualist formula when we do not already know what we have reason to do. The formula may be redundant.

Doug Portmore makes trouble for rule consequentialism, another key element of Parfi t’s Triple Theory. He casts rule consequentialism as stating that agents have reason to act so long as the act is part of a set of acts that, if realized, would bring about the best consequences, and that this is so even if (1) the act itself does not have good consequences and (2) the agent cannot see to it that the set of acts (and their consequences) are realized. Portmore argues that an agent has reason to perform the act only if she can see to it that the set of acts and the consequences are also realized, thus denying (2). This then leads, absent any other suffi cient reason to act, to the fact that agents lack suffi cient reason to act. So, argues Portmore, this means either that rule-consequentialism is false, or that we often lack suffi cient reason to act as morality requires. Both of these options damn Parfi t’s position.

In their joint chapter J.L. Dowell and David Sobel consider Parfi t’s argument – the Triviality Objection – against non-analytic naturalism (as considered by Copp). They argue that naturalism can meet the central challenge that Parfi t offers. Non-analytic naturalism can make informative identity statements, and Parfi t misses this because he relies on the mistaken assumption that the informativeness of such statements must be explained by their semantics rather than by the prag-matics of their use. Dowell and Sobel show that it is possible for non-analytic naturalists to make informative identity statements, and hence Parfi t’s objection is undermined.

Having raised a worry with Parfi t’s anti-naturalist stance and also considered one of his anti-naturalist arguments, we then change tack to consider what a naturalistic alternative might look like. In her contribution Julia Driver argues for a type of naturalism, whilst taking seriously Parfi t’s view that metaethical theories should ensure that they can make sense of things mattering. Her approach is broadly Humean. Within this broad approach she defends a view of ‘constitu-tivism’, which sees reasons as extractable from basic norms of agency. This can, of course, mean that the reasons that exist are contingent on features of humans and our agency, and this contingency may be unpalatable for certain realists, includ-ing, one can imagine, Parfi t. Driver argues that this contingency does not in any way lead to a vicious arbitrariness and that this position can still make plausible

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sense of why it is that things matter. In this way it ties in nicely with Markovits’ chapter.

At the end of the book Parfi t replies to all our commentators, with the replies having varying lengths. I do not go into detail here about Parfi t’s replies. Two main points are worth highlighting, however. First, as one might expect, many of the themes from above appear: the nature and ground of reasons, the status and value of the Triple Theory, practical rationality, Parfi t’s arguments against naturalism, and others. Second, his replies are robust in his defence, although, as one would expect from Parfi t’s work, he is always at pains to ensure he gives as clear an answer as possible. It is also worth noting that where he agrees with a fellow writer, Parfi t sometimes merely records this fact, whilst at other times he spells out why he thinks that a supposed disagreement is nothing of the sort and why there is some deeper agreement between himself and the writer he is responding to.

This searching for agreement has become a theme in Parfi t’s writing of late; the advance of the Triple Theory itself shows this. The writers in this volume hope that the various criticisms and ideas discussed here will help to show what (seeming) disputants can in fact agree on and help to underline what can remain as real disagreement.

Notes All references to On What Matters in this volume are referenced as either OWM 1 or OWM 2, with the relevant page number, chapter or section. Reasons and Persons is referenced as RP .

1 In this collection we deal only with the fi rst two volumes. 2 OWM 1, p. 72. 3 These two parts were fi rst delivered, in different form, as Tanner Lectures in 2002. 4 OWM 1, p. xix. 5 OWM 1, p. 413. 6 See especially OWM 1, §42. 7 OWM 2, §95. 8 The order of commentators was suggested by Parfi t himself because of how he wanted

to structure his responses.

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2

MORAL THEORIES

INTRODUCTION

In the last chapter we saw how the task of working out what we ought to do in face of the numerous dilemmas in bioethics seems to lie at least partly with moral philosophy in its specification of moral theories. Now we must look at the range of these theories and try to see how adequate they are to this task. To bring the various theories to life, I want you to imagine yourself faced with a moral dilemma, a situation in which you have to make a very difficult moral choice and it is hard to know which ‘horn’ of the dilemma is the better one to opt for. So let’s start with an actual case in medical ethics. It is one in which I was personally involved, since it arose when I was Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the University of Otago, New Zealand. I have used it many times with groups of students, both medical and non-medical, and I find it raises very strong opinions about what was the right thing to do. Hence it can help to clarify how different answers to the dilemmas raised by the case would be dealt with by the various ethical theories I shall be discussing later in this chapter.

Anna’s storyHer name was Anna. This is her real name, which I can use freely, because she wanted me to tell her story fully so that others could understand her decision. Anna was a married woman with three young children. As the

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result of a traffic accident four years earlier, she had become paralysed from the neck down. It happened when she was out on a drive in the country with her family. Her husband was the driver and she was in the passenger seat, with her children in the back of the car. On a winding section of the road the driver of a logging truck lost control of his vehicle; some of the massive logs came loose from the truck and crushed her side of the car. Miraculously none of the rest of the family was seriously hurt, but Anna’s spinal injury was permanent, with no hope of recovery.

After a long period in hospital, Anna was able to return home, but she required total care from her family, visiting nurses and other therapists. What made matters worse was that she also suffered from diffuse phan-tom pain throughout her body, which did not yield to any method of relief except doses of narcotics so heavy as to make her incapable of any sus-tained concentration. As a result, none of her former activities – hiking, reading, acting, singing – were possible for her. Anna had requested that, if she were ever to suffer a respiratory or cardiac arrest, she should not be resuscitated. As she put it, strongly and with utter conviction, ‘I am no longer the person I was; I do not wish to continue like this.’ she had discussed these views with her husband and children, and they respected them, though very upset at the thought of losing her.

However, when she did suffer an arrest she was away from home in another country, on a brief respite holiday for her family; and, although her wishes were known by the professional carer (her family could not be contacted quickly), they were ignored; an ambulance was called and she was rushed into hospital and resuscitated. As a result, she ended up totally dependent on a ventilator, and attempts to wean her off it were all unsuccessful.

Throughout a period of several months, Anna steadfastly maintained that being kept on a ventilator was against her wishes and that she wanted it to be switched off, even although she was not likely to survive without it. she was examined by a psychiatrist and found to be fully competent. Her request went to an ethics committee, which recommended that her request be granted. A device was fixed to the ventilator that made it possible for Anna to switch it off herself. At a prearranged time, with her family present, she flipped the switch, and lapsed into unconsciousness briefly. However, after a few minutes she woke up and became very agitated and distressed, saying to the anaesthetist who was present, ‘why am I still here?’ The anaes-thetist decided, with the agreement of the family, that he should give her some sedation, even though this could jeopardize her capacity to breathe unaided. shortly after the dose was administered Anna stopped breathing, and (according to those present) had a very peaceful death.

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Now please take a few moments to think about this story from dif-ferent perspectives. First, imagine you were Anna – what would you do in her situation? Would you feel it your duty as a mother to carry on for the sake of your children, regardless of the constant pain and loss of all the activities you used to enjoy? Or would you think that it would be better for everybody, not only yourself, that you were released from this state of total dependency, no longer able to be a real mother to your children?

Next put yourself in the position of the attending doctor. Was it right that he agreed to have a device fitted to the respirator, allow-ing his patient to switch it off? Rather than giving her the means to (probably) end her life, should he have been encouraging her to accept her dependent condition, maybe talking about other patients he had worked with, who had to cope with similar challenges but managed to live with them? And what about his decision to give sedation, knowing that this could result in her death? Was this an act of killing (we shall look at the debates about euthanasia in Chapter 4) or an appropriate treatment for her distress?

Finally, imagine you are a member of the ethics committee deal-ing with the request to have the ventilator removed. (If there is a group of you thinking about this, you could role play the meeting of the committee, with different people taking opposing views.) What might be the committee’s justification for agreeing to the request? And what arguments might be used to say it should not be granted?

You may have noticed, when you were thinking about this on your own or discussing it in a group, that different kinds of reasons could be used to decide whether the various actions and decisions were right or wrong. Among these is the need to assess the conse-quences of different solutions to the problem. What will be the effect on Anna and on her family if her wish is granted? And what if her wish is not granted? Which would have the better outcome? Then the idea of duty might crop up. What is Anna’s duty as a mother; and the anaesthetist’s duty as a doctor? What about Anna’s husband? – should he persuade her to soldier on, for the sake of the children, or should he stand by her choice, seeing himself as supporting her in such a difficult decision? Then there is the role of the ethics com-mittee. Is it there to uphold the right of individuals to choose, or

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does it need to think about community values, which could include seeing human life as sacred and suicide as wrong? Will its decision in Anna’s case affect future policy for other patients in Anna’s condi-tion, and is this potentially harmful to other patients, even though it might be the right one for Anna? Finally there is Anna herself. What would we admire in her approach to this? Does it show strength of character to prefer a peaceful death to the constant struggle she has with pain and disability? Or, is it more admirable if she struggles on, trying to find a new meaning in her life, now that all her old sources of pleasure and fulfilment have been taken away from her?

We can see then, that, as we think through this case, we get the building blocks of different kinds of ethical justification. Some theories focus on good and bad consequences as a measure of what is right; others make our duty as moral agents the central focus of the justification for decisions; others stress community values, which may override the choices of individuals in some circumstances; and lastly, some look at character first and foremost, asking which actions and decisions show the person to be a virtuous individual, one whom we can trust to make good decisions. Let us look at each of these theories in turn.

COUNTING THe CONseQUeNCes

One approach to ethical dilemmas is to count up the benefits and harms which would come from a decision one way or the other, and then favour the one where the likely amount of benefit outweighs the likely amount of harm caused by the decision. It is often thought this is the commonsense – some would say, rational – approach to moral choice. The moral theory behind it is called consequen-tialism. The best-known consequentialist theory is utilitarianism, formulated first by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham. He devised the Greatest Happiness Principle, which stated that actions are right according to whether they produce the greatest amount of happi-ness and the least amount of pain for the greatest number of people. So, according to this theory, we need to consider all the people who will be affected by Anna’s decision (and by the decision of the ethics committee and her doctor to agree to her choice) and estimate what

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the balance of harms over benefits will be. Doing this calculation of consequences will, it is claimed, tell is what the morally right decision is.

Consequentialism in various forms has had a major influence in bioethics and is probably still the dominant theory in the subject. The theory can sometimes appear attractive to health professionals, since it seems to reflect how they make their everyday clinical deci-sions, seeking to maximize benefit for their patients and to avoid, or minimize, harms. A well-known exponent of the approach is the Australian philosopher and first president of the IAB, Peter Singer, who has written across a wide range of topics, including use of ani-mals, euthanasia, treatment of severely handicapped infants and our obligations to the poor. In these situations, Singer argues, we need to make our choices by seeking to minimize pain and suffering (includ-ing the suffering of nonhuman animals), in some cases at a cost, if need be, of ending lives.

Yet consequentialism is not as straightforward as it at first appears. The first problem is the uncertainty of predicting consequences. Some of the consequences of switching off the respirator may appear to be clear: Anna will most likely die (and that is what she seemed to want) and so she will no longer have to put up with the con-stant phantom pain and the severe disability caused by her condition. However, as we see from the story, even that was not a certain out-come, and so we have the next decision made by the doctor, to sedate her, resulting in her death. How will these two decisions (Anna’s and the doctor’s) affect the others involved or affected by them? Here we have even more uncertainty: the children are young and may be badly affected now or later by her death; and certainly they and her husband will suffer from grief – will they get over it? We don’t know, at least not at the time the decision has to be made. Again, the decision of the ethics committee and the doctor’s actions might have harmful consequences on other people in the future. Will it make other paralyzed patients feel they too are better dead? Will dependent patients fear that their doctors now have the author-ity to end their lives, if they are considered not worth continuing? Again, we simply don’t know, and that is one of the problems with relying on prediction of consequences for making moral decisions. The uncertainty of consequences is in fact a feature of nearly all

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medicine and health care. For example, it used to be thought that giving premature infants high doses of oxygen would help them to survive and develop, but then it was discovered that this could cause blindness. Medicine must proceed by trial and error, and sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease. Consequentialists answer this problem by distinguishing between acts and rules. Clearly it may be difficult for anyone to predict all the consequences of one specific act, but instead we can rely on rules for conduct, forged over many years of human experience and known to promote the best con-sequences usually, but not necessarily in every case. So we should follow these rules and adapt them as the consequences of follow-ing them become clearer. This, of course, is how modern medicine normally deals with uncertainty. It relies on clinical research to give guidelines based on the best evidence-based medicine.

Then what would be the rule for Anna and those caring for her? It is hard to know, but it might be the view that competent patients have the right to make decisions about their own lives, even if these decisions result in their death. By following this, we would have to agree with Anna’s very carefully considered and consistent choice that she no longer wanted life-preserving treatment. But the oddity of this conclusion is that it means we would have to disregard all the adverse consequences on the other people affected by the decision, even if the calculation of the balance of benefit over harm showed a negative result! So the reality is that even rules forged over years of human experience cannot guarantee that our actions will bring the best consequences, whether in the long term or the short term. The consequentialist confidence that we have a simple solution to moral uncertainty seems somewhat misplaced.

And now we come to a second problem with consequentialism. How do we define the good and bad outcomes or consequences? Jeremy Bentham thought this was quite easy. We need to develop a ‘felicific calculus’, by which he meant a scientific measuring sys-tem for human happiness, which would allow us to estimate the quantity, fruitfulness, intensity and duration of pain and pleasure of any given action, and so work out which actions or social policies scored the highest. However, as Bentham’s disciple (and unwilling critic), John Stuart Mill, soon perceived when he tried to defend the theory, trying to measure pain and pleasure fails to capture what

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constitutes human happiness or fulfilment. (It would be possible to make everyone happy, in a sense, by universally and surreptitiously administering a mood-changing drug – an idea explored in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World). Mill distinguished between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures; and he recognized that there were certain human ‘goods’ that could not be reduced to a calculation of amounts of pleasure, but had value as ends in themselves. The chief example of such a human ‘good’, according to Mill, is liberty (so in Anna’s case it would be the liberty to make choices about her own life), but oth-ers mentioned by Mill included the search for knowledge and the appreciation of beauty.

When we relate this second problem (defining good and bad out-comes) to bioethics as a whole, we find that it is a really tough one to solve. Of course, sometimes the beneficial outcomes of medicine and health care are obvious and easy to measure. In cases of serious and curable disease or recovery from accident, there is little doubt about what will be the best outcome. But, as the WHO has pointed out, health is often not simply ‘the absence of disease or disability’ (World Health Organization, 1948). A person may be dying or be seriously disabled, but live a life of greater fulfilment than those who live physically healthy, yet emotionally and spiritually discontented, lives. And often in medicine a choice has to be made between quan-tity and quality of life. Mere survival, but with unremitting pain, fear or indignity, may not be the outcome people would choose for themselves, as Anna’s story demonstrates. Thus, such value ques-tions, beyond the simple calculation of pleasure and pain, make it very hard to know for sure how consequences are to be used to help us make the right decisions.

There is also a third problem with consequentialism, which we can identify as the problem of justice. This is the need to treat every-one fairly, not merely to follow what will benefit the majority, as Bentham’s Greatest Happiness Principle requires. Let us change Anna’s story to explore this. Supposing she did want to carry on living, despite the challenges she faced, but her husband felt that it was all becoming too much for the family and that she needed to go into institutional care. But then suppose further that funding for such care is in short supply and so people as badly disabled as Anna are not given priority for life supporting treatment, this being

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reserved for patients who have some prospect of recovery of func-tions. Thus Anna is left to die, even though she wants to live. (I must stress that this is all fictional, as her family would never have abandoned her in this way, and in her country no such policy would ever have been tolerated. But there are places where this could hap-pen, largely because of extreme poverty and an inadequate public health system.) This abandonment of Anna seems to be quite unfair, but for consequentialism (except in a very sophisticated form which I shall mention below) none of this matters, so long as the balance of benefit for the majority is maintained. It may be important for people to be treated fairly usually, since this will make for a happier society, but if the situation demands it, the individual’s welfare must be sacrificed.

We can relate this more widely to bioethics by thinking of the origins of research ethics, described in the last chapter, in the Code which emerged from the Nuremberg trials. Suppose the horrific experimentation on concentration camp inmates had resulted in some major advances in therapeutic medicine (in fact they did not produce any outcomes of this kind, apart from some findings about hypothermia coming from freezing people to death). Would these agonizing deaths of a few people be justified by the saving of thou-sands of lives in the future? If the majority benefit can be enhanced in this way, what is there in the consequentialist account that marks it out as wrong? A rule-consequentialist might respond in terms of the undermining of a sense of security in society. If such acts were permitted, the argument goes, then people would never know when they might become the next victim for the common good. Thus the general happiness would not be served by permitting the abuse of a few for majority benefit.

But let us imagine a scenario where such majority-benefiting injustices are unlikely to be discovered. An example given by Griffin (1997) imagines surgeons operating on a man who lives a solitary life and has become cut off from all family and friends. They realize that he has a set of healthy organs which could save the lives of several needy patients, so, rather than making sure that he survives, they ‘accidentally’ allow him to die on the operating table, and then sal-vage his organs. Since no one will be made to feel insecure, provided the actions go undetected, and since several lives are saved, what

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are the consequentialist grounds for describing this action as mor-ally wrong? A similar argument might be made for justifying capital punishment on consequentialist grounds, since executed criminals could provide a steady supply of organs for transplantation and most members of society would not expect to be in the same situation, and might see them to be worthy of death. Indeed, the security of society might be enhanced by the knowledge that dangerous crimi-nals would not be free to threaten society again. Yet surely there is something unjust in relating the execution of convicted criminals to the supply of organs for transplantation. If demand for organs continued to increase, should we take steps to achieve an increase in executions?

So, perhaps we should conclude that consequentialism, despite its common-sense appearance, is not up to the task of helping to deal with the issues arising in bioethics. But this would be a rather hasty conclusion. The attempt to predict the likely outcomes of individual actions and policy decisions in bioethics must always be one feature of a carefully reasoned approach. If we don’t try our best to establish all the relevant facts and to make well-informed predictions about consequences, then we could be at the mercy of what some writers have called the ‘yuk factor’ in ethics – a reaction of distaste or dis-approval, based solely on emotion and unexamined prejudice. On the other hand, the simplistic notion that it is easy to put values on different consequences, even if we are able to be reasonably sure of them, also needs radical criticism. What is needed is a more nuanced account of social benefit and of human fulfilment. Only when we know more about the key human values to be defended and pro-moted are we likely to have an adequate way of assessing whether individual choices and social policies have genuine moral worth because of their consequences. This enrichment of consequentialist calculations is offered by some of the other approaches to ethics that I will now discuss, in preparation for a suggested way forward in using moral theory in bioethics.

DOING ONe’s DUTY

When we were discussing Anna’s difficult choice and the corre-sponding choices that had to be made by those around her, including

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her husband, her doctors and the ethics committee, the question of duty arose. What was the duty of the ethics committee? – to agree with her decision, or to oppose it on the grounds that it could threaten the welfare of others in the future? What was her husband’s duty? – to respect her wishes or to try to persuade her otherwise for the sake of the family? And what about Anna herself? Was she being selfish in wanting an end to her suffering? Was it her duty as a mother to stay alive in order to continue to love and support her children as they grew up? Ethical approaches which seek to deter-mine our moral duties are known as deontological theories (from the Greek word deon – ‘it is required’). The most powerful exponent of this approach was the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant drew a distinction between what he called ‘hypothetical imperatives’ and ‘categorical imperatives’. The first type of imperative lays down the requirements for achieving some desired end. An example would be: ‘If you want to remain healthy, exercise regularly and eat a sensible diet’. Obviously, you need not obey this imperative if you don’t see the end result, health, as one of your priorities. So, you may prefer a life of TV watching and eating fast food, realizing that your health may suffer, but think-ing that you will at least die happy! In contrast with this conditional obedience of hypothetical imperatives, a categorical imperative requires unconditional obedience and overrides our preferences and desires. According to Kant, it does not depend on your having cer-tain desires at all, but solely on knowing your duty and following it, whatever the consequences. In fact, Kant thought that the best sign that we were following our duty was when we did something we did not want to do. So in Anna’s case, a decision to continue on life support, despite the fact that she found it intolerable, would show that she was following her duty.

How, then, do we know what our moral duty is? Kant offered several answers to this question. The first was based on the idea of universal law, which would apply to everyone in the same cir-cumstances, without exception or partiality. So, when considering a particular action, we must ask ourselves, can I consistently will that this same action be done by others, when I am at the receiving end of the action? For example, if I think it would be all right for me to tell a lie when circumstances warrant it, can I also agree that it

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is all right that I will be lied to at times? (I shall return to this lying example later.) Kant thought that we would quickly see the illogi-cality of this idea, and recognize that the prohibition of lying must be absolute, otherwise we could never be sure of when people are being truthful. This test of moral consistency is probably familiar to most of us, in the form of what is called the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you’.

A second account of the categorical imperative offered by Kant can be summed up in the idea of the need to have a society in which there is collaboration and harmony among all moral agents. Kant called this being ‘a member of a rational kingdom of ends’. We know we are doing our duty when following it enables and protects others also following their moral duty. Thus, together we ensure respect for the moral law throughout society. This prevents us from merely promoting our own personal ends and enables us to create a society in which all are equally respected and honoured. This formulation leads on to the third and best-known version of Kant’s categori-cal imperative, which can be summed up in the phrase ‘respect for persons’. Kant’s wording is: ‘So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of any other, in every case as an end, never a mere means.’

So how useful is this theory for the dilemmas of bioethics? Thinking back again to the notorious uses of humans as experimen-tal guinea pigs, it is clear that the Kantian injunction never to treat people as mere means prohibits such actions absolutely. When the US government gave immunity from war crimes prosecution to the Japanese doctors doing research into biological weapons so that it could get the data (ostensibly for defence purposes) (Harris, 1994), it treated the Chinese prisoners who suffered agonizing deaths as no more than convenient sources for information that it believed to be essential for its own country’s national security. Moreover, duty-based ethics has an effect much wider than the proscription of such obvious compromises with evil. The centrality of moral agency in the theory has led to a revolution in the way medical ethics has been understood. The idea of ‘the patient as a person’ has become norma-tive in all aspects of the therapeutic relationship, resulting in a new emphasis on autonomous choice by patients, which affects key aspects of medical care, such as communication, confidentiality and

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treatment decisions. We shall return to these in detail in Chapter 4, but at this stage we can see that an approach to ethics that accords to every person an equal moral status is a powerful weapon against arrogance, paternalism and the abuse of professional power.

Yet, despite these advantages, this theory does leave us with some puzzles and problems. The first of these is that it seems to promise too much by way of moral certainty. Is our duty always as clear as is suggested by the theory, and is it really the case that all moral rules are absolute, allowing for no exceptions? For example, Kant believed that it was always our duty to tell the truth, whatever the consequences, and that allowing exceptions would invalidate the nature of truth itself. In his own writing, he imagines a scene in which a murderer is pursuing his victim and this person has taken refuge in our house. Must we tell the murderer the truth when he comes knocking at our door? Yes, says Kant, for we cannot be sure that lying will bring good consequences – it could in fact bring bad ones, since the person may have already escaped from a window and our lie would send the assassin in his direction! Our duty is to be truthful and to face the consequences, including defending the victim from the killer if need be.

Yet, is this somewhat extreme conclusion really necessary? Kant’s idea that any lie will undercut the veracity of all communication seems to ignore the sophistication of human interactions. We can quite often distinguish between a habitually deceitful person, whose word we would never trust, and a trustworthy person, who may sometimes have to conceal the truth for the sake of more important moral ends (Bok, 1978). Numerous examples can be used to illus-trate this, from relatively trivial ones (the ‘white lie’ to avoid hurting a friend’s feelings) to very serious ones (captured soldiers who lie under interrogation to save the lives of others).

This leads us to an unresolved problem in Kant’s absolutist approach. Duties conflict at times, and not all of them can be met in some situations. In the above example, the duty to protect life conflicts with the duty to tell the truth. So it seems better to talk about prima facie (‘on the face of it’) duties, realizing that there is more work to do in order to decide what any particular situation requires of us. Let us take some medical examples to illustrate this. In one case, a young person needs a kidney transplant and the best

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result would come from a living related donor, whose blood type is compatible, so there will be less risk of rejection. The brother of the patient is tested and is a match for the recipient, but he tells the doctor in confidence that (although he is ashamed of this) he is really too frightened to go through with the operation. He does not want his family to know this. The doctor tells the family that the potential donor is ‘not compatible’. Is this lie morally justified? Is it really a lie, or just ‘economy with the truth’, since the doctor has not said why the donor is incompatible? In a second case, the tests done to establish compatibility reveal that the donor is not in fact the child of both parents. Does the doctor have a duty to reveal this information to the parents, to him, to all three, or to none of them? The Kantian answer seems unambiguous – the truth must be told to all parties. But is this really the doctor’s duty? And is deciding not to reveal some information exactly the same as a direct lie or deception?

These dilemmas reveal that Kant’s idea that we always have a clear test of whether an imperative is categorical does not really work in practice. It is obviously important to see the force of moral rules. They are not just matters of convention or convenience, not just to be followed when we feel like it and ignored when they frustrate our desires. But they do not come in the simple, unconditional form suggested by Kant: Do not kill; do not lie; always keep promises; and so on. In these formulations they cannot be made into universal moral laws, as Kant believed. The Golden Rule, that we should do unto others as we would have done unto ourselves, may be a good test of the impartiality of our decisions, but it does not tell us enough about what is morally required. For example, I might prefer that people lie to me about whether I have terminal cancer, but that does not mean that I can make it into a universal rule for everyone in my situation. Agreeing to do this as a moral requirement may depend on the circumstances of each case. Similarly, we can agree that killing is wrong in most circumstances, but still, without obvious contra-diction, recognize that it could be our duty to kill (for example, to prevent a mass murderer continuing to fire on innocent bystanders). Our moral absolutes need to be more carefully formulated.

We can perhaps make more progress by using Kant’s alternative formulation of the basic moral law: always treat people (including ourselves) as ends in themselves, never as mere means to an end.

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Here we need to note that the prohibition is on treating people as mere means. We treat people as means to our ends all the time: the bus driver is the means of our reaching a lecture hall in time; the lec-turer is a means of our learning more about an interesting or useful subject; if we get sick, the doctors and other health professionals are a means to our recovery; our sexual partners can be a means for us to have children of our own. However, if these are morally acceptable relationships, all these people have chosen to help us to achieve our ends. The bus driver, lecturer and health professionals have cho-sen to provide the services we receive and are remunerated for it; and, if our sexual partner has not consented to having a child by us, but is the victim of non-consensual sex or has been deceived by us (say, about contraception), then we have treated him or her as mere means to get a child. Thus, at the core of this basic moral principle, is the requirement to respect the autonomy of others. Later I shall discuss this concept in more detail, but for the present we can see it as allowing people to make their own moral choices, to direct their own lives in ways that they believe to be right, to be – in a phrase – free moral agents. Applying this to Anna’s situation might make us see that Anna’s autonomous choice to have her treatment discontin-ued has to be respected, if we are to treat her as a person, as a moral agent, whose life is in her own hands, not in ours. (Kant, however, would not have agreed with this account, as he saw us all as having an absolute duty to preserve our lives, since as moral agents we could never allow our unhappiness to be a cause of our own death.)

However, despite the problems in such an uncompromising approach, we can see, using this Kantian formula, that there are some moral absolutes. Slavery in all its forms, rape and other unpro-voked physical assaults, murder, exploitation, deception for personal gain and the betrayal of trust, especially the trust of the vulnerable, are unconditionally wrong. In all these cases, people are used as mere objects to serve the purposes of others. They have been deprived of some or all of the most basic of all human attributes, the capacity to make their own choices about those things which matter to them in life, planning their own futures and living with the consequences of those choices. At this most basic level of moral reasoning, Kant seems to be absolutely right. But the devil is in the detail, as we shall see later on. Knowing about these moral absolutes does not

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automatically enable us to get the day-to-day moral rules neatly wrapped up in the orderly way Kant hoped to achieve.

There is one other problem with Kant’s approach: his rational-istic account of moral agency. We have seen already that he puts rationality at the centre of morality. His concept of a moral law was one which could be accepted as universal by all rational beings; and in another formulation, as we saw above, he spoke of a rational king-dom of ends. In the same way, his distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives depends on a radical separation of feel-ings or desires, on the one side, and reason, on the other. For Kant, feelings will lead us astray; only the strict exercise of reason will ena-ble us to both know and obey the moral law. (His only concession to emotion was to say that we would be helped to act morally by feeling ‘respect’ for the moral law, which he described as a kind of awe similar to the feelings generated by the ‘starry heavens above’.)

However, this creates two difficulties for an adequate account of what is entailed in moral choices. Requiring logical reasoning (which is what Kant seems to mean by rationality) seems to be asking both too much of us and too little. It is asking too much because it would suggest that only those humans who possess such analytical powers can be seen as part of his community of moral agents, and this would surely exclude all children and those humans who do not possess the level of intelligence that he seems to demand. Does this mean that such people do not merit the respect accorded to moral agents? If so, then it would seem to be morally acceptable to treat them as mere means, even perhaps enslaving them if this served the ends of the members of the rational elite. (Children might be exempted, since they may eventually attain the rationality required.) Of course, Kant probably did not intend such a conclusion (so far as we know), but the logic of his position seems to be that the boundaries of the human family extend only so far as rationality of the quality that he requires can be demonstrated. This would have serious repercussions for bioethics, implying, for example, that we do not have to have the same standards of treatment for those with cognitive impairments as we would require for those of ‘normal’ intelligence.

A second difficulty with the concentration on rationality is that it seems to miss some essential features of the moral life. It is asking too little of us. We know from experience that highly intelligent

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people are not always the most admirable morally! They can use their reason in a cold and calculating way, perhaps to further their own advantage, or, when they do consider others, being helpful out of an impersonal sense of duty, obeying the letter but not the spirit of the law. Such duty-driven individuals can be hard to bear.

Thus Kant, with his stress on an iron-clad rational duty, seems to ask too little by suggesting that the ability to see logical contradic-tions or inconsistencies in our actions is enough to ensure that we act morally. But we look for far more than this in moral agents, and this ‘more’ is in the realm of emotion, not reason. We look for empathy, compassion and a certain humility that sees the limits of our wisdom and the fallibility of our decision making. To put it simply: we sense that in order to get right actions, we need good people. So it is to this idea – that morality is what good people do – that I now turn.

BeING A GOOD PeRsON – VIRTUe eTHICs

My discussion of the limitations of Kant’s emphasis on duty, based in rationality, takes us to another major tradition in ethical theory, virtue ethics (VE). This approach can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, with a major exponent being the philosopher and natural scientist Aristotle, but it also found its way into the Christian tra-dition when mediaeval theologians began to make lists of virtues and vices. It has seen a revival recently, reflecting a dissatisfaction with the way both consequentialist and deontological approaches deal with the moral life. The VE approach can be summed up by a comparison with these theories, which seek answers to the question, ‘What should I do?’ In contrast with this stress on difficult choices, VE asks a different question, ‘How shall I be?’ or, ‘What sort of life should I lead?’ Thus the focus is shifted from the individual choices or decisions made by people in challenging situations to the endur-ing character of moral agents.

Imagine what it must have been like for Anna’s husband and children to be in the room when the moment came for her to flick the switch and (it was expected) end her life. Then think of the later scene when she wakens up and clearly asks not to be kept alive. What emotions must have surged up both in her family and in the doctor who had to decide what to do next! The actual testimony of

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those involved is very revealing. To her children and her husband, she was a heroine, a truly brave person, whose courage and determi-nation to be true to herself as well as true to her family was utterly admirable. (And in fact, years later, one of her daughters wrote a play about it, and took the leading part herself, as a tribute to her mother.) For the doctor involved the challenge of her question ‘why am I still here?’ was inescapable. He knew he would be criticized by some of his colleagues, and indeed might be in danger of disci-plinary action against him, if he administered a sedative. But, as he said at a medical meeting about the case, he felt he owed it to Anna to give her peace and freedom from anxiety, whatever the cost to him. Thus the end of Anna’s story illustrates in a very vivid way that moral decisions are always a blend of reason and emotion. It is true that health professionals have to learn some kind of distance in order to care adequately for their patients. They have to avoid becoming over-involved in a way that could affect their objectivity and judg-ment. But at the same time, a cold detachment does not serve either patient or professional well. Moral choices are not made in an emo-tional vacuum, but in the difficult terrain of human encounters, where we have to face up to the psychological challenge to ourselves of genuinely caring for others.

It is this blend of reason and emotion, acting as a guide to our actions throughout our lives, that VE is seeking to capture. There is, however, no single theory of VE but, rather, a cluster of theories, which have both similarities and differences. One thing they have in common is the attempt to base ethics on the essential elements of human nature – to see ethics as an expression of our true humanity. It is here that the central notion of ‘virtue’ comes in. To modern ears, the word sounds like a description of special people, of heroes or saints (Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa), well above the level of common humanity. But this is not what the Greek word for virtue (arete) means. It expresses simply the essential function of anything. So, the virtue of a knife (a ‘good’ knife) is that it cuts well. (In the hands of a surgeon it can cure, and in the hands of a murderer it can kill, but in either case it retains its virtue, if it cuts well.) So, virtuous human beings are not exceptional people, but simply ordinary people who are true to their own nature, who act in a humane way.

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What, then, is our true nature? It is here that the various theories diverge. The classical theory, going back to Aristotle, sees two forms of virtue, intellectual and moral. The intellectual virtues reflect our nature as rational animals, but consist of more than simply skill in log-ical reasoning. In addition to the type of reasoning that helps us make scientific discoveries and technical innovations, we are endowed with a kind of practical wisdom (sophrosune in Greek) which grows with experience and enables us to make considered moral choices. The moral virtues supplement this intellectual ability. They are a blend of reason and emotion, habitual ways of acting, developed by experi-ence and training from childhood, which give balance and harmony to our lives and to our relationships with others. These moral virtues are characterized by the ‘golden mean’, a proper balance between deficiency and excess. Thus, as an example, courage is a moral virtue, and its corresponding vices are cowardice (deficiency) and rashness (excess). Courage maintains a balance between these extremes. In a similar way, temperance is the golden mean between gluttony and asceticism. In addition to courage and temperance, other ‘cardinal’ virtues are prudence and justice. To these four virtues Christian tradi-tion added three ‘theological’ virtues: faith, hope and love – and then added seven corresponding vices (or ‘deadly sins’) for good measure!

So the traditional answer to the question – ‘How shall I live?’ – is that we must nourish these virtues and avoid the corresponding vices. However, such list making can seem somewhat arbitrary and unhelpful. Is there some kind of unifying theme running through these descriptions that enables us to say of a person that they are a good person, someone we can trust to make good decisions and live in helpful relationships with others? Modern VE theorists have tried to describe such a unified theme in human virtue in terms of realistically facing up to the challenges of being human. This will mean accepting our vulnerability as living creatures and our inevi-table dependency on others at different phases of our lives; it will acknowledge our need to find some sense of meaning and purpose in our lives; and, finally, it will enable us to confront our mortality, coming to terms with the knowledge that we, and those we love, must all, some day, die. Pulling this all together is a sense of self-fulfilment (called by the Greeks eudaimonia, literally ‘having a good spirit’); this comes from the knowledge that our lives have been

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worthwhile and, despite some failures, have brought some goodness into the lives of others. Another term to sum up this idea of the ful-filment of our capacities as humans is ‘human flourishing’, and this can be contrasted with the denial of the human potential for good-ness in acts of selfishness, violence and despair.

There are several ways in which VE can be related to bioethics. The most frequent way has been to try to describe the ‘virtuous practitioner’, a health professional whom patients can trust and who provides a good role model for students and trainees. This can be helpful in practice and is clearly relevant to professional education, in which the ‘hidden curriculum’ of peer pressure and models of prac-tice by senior practitioners are well known to have a greater effect than the ideals of professionalism promulgated in lectures. But the danger here is a kind of glorification of the professions, putting them on a pedestal above the lay public, as though they hold a monopoly on ethical ideals. (This is the danger of elitism in VE, to which I return below.)

By way of counterbalance, we need to think more carefully about what might be meant by ‘virtuous patients’. From the professional perspective, this term has often been used to describe patients who are compliant, uncomplaining and cheerful in adversity, and who never question medical judgement – in other words, the easy patient! However, the more modern account of VE, described above, offers a quite different perspective. It suggests patients as moral teachers of those caring for them, as they show us how to cope with human frailty and with the challenges of illness, disability and the fear of imminent death. The courage, perseverance and kindness of patients can often present a richer account of what it means to be human than can any medical heroics by health professionals. It is this kind of virtuous patienthood that led Anna’s family and Anna’s doctor to see her, not as a selfish person abandoning her family, but rather as a mother and wife who remained true to herself to the end.

VE is also relevant to bioethics because of its emphasis on the whole moral life rather than on incidents of moral choice and dilemma. In Chapter 1 we saw how, under the influence of the WHO, the social, political and environmental correlates of health have come increasingly into focus. Instead of being caught in the disease model of health, in which the dramas of acute medicine

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function prominently, bioethics has begun tackling issues of health care delivery, environmental causes of ill-health and those aspects of social life which foster or destroy healthy human development from birth to death. The weakness of the consequentialist and deonto-logical approaches to ethics has been their portrayal of morality as a series of isolated moral choices – the ‘what should I do?’ question. VE opens up our horizons, helping us to consider the quality of our lives as a whole, both individually and socially. It suggests that, unless we are willing to tackle the difficult questions about the purpose and value of human life, we are unlikely to know what the right deci-sions are. Thus we seem to have a richer theory for dealing with the complexities of the issues raised in contemporary bioethics.

However, like the other two theories, VE is not without its prob-lems. The first, already referred to above, is that, despite its claims to be describing the ordinary capacities of all humans, it may be in fact both elitist and utopian. Is it reasonable to expect everyone to find self-fulfilment, to believe that they have had a meaningful life, to find ways of helping others and to face death with equanimity? Much of this may be to do with what has been called ‘moral luck’ (Nagel, 1979). We noted that the development of moral character is a matter of training and habituation from early years, but, then, what of those whose childhood has been one of deprivation, paren-tal neglect and an environment of crime and violence? It is obvious that people vary greatly in their upbringing, in their life experiences and possibly also in inherited traits of character. So why should we expect that the norm for everyone is to live a life of harmony with others, to find fulfilment in what they do and to die a ‘good death’? Is it not enough that we avoid causing serious harm to others, or, if we do, that we can make amends for it? And there is a further risk in such idealism. Notions of the ‘good life’ can be very class related and influenced by those in power. Is the good life manifested by an Oxford don or a Nottingham coal miner? Is it, in the manner of Lord Reith (the first Director General of the BBC), to be graced by the best in classical music and in political analysis, or can a good night in the pub suffice? How are we to distinguish matters of taste from those attributes which describe fundamental human goodness?

These are serious questions, especially if those in power take it upon themselves to impose their values on the society and give no

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scope for a range of conceptions of the good. History is full of exam-ples of such an imposition of value, from Plato’s plan in The Republic to expel poets from his ideal society, to the Communist and other ideologically based states of our era. This is a problem to which I will return in the next section, when describing communitarian eth-ics, but for the moment we can note that, while VE’s stress on the goodness of people, which underpins the rightness of actions, is wel-comed, we need to be cautious! It is one thing to try to have a vision of the good human life: it is quite another to impose it on others.

This leads us to the second problem with VE, already implied above: its account of ‘virtues’ and ‘vices’ can seem very culturally relative. Aristotle’s model for the virtuous person was clearly a free Athenian man. Women, slaves and foreigners were not in the frame! Subsequently VE has fallen under powerful cultural influences, most notably Christianity with the adaptations of Aristotle’s account by the mediaeval theologian Thomas Aquinas. In our own day many of the philosophers involved in the revival of VE have come from a Catholic Christian background. This is not in itself a problem, pro-vided the arguments in favour of the theory do not involve a buy-in to the particular cultural or faith assumptions. Thus we could see force in Aristotle’s account of the Golden Mean, without accept-ing his sexist and racist prejudices. Similarly, it is obvious that the Christian concept of other-regarding love (agape) is one of the influ-ences on the more modern accounts of virtues such as justice and compassion, but this is not a difficulty if such a virtue is attainable without the need for divine intervention or religious faith.

We need to stress that cultural influence is not the same as cultural imperialism. Whatever the source of the ideas, the key question is whether they can be generalized to apply to humans in all cultures. In our era this question of generalizability has become even more pressing because of mass communications and the globalization of so many enterprises. It is no longer possible to keep ethical issues in some kind of cultural cocoon when the entire world can perceive, and be affected by, the events in our own society. The most obvious signs of this quest for some kind of broad account of basic human values are the UN Declaration of Human Rights, drawn up after the Second World War and the increasing activities of war crime tribu-nals, which have to appeal to fundamental humanitarian standards.

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We cannot escape entirely our own culture any more than we can jump out of our own skins, but we can try to find ways of transcend-ing it. Maybe a genuinely universal VE can help us to do this.

A third criticism of VE is that it is too vague to give clear answers to the ethical dilemmas that we will encounter in bioethics and, more generally, in ethics. All that the theory tells us is that we must act as a virtuous person would act in the situation – but that hardly seems to be an answer at all! In Anna’s case, for example, some people (including her family) might consider her decision to end her life a brave and virtuous act; but others, might regard it as more virtuous to carry on and attempt to overcome the challenges posed by her disability and chronic pain. So VE does not give us a clear cri-terion for deciding what is the right thing to do. This criticism of VE does seem to hit its target. In fact, the theory does not claim to tell us what to do in specific situations. Its aim is to set the right context for such decision making, to help develop the sort of people who can be relied on to make the right decisions most of the time, and to foster a society in such a humanitarian attitude is common. That is why many writers have suggested that we need both VE and one of the decision-based theories to give us a complete picture of how to assess and guide moral actions. The question then comes down to which of the theories – consequentialist or deontological – will prove the best ally of VE. I shall be returning to this question later, but first we need to consider two other contenders for the position of the best normative theory: communitarian ethics and libertarian ethics. Assessing their adequacy will occupy me for the next two sec-tions of this chapter, before I try to draw some tentative conclusions.

BROTHeRHOOD AND sIsTeRHOOD – COMMUNITARIANIsM

The rallying cry of the French Revolution was Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity). It is the third of these, ‘brotherhood’, that communitarian ethics hopes to achieve (but I have sought sexual equality in my section heading!). Another, non-gender-specific, term is solidarity or social solidarity. In this approach the main criterion is whether the actions and decisions of individuals

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ensure the good of society. The individual will must be subservient to the general will and, indeed, a person’s own good can be served only when the good of society is also served. This idea goes back to Aristotle, who famously described man as a ‘political animal’, whose nature it was to live in society. He went on: ‘he who is unable to live in society or has no need because he is sufficient for himself must be either a beast or a god’ (Nichomachean Ethics, Book 1, chapter 2). The eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed this idea further in his book, The Social Contract. A true democracy, Rousseau believed, would be a one-party state, since political parties merely result in compromises between rival interest groups. Instead of such factional politics, the ‘general will’ should be established in a general assembly of all the people, each voting according to his own beliefs and not according to any party line. Once this will is established it must be followed by all, since this is the Will of the People.

As we look back at such an idea after two centuries in which totalitarian states have made their citizens bend to the ‘will of the people’ by force and by subterfuge, it must seem dangerously ideal-istic and, indeed, a charter for tyranny. Yet there are aspects of the philosophy that deserve closer inspection. First, we need to think carefully about what we mean by the ‘self’. It is clear that we are not isolated individuals, each living in a world of our own, within which we have complete control of our lives. On the contrary, our freedom to choose and to act is both constrained and enabled by the society in which we live. As the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, without society our lives would be ‘soli-tary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. Without an ordered society we could not be the makers of our own destiny that we imagine ourselves to be. All our energies would be taken up simply by the struggle to survive in a hostile environment. But in addition what we see as our individuality, our personal identity is very largely the creation of all those social factors – family, neighbourhood, school, nation, historical epoch – that have filled our memories, formed our attitudes and offered us goals to strive for. This does not mean that we have no freedom of choice, that all our decisions and actions are wholly predetermined, but we have not chosen the scope of choices open to us, nor have we created the influences that will structure

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and influence our choices. For all these reasons, the character of the communities in which we live is a crucial factor in our moral agency. We have much less scope for choice than we imagine!

Arising from this fundamental feature of our lives, we can see the importance of the communitarian stress on social solidarity. The qual-ity of our personal and private lives is intimately related to the nature of the society in which we live, and it is in our interests to make that community work for the benefit of all. But where some communi-tarian approaches get it wrong is in their monolithic approach to the common good, seeing this as promoted only by a single way of order-ing society. Down that path lies totalitarianism and tyranny. Instead, we need to look for a diversity of communities serving different ends. Some may be related to neighbourhood concerns, others to the protec-tion of vulnerable groups, others again to the promotion of justice on a national or international scale. The philosopher Karl Popper called this approach ‘piecemeal engineering’, and he saw it as a bulwark against ‘the greatest and most urgent evils of society’ (Popper, 1974).

When viewed in this light, communitarian ethics can enhance our approach to bioethical issues by stressing the social dimension of our potential solutions, and, as we shall see in a later chapter, it has particular force when we are considering justice in health care provision. It does not, however, provide the kind of comprehensive moral theory offered by the others we have already discussed. On the other hand, it does oblige us to keep thinking about morality in its social context and not regard it as merely a question of individual choice. If we think back once more to Anna’s story, we can see the wider social implications of the decision of the ethics committee to agree to her request to have the ventilator withdrawn. This can be seen as simply the defence of the right of competent individu-als to refuse treatments or to have them withdrawn at a later stage. However, as we shall see in Chapter 4, this decision verges on the wider social question of meeting a request for active euthanasia. This question becomes more acute when we see the decision of the doc-tor to give a sedative, knowing it could result in her death. At that point we do get to wider issues of social policy and its effect on all members of the society. Morality at that point becomes much more than a question of individual choice. In the words of John Donne (originally written in 1642):

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No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

(Donne, 2002)

Yet, the threat to individuality in communitarian approaches remains strong. In the next chapter I shall be discussing a range of approaches to bioethics that depend on the cultural setting, social situation or reli-gious beliefs of the individual to define the rightness of moral choices in bioethics. We shall have a chance then to think more fully about how we can achieve a balance between personal freedom and the demands of society. But, for now, let us look at an account which is in total opposition to any account of morality that undercuts personal freedom.

lIVe FRee OR DIe – lIBeRTARIANIsM

The heading for this section is the motto of the state of New Hampshire in New England, and it captures well the revolutionary origins of the USA. The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

This stress on rights, and particularly on liberty as an inalienable right, forms the foundation of an approach to ethics which can be called libertarianism or liberal individualism. The theory can be seen as the polar opposite of the one we have just summarized. It stresses the freedom of the individual from social control, putting strict limits on the extent to which the state or society can encroach upon the choices and decisions of the individual. As we saw earlier, one powerful advo-cate of this stress on the non-interference in individual lives was John Stuart Mill. Here is how he put it in his famous essay, On Liberty:

the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any mem-ber of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant . . . Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

(Mill, 2004, pp. 33–34)

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This statement is often referred to as Mill’s Harm Principle, and it is used as the basis for numerous practical conclusions in bioethics, for example, in relation to suicide, voluntary euthanasia, sexual prefer-ence (when minors are not involved) and reproductive decisions. It can also influence wider policy decisions, for example, in relation to scientific and technical innovations, where (it is alleged) no harm can be conclusively predicted. Examples would be reproductive cloning, germline modification and techniques for human enhance-ment, including prolonging the human life span (see Chapters 4 and 5 for a discussion of these issues). A frequent target of this approach is what has been called the Precautionary Principle, which seeks to control individual choices and new social policies, for fear of possible, but uncertain, negative consequences. The libertarian has no time for such constraint!

In its more extreme forms, libertarianism severely limits the power of the state and sees no ethical obligations on us, apart from the defence of our individual rights. Thus taxation can be seen as a form of legalized robbery, and our moral responsibility does not extend to ensuring the welfare of others, since it is up to them to see to this for themselves.

However, in its less extreme forms, this approach clearly has echoes of the Kantian stress on respect for autonomy. We can also – following the terminology of a more recent philosopher, Isaiah Berlin – distinguish two types of freedom, negative and positive. Mill’s Harm Principle stresses non-interference. We are to be left to make our own choices, without any controls upon this, apart from not causing harm to others. This can be called ‘negative freedom’. But what of con-ditions that will enrich people’s powers of choice? This would not entail imposing a way of life on people (as communitarianism may be in danger of doing), but giving them a wider range of possibilities from which to choose. This we may call ‘positive freedom’. If we grant the importance of this aspect of freedom, then in the name of greater freedom for individuals we can embark on projects designed to improve the quality of people’s lives, without jeopardizing the fundamental value of individual choice (Berlin, 1958).

In this revised version of liberal theory, there is room for a richer account of moral agency than the highly individualistic version allows. If we see autonomy not as mere randomness of choice (‘doing

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what I feel like’), but, rather, as commitment to a set of self-chosen, not externally imposed, values, then improving human health and well-being becomes a project to enhance autonomy. There is both an individual and a social obligation to achieve this both for ourselves and for others. The pursuit of liberty for all equally, in the spirit of the US Declaration of Independence, need not entail discarding the fundamental importance of achieving a society in which freedom flourishes. When this is related to bioethics, we can see that the chal-lenge of libertarianism is that it forces us to think more deeply about the meaning of both autonomy and justice. For example, the notion of health as a fundamental human right can be related to the criti-cal relationship between human freedom and health. If we do not take steps to remove the barriers to individual capabilities that are so evident in societies without universal provision of health and wel-fare services, then the claim to be defending human freedom is truly empty rhetoric. (In Chapter 6 I return to this issue in greater depth.)

A BAlANCING ACT – THe FOUR PRINCIPles

What, then, are we to make of the range of theory described in this chapter? How are we to make sense of it in a way that will really help us with the problems discussed in bioethics? The answer could lie in seeking some kind of balance between the different emphases they represent, recognizing that each has both strengths and weak-nesses. This is the approach taken in Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress (2012). They believe that we can identify a common morality across human cultures to which all humans can subscribe, and that in this common morality we can identify four broad principles which serve as a suitable starting point for biomedical ethics. The principles are: respect for autonomy; non-maleficence; beneficence; and justice.

We shall see in more detail what Beauchamp and Childress mean by these terms, but first we need to note a common misunderstanding and misuse of these principles. The authors make it clear that they do not provide some kind of formula for solving moral problems. They simply offer a way of structuring the kinds of questions that must be confronted when facing moral problems in bioethics. Much more work is needed to see how they each can help in specific situations. However, health

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professionals are used to handy formulas and guidelines for dealing with clinical situations, for example, the mnemonic ABCDE, standing for ‘airway, breathing, circulation, drugs, environment’, is used as a check-list in emergency life support. The four principles are often cited in clinical ethics discussions, as though they somehow give this kind of guidance. For this reason they have been nicknamed the ‘Georgetown Mantra’, after Georgetown University, where Beauchamp works. But this is not at all how the authors intend them to function. Instead, they see the need for some kind of balance or ‘reflective equilibrium’ (a phrase borrowed from the legal philosopher John Rawls) between the principles, with much more specification needed to make them useful in the wide range of situations encountered in bioethics. In addi-tion, they do not claim that there is any significance in the order of the principles, and this is especially important, since they have been accused of giving priority to respect for autonomy over the other three. Let us, then, see how each of the principles might help in the attempt to apply theory to practice in bioethics.

AUTONOMY

We are already familiar with this concept from the brief account of Kant’s theory earlier and also from Mill’s stress on personal liberty. Beauchamp and Childress stress that respect for autonomy entails more than simply an attitude of toleration of others’ choices: it must also entail action to ensure that the capacity of others to make choices is both defended and enhanced. However, they differ from Kant in his belief in a universal moral law to which all rational beings will subscribe. Instead they are closer to Mill’s idea of ensuring that people are free to act according to their personal values and beliefs, provided this does not cause harm to others. Later, we shall see how this needs to be spelled out in detail when medical decisions are made about treatment or non-treatment, confidentiality and public health policies.

NON-MAleFICeNCe AND BeNeFICeNCe

The second principle goes back to an ancient medical maxim, Primum non nocere (‘first of all, do no harm’). Its connection to the requirements of research ethics is obvious, but it also applies more

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widely to medical practice (the participation of doctors in torture, for example) and, more widely still, to policies which hazard human health (industrial pollution, destruction of the environment and global warming). Beauchamp and Childress restrict the scope of their discussion to medical practice, but, as we are looking at bio-ethics as a whole, we shall need to include these wider socio-political questions.

Clearly, the principle of beneficence is closely related to non-maleficence, the prohibition of harm, but this principle stresses a positive requirement to do good to others (not to be confused with ‘benevolence’, which is merely a willingness to do good, or an atti-tude of goodwill towards others). In practicing beneficence we do not merely refrain from harming others, we try to prevent harm to them, to remove that which is harmful, to counterbalance any harm with benefit, and actively to promote their well-being. This can be seen as the principal aim of medicine and health care, and the failure to act beneficently as a betrayal of the trust which patients place in the good intentions of health professionals. Obviously, the practice of medicine can often entail harm, for example, the use of powerful drugs for treating cancer, which can have toxic side-effects, and, for this reason, the ratio of benefit to harm becomes crucial.

A hazard in the principle of beneficence is what has been labelled as ‘paternalism’ in health care. A strong form of paternalism entails imposing treatment on people ‘for their own good’, even when they do not wish to receive it. In exploring this hazard we will see that there is clearly no simple formula, since acting in this way, while perhaps satisfying the beneficence principle, breaches respect for autonomy. Both cannot be satisfied, so a choice between them must be made.

JUsTICe

The fourth principle, justice, creates more potential for conflict. We already saw how consequentialist calculations (which clearly underlie the non-maleficence and beneficence principles) provoke major problems of justice or fairness. If all persons are to be treated with equal respect and consideration according to their needs, then it will not be morally acceptable to maximize the benefit of any

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one individual, or even of the majority in the society, if doing so will result in the unfair treatment of others. For example, a very expensive treatment might be available which could save the lives of some patients, but, since resources for health care will always be limited, providing it to some could jeopardize the treatment and even the survival of others with different needs for heath care. Distributing benefits and costs fairly, which is one of the basic fea-tures of justice, demands a different and more demanding form of moral reasoning than simply working out potential benefits and harms to individuals.

KeePING OUR BAlANCe

So can the Four Principles approach of Beauchamp and Childress help us at all in our need to find a way through the dilemmas of bioethics? If properly understood, it probably can. We have already noticed that it is easily misunderstood and misused. The principles can help us to formulate the relevant questions (or most of them), but they do not provide the answers to specific dilemmas. To do this, we need to be aware of the moral issues at stake in each situ-ation and then draw on the richness of the various moral theories available to us. We need to ask questions like, are we justified in overruling individual choice in these circumstances for the sake of a more just outcome? Which decision will create the best ratio of benefit to harm to those affected? What is our duty in this situation and how does it relate to the fundamental values of our society, such as respect for the rights of all persons?

If this seems a somewhat precarious way of doing ethics, one sadly lacking in the kind of quick and definite conclusions that would get us back down to solid ground, we at least have the consolation of knowing that others whom we respect and admire also struggle to get the balance right. The most dangerous practitioners, whether of medicine or of morality, are those who never know what it feels like to be uncertain. And this takes us back to VE – somewhere in that middle ground between deficiency and excess we will find the kind of practical wisdom that we need. In the chapters that follow, we will see how this spells out in detailed decision making across the range of issues in bioethics.

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ResOURCes AND FURTHeR ReADING

For more information about the philosophical theories covered in this chapter see Nigel Warburton’s book in this series, Philosophy: The Basics (2012). For a discussion of Kant’s ethics as it relates to bio-ethics you should turn to Onora O’Neill’s excellent book, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics (2002). There are essays on most of the other theories in Ashcroft, Dawson, Draper et al., Principles of Health Care Ethics (2007). For VE (and also care ethics, which is discussed in the next chapter) see my essay ‘The “ethics of care” as virtue ethics’, in Evans (1998, pp. 295–305). If you want to understand Principlism, rather than ‘pop’ versions of it, you should read Tom Beauchamp’s essay in Ashcroft, Dawson, Draper et al. (2007), or else consult the latest edition of Principles of Biomedical Ethics (Beauchamp and Childress, 2012). For Internet searches on philosophical concepts and theories, the best resource is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (www.plato.stanford.edu). Several blogs also discuss moral theories, including most prominently PEA soup (www.peasoup.us/).

Surprisingly, humour can also help us to appreciate the essence of the philosophical theories which underlie bioethics. So, for light relief, you may want to read Cathcart and Klein’s Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (2008).

eXeRCIse

To help you to think through the implications of the various theories more fully, you may wish to read through the story below (which is loosely based on a passage in a novel by John Fowles entitled The Magus (1965). If you are doing this as a group then you can have dif-ferent people role-playing the different characters (mayor, prisoners, hostages, soldiers and colonel). Do not script the role-play, but let the individual characters decide what to do, whether to obey the colonel, kill or not kill the prisoners, kill or not kill the hostages.

You are the elected mayor of a small village on an island which has been occupied by a foreign power as part of the war it is waging against your country. A colonel of the occupying army has been

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sent to the island to deal with a group of three resistance fighters who have killed four of his soldiers. He has taken 80 hostages from among the villagers and has had them marched into the village square. Two of the captured guerrillas are already in the square under armed guard. The third guerrilla, and two girls from the vil-lage who had helped him hide, have already been tortured and executed. Their grossly mutilated bodies are in full view of all the hostages. The colonel hands you a machine gun (which turns out to be unloaded) and orders you to beat the two surviving captives to death in front of the villagers. If you do this at once, the colo-nel says he will spare the lives of the 80 hostages (sending them instead to a labour camp), but, if you refuse, then you and all 80 hostages will be instantly mowed down by his soldiers’ machine guns. You must decide in the next few minutes. What will you do? And why is it the right thing to do?

How would the different ethical theories deal with these questions? Do you find one more satisfactory than the others in suggesting how the various characters (mayor, soldiers, colonel) could do the morally right thing in this desperate situation? Give reasons for your choice.

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In one sense, nothing could be more obvious than agriculture’s importance for environmental quality. Field crops and animal grazing—the key production activities of agriculture—are easily the most spatially extensive human activities on landmasses. The potential effects of agriculture on soil and water have been known for centuries and were certainly among the first environmental impacts to be recognized. The American Dust Bowl of the 1930s provided a vivid example of an agriculturally based environmental catastrophe, and it has been immortalized in literature, film, and folklore.1 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), often described as the book that sparked the environmental movement in North America, is a diatribe against chemi-cals used primarily for agriculture. The general public continues to associate agricul-tural chemicals with environmental impact and risk to human health.

The list of current environmental controversies involving agriculture cited in the first edition of The Spirit of the Soil began with the expansion of beef pro-duction in Central and South American rainforests. If figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at the United Nations are used, an additional sixty million hectares of tropical forest have been lost since 1995 in Brazil alone. But that figure is matched by losses for crop production (especially palm oil) in Indonesia, Malaysia and a handful of African countries over the same interval.2 The first edition noted that ranchers and environmentalists were locked in a battle over grazing on public lands and that wheat production in Washington State’s Paloose region has caused dramatic soil erosion. Conflicts between agri-cultural producers and environmental advocates continue.3 David Pimentel con-tinues to argue that soil erosion is a significant threat to the well-being of future generations.4 Dams and levees constructed for Midwestern US crop production contributed to devastating floods in 1993. More recent European studies have demonstrated how farming practice affects flooding.5

1THE ETHICS OF SOIL

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Less visible environmental impacts from agriculture may be even more serious. Irrigation returns virtually the full volume of surface water into streams and rivers, but trace minerals are leached into water. When irrigation drain water cannot be disposed of properly, minerals concentrate and become toxic to humans and wild-life. The potential for selenium pollution from ordinary irrigation was realized at California’s Kesterson Reservoir.6 Nitrogen added to soils can pollute both ground and surface water. More generally, fertilizer runoff is causing “dead zones” in lakes and oceans on a worldwide basis.7 When water pollution of any form becomes concentrated in watersheds, the health and environmental consequences can be devastating. Yet the farming practices that lead to pollution are not always obvious.

The first edition of The Spirit of the Soil noted the growth of concentrated ani-mal feeding operations (CAFOs) where large numbers of livestock are kept in rela-tively small spaces. Growth in the size of dairy operations was especially dramatic and occurred over a single decade. Where in the mid-1980s the largest dairy herds were between 500 and 800 cows and typical herds might have averaged 100 cows, by 1995 herd size had reached 10,000 to 20,000 cows at a single location. The growth of mega-dairies has continued. While the role of CAFOs in water pollution and green-house gas emissions has become widely appreciated (see Chapter 2), the underlying agro-ecology is not. The small dairy farmer spreads manure on fields that produce feed crops for the cows. Large dairies feed grain hauled in over hundreds of miles. The animal waste must then be impounded or trucked out, but it is never returned to the fields where the feed grain was grown. The nutrient cycle is broken and the rich dairy manure becomes a pollution problem.8 The expansion of dairy size was made possible by the introduction of information technologies that automated most of the record keeping in dairy production. Amazingly, this phenomenon (noted in the first edition) still has not been studied by agricultural economists or animal scientists, who tend to be fixated on technologies that impact biological yields.9

The list of environmental impacts from agriculture could continue (and more will be discussed in Chapter 2), but despite the evidence for agriculture’s harm to environmental quality, farming remains a source of metaphors for the correct relationship between humans and the wider natural world. Farmers are thought to have a right and proper affiliation with the land, in contrast to the venal and exploitative relationship used to tarnish the reputation of mine owners or urban developers. The farmer’s admiration for rich, fertile soil is thought proper, for example, rather than an instance of greed, as when the carnival barker eyes an approaching sucker. Indeed, the word “soil” is implicitly, spiritually, linked to farming and gardening by many people, so much so that it is almost inconceivable to think of the farmer qua farmer as anything less than a steward of the soil. Farm-ing that abuses soil is bad farming, meaning not only that it degrades something of value, but that it is not consistent with the true spirit of farming itself. The contrast to mining, again, makes the implicit dimension more obvious: mining is mining and whether it is good or bad depends solely on the consequences. We do not think of mining as something that must be true to its essence.

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One might say that farming’s essence lies in remaining true to the soil. In this, proper farming might be said to make concrete what is latent in humanity’s dependence upon the Earth. For the act of good farming simultaneously releases and replenishes the provisions for human sustenance. Farming is the activity that locates the human species most surely in the planetary ecosystem. It is on farming that we depend for our food and in farming that what we take from the soil is returned to it. This vague but symbolically powerful tie between farming and the Earth has been incorporated into religious celebrations of fertility since antiquity. On the one hand, fertility rites are simple expressions of human dependence on the Earth for daily food. They remind a people of their reliance on natural pro-cesses for sustenance through a ritual performance. On the other hand, the mean-ings of fertility multiply into subtle and complex cultural forms that open into ever-deepening mysteries. Fertility gods and “green men” abound in the folklore and religions of all human societies. These anthropomorphic figures, these spirits of the soil, are by turns deified and demonized, prefiguring a modern ambivalence toward dependency that is now taking shape through debates over the environ-mental impacts of industrial agriculture. As symbolically powerful images, our notions of land, fertility and food itself require thoughtful consideration lest their implicitness makes us forget their potency, as well as our material reliance on the realities that they represent. Yet celebration of farming falls too easily into a slavish defense of farming practices that may be far from justifiable.

Agriculture in Environmental Ethics

Despite the importance of examining the two-edged character of agriculture’s relation to the environment, environmental philosophers have devoted compara-tively little attention to agriculture. The first edition of The Spirit of the Soil notes a 1994 anthology of readings on environmental ethics that was edited by Donald Van DeVeer and Christine Pierce. It was 649 pages long, but there was apparently not enough space to include even one bibliographical reference, much less a chap-ter or section, on agricultural ethics. Another book published at about the same time as the first edition was offered as a text for undergraduate classes in environ-mental ethics. It gets around to agriculture only as a side point to its discussion of the 1984 industrial accident at a Union Carbide agricultural chemical plant in Bhopal, India. The authors begin this three-page section of their 250-page book as follows:

Bhopal is not alone: The pesticide industry is global big business, worth bil-lions of dollars per year, all aimed at killing insects, molds, weeds and rodents that compete with the crops for sun and water or compete with us to eat crops. Our own factory farms have become dependent on pesticides. In the Third World, pesticides are an essential part of the “green revolution” that was expected to feed the world.10

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The book continues to discuss toxic effects of pesticides but never clearly sepa-rates point (e.g., industrial accident) from non-point (e.g., farmers’ fields) pol-lution effects. The authors end with what they must today regretfully regard as an unreflective call for biotechnology: “The obvious suggestion is to learn how plants defend themselves and figure out how to teach, or modify, our agricultural staples to do the same; then we would not have to use chemical pesticides at all.”11

Although this textbook does not mention it, plants that had been modified to defend themselves were well underway in the mid-1990s. The Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a soil bacterium that produces over 200 different types toxin that are all fatal to Lepidoptera (e.g., butterflies and moths), but so far as we know cause no harm in vertebrate animals. Since the larval stage of many species of Lepidoptera cause significant damage to crops, Bt sprays are used widely by organic farmers. A gene sequence capable of producing the Bt toxin was first incorporated into tobacco plants (Vaeck and coauthors, 1987) and commercial varieties of tobacco, corn, cotton, and soybeans began to be introduced in 1996. Although philosophers were generally incognizant of agriculture prior to the advent of these genetically modified (GM) crops, debates over biotechnology did spark a significant amount of interest among environmental philosophers. A discussion of early debates over genetically engineered ice-nucleating bacteria (an idea that did not pan out) was included in the first edition of The Spirit of the Soil. Indeed, agricultural biotech-nology has enjoyed significant attention by philosophers since 1995.12

If it is no longer correct to say that environmental philosophers have ignored agriculture, there is still a gap between the topics explored in the first edition of The Spirit of the Soil and work that is considered to be of mainstream importance in environmental philosophy today. There is a profound sense in which environ-mental ethics continues to be dogged by an unexamined assumption that agri-culture simply is not even part of the environment. This view was stated explicitly by Laura Westra, who argues that agriculture should be seen as a “buffer zone” that helps to shield natural ecosystems possessing integrity from urban centers and the industrial activities of manufacturing.13 For most practitioners of environmental philosophy, the thing that separates agriculture from the core issues of their field is largely unspoken. One would have difficulty finding places where environmental philosophers have stated that farming, ranching and other forms of food and fiber production are uninteresting or unimportant, but their practice often testifies to a prejudice that also continues to plague ecologists. It is pristine and untrammeled nature that is interesting and worth preserving. Farms are something else.

The situation that predominates among philosophers is not characteristic of environmental studies in general. Scholars in other fields of the environmental humanities have undertaken numerous studies of agriculture. Indeed, environ-mental history is widely recognized as the intellectual successor to what was once thought of as agricultural history. By 1995 Donald Worster, arguably the dean of environmental history, had written two books on agriculture (Dust Bowl and Rivers of Empire). William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis—in many respects the paradigm

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example of environmental history—contains extensive discussion of the way that Chicago linked western grain farmers and the livestock industry to markets in the East. While historians have traced the environmental impact of agricultural set-tlement patterns and cultural practices, environmental ethicists have been preoc-cupied with the extension of moral concepts to animals and to the environment. They have debated non-anthropocentric, holistic, pluralistic, and deep ecological theories for valuing nature and defining the moral imperatives of environmental-ism. Some of these topics are relevant to an environmental philosophy of agri-culture, but they are sufficiently disengaged from agricultural problems that their applicability is far from obvious.

Why do environmental ethicists continue to show so little interest in agricul-ture beyond the GM crop debates? Aside from sharing the old-school ecologist’s preference for the pristine, the mere fact that farming practices are causing envi-ronmental insults is not enough of a reason for motivating philosophical interest in agriculture’s environmental impact. By analogy, a gangland shooting may be morally reprehensible, but that doesn’t mean that it poses interesting philosophical questions about the ethics of homicide. A general account of why murder is ethi-cally wrong is going to cover the gangland shooting. Similarly general accounts of why pollution or biodiversity loss are wrong will apply equally to mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Philosophers do not develop extended treatises on gangland shootings; they do devote attention to problem cases such as abor-tion, euthanasia and the taking of life in times of war. Perhaps agriculture’s impacts on the environment are just not philosophically interesting.

This speculation can be generalized. If an ethical theory of the environment is sufficiently powerful, it will provide guidance over many environmental problems that are never discussed by philosophers. Environmental ethics is actually quite like any branch of science in this respect. The generality of the theory covers applications to specific instances. It might not be necessary to explain why it is wrong to kill endangered species (or to disrupt their habitat) in order to have a tasty dinner if the theory has already articulated the reasons for preserving endan-gered species tout court. The unwanted environmental impacts of agriculture may just be examples of harms to nature and ecosystems that are already adequately covered by arguments that link ethics to conservation biology or to the laws that protect natural areas from incursion for any human purpose.

Thus one burden of proof that must be shouldered by this book is to show readers that there are philosophically interesting things to consider regarding agri-culture and the environment. I must argue that agricultural cases present problems worthy of philosophical attention. But in fact, I will make an even broader claim: recent work in environmental philosophy would be substantially enriched by tak-ing the spirit of soil—so common in religion and folklore—into more thoughtful consideration. The main argument for this is developed by exploring how agri-culture is generative for philosophies of the environment. This is not to say that all the philosophies issuing forth from an agricultural orientation to the natural

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world are defensible in their totality, but I will argue that each of the four world-views explored in Chapters 3 through 6 contribute something of value. Before turning to that argument, however, it may be useful to say a bit more about how environmental philosophers do see their subject matter.

Mainstream Environmental Ethics

Bryan Norton’s book Toward Unity among Environmentalists provides a synoptic entrée to environmental philosophy that is still widely accepted, even if many of its particulars are open to criticism. Norton casts a dispute between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot over the fate of California’s Hetch Hetchy value as the paradigm for continuing conflicts over environmental issues. Pinchot was the founder of the US National Forest Service and an advocate of “wise use” for natural resources. In Norton’s telling, he was an enlightened utilitarian—he believed one should seek to do the greatest good for the greatest number—who understood the significance of impacts on the environment in terms of their effect on conservation practices. Con-servation policies required a broad understanding of how forests, mountains, range, and wetlands are useful. Pinchot recognized the value of recreational and aesthetic use, and he was willing to countenance the value of indirect environmental benefits that would today be called “ecosystem services.” These would include everything from soil conservation to flood control. Pinchot’s vision of nature’s utility was more enlightened than that of developers who saw only the opportunity to convert natu-ral resources into dollars by consuming them as inputs for industrial production. But he was nevertheless utilitarian (and anthropocentric) in that he assigned value to natural systems in virtue of the use that humans might make of them.

Norton paints Muir as a romantic nature lover, offended by Pinchot’s utilitari-anism, who was nonetheless willing to work with Pinchot in promoting a number of nature conservation projects. The split between them came of the proposal to create a reservoir for the City of San Francisco in what had been Hetch Hetchy Valley. For Muir the project was a sacrilege; it entailed the sacrifice of some of the most beautiful areas in what is now Yosemite National Park. Building the reservoir led to a permanent loss of an ecosystem that was of great value in itself, irrespective of its aesthetic appeal for human sensibilities. For Pinchot, preserv-ing Hetch Hetchy was indeed a loss of the opportunity for aesthetic experience, but ample replacements were available. Ever since the battle over Hetch Hetchy, environmentalism has been riven by a split between the wise-use, utilitarian and anthropocentric philosophy of Pinchot and the preservationist, ecocentric, intrin-sic value philosophy of Muir.14

The intervening decades have seen that debate become institutionalized. Cadres of resource economists, foresters and resource managers have developed increas-ingly sophisticated theoretical tools for assessing the difficult trade-offs between pecuniary uses of lakes, rivers, forests and streams and their aesthetic, recreational or indirect uses. Philosophers such as Holmes Rolston III and J. Baird Callicott

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have taken up the banner for Muir, producing more sophisticated accounts of intrinsic value. Both sides have wished to claim Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) for their standard-bearer. Norton’s treatment of this history shows how Leopold’s thought holds a possible key for unifying the philosophical rift in environmental-ism and also why pluralism itself has become a contentious issue. If in some sense Muir and Pinchot are both right (along with others who have taken different tacks toward the value of nature), there is hope that a broad political consensus on many environmental issues can still be maintained. Since it is in every environ-mentalist’s interest to forge a political consensus, Norton (along with Christopher Stone) has argued that common policy goals can serve as a philosophical tent that is big enough to accommodate everyone.

The merits of Norton’s argument notwithstanding, it is crucial to see how in placing a debate over wild nature at center stage makes agricultural issues intrinsically uninteresting. Even when multiple land uses are considered (as they might be for national forests) agriculture is not wild nature. Agriculture takes place only where Muir’s forces have already conceded that there is nothing at stake. Even those philosophers (and there are some) who defend the ethic of wise use will be uninterested in agriculture as such, for it is but one of the conceptually unproblematic instances of a productive resource that will have to be taken into account when calculating the costs and benefits. If the agricultural use achieves more benefit than cost, a wise-use philosophy might countenance the loss of an ecosystem in much the same way that Pinchot accepted the loss of Hetch Hetchy Valley. Agriculture will either be all wrong or all right depending on how these questions of greater philosophical generality get settled.

Environmental philosophers have settled on their criteria for what is and what is not interesting for at least three reasons. One is exemplified in the conflict story that Norton tells about Muir and Pinchot. Arising in the 1970s and drawing its intellectual underpinnings from Muir, Pinchot, and Leopold, environmental philosophy has been written by individuals who were committed to the preserva-tion of species, wilderness, and wetlands. They have defined their philosophical interests through their attempts to justify their activism to themselves and to others. It is an activism that is politically organized in opposition to groups that (in the name of “wise use”) would sacrifice species, wilderness, and wetlands in exchange for jobs and economic growth. A more enlightened utilitarian (like Pinchot?) might argue that species, wilderness, and wetlands should indeed be set aside because we need them. If not we ourselves, then possibly our children and grandchildren will need species, wilderness, and wetlands for recreation, resources, and the ecosystem services they produce. They are objects of scientific study, if nothing else. Enlightened utilitarians and environmental activists might conspire to achieve short-term political goals, but the environmental philosophers among them have been sensitive to the potential rifts in their consensus.

The view of the enlightened utilitarian has been vulnerable to two philo-sophical objections. First, the possibility of finding replacements or substitutions

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for nature seems to undercut the utilitarian’s willingness to make common cause with preservationists. Perhaps, for example, we don’t need to preserve the spot-ted owl in the wild if we can preserve its genetic materials in a refrigerator. The possibility that this might actually satisfy an enlightened utilitarian brings forward the second objection: the language of enlightened utilitarianism is simply a false representation of the motivation that many environmentalists actually feel. They feel a sense of duty toward nature. They see nature as sacred and the idea of accept-ing substitutes is simply beyond the pale. Indeed the calculating nature of human reason, weighing costs and benefits as if they mattered, is part of the problem from this perspective. At least some philosophers of the environment have been led to their position because the mindset and politics of activism is inimical to any kind of utilitarianism, enlightened or otherwise.

A belief in the sacredness of nature recalls the bias against seeing value in eco-systems where human beings have had significant impact. This prejudice, which philosophers have shared with many ecologists, is the second reason why environ-mental philosophy has taken the shape that it currently has. The bias has been under assault in ecology for some time, and during the last two decades it has been erod-ing in philosophy, as well. The recognition that the entire planet has been affected through processes of climate change may have given this attitude its coup de gras. Environmental philosophers have been taking an interest in urban environmental ethics and more recently in “novel ecosystems,” where flora and fauna have recolo-nized areas dramatically affected by human practice.15 Nevertheless, old habits die hard and there is still a significant gap between taking a philosophical interest in restoration of damaged ecosystems or moving endangered species to new climes as a preservation strategy, and taking a deep philosophical interest in an ecosystem where someone called “the farmer” is exerting continuous and intentional pres-sure on the mix of species, the texture of soils and the amount of water available to sustain life.

Environmental philosophers’ third reason for settling upon a narrow set of paradigmatic questions derives from the institutional structure of philosophy as a discipline. Whether in secular or theological settings, philosophers’ niche in the academy is subject to the same pressures for publication and putting butts in seats as any other discipline, but the content of what they write and teach about is largely up to them. Philosophers can do whatever they want so long as other philoso-phers will play along when it comes to reviewing manuscripts, hiring colleagues and granting tenure. This means that aside from filling classrooms, the fact that people engaged in more practical pursuits are facing problems of a philosophical nature provides absolutely no incentive for academic philosophers to take those problems seriously. As John Dewey wrote as early as 1920, philosophers can con-tinue to hash and rehash doctrines and texts from the distant past irrespective of whether those doctrines and texts have any relevance for contemporary life.16

To be sure, the mere existence of environmental ethics shows that philosophers can take on new topics, but as Robert Frodeman has argued, this is not to say that

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they will take on the topics that are of the most pressing social or environmental importance. The processes of peer review and journaling create an inherent con-servatism in all academic disciplines, and once the Muir-Pinchot-Leopold fram-ing of anthropocentrism versus ecocentrism, instrumental versus intrinsic value had caught on, there was little incentive within academic philosophy for schol-ars to branch out into questions such as sustainability.17 Thus the mere fact that agriculturalists, food system activists or indeed anyone takes an interest in ethical issues that relate to food system practices has little effect on whether philosophers themselves are likely to find it interesting.

In short, the aims of environmental philosophy emerged out of philosophers’ personal interest in wildlife and wilderness preservation, not to mention out-door recreation. In the United States, this interest coincided with public debates over environmental legislation and the subsequent administration of key laws: the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Wilderness Preserva-tion Act. The history of those topics is one of political conflict with genuinely interesting conceptual issues that are buried within the interest group politics of environmental protection that have raged for over a century. The political debate between anthropocentric conservationism and intrinsic value preservationism could be translated into a philosophical conflict that was able to gain a niche within ethical theory. The political aims sought by Muir and Pinchot have been transformed into theoretical aims, but the political debate was finished when the dam got built. The philosophical debate will continue as long as there are young scholars who are will to give voice to it. Environmental philosophers neglect agriculture because they already have plenty to do.

What Environmental Philosophers Can Learn from Agriculture

The framing of debates over the structure and enforcement of environmental regulation pits production interests of firms in energy, mining, timber, manufac-turing and commercial real estate development against those who try to control the exploitation (and often destruction) of unspoiled natural areas. This effec-tively casts the environmentalist as a “consumer” of environmental goods and services that are the natural product of ecosystems in which humans have minimal involvement. Norton’s origin story about the Hetch Hetchy Valley controversy suggests that key perspectives in environmental philosophy emerged from con-stituencies that reflect different orientations to consumption—wise but consump-tive uses versus uses that preserve the integrity of habitats and ecosystems. These conceptions of use are examined in more detail in Chapter 5, but for the time being it is important to see how the rhetoric of the environmental movement engendered a critique of production, even among its more conservationist con-stituencies. To this day, environmental ethics has little of a constructive nature to say about production.

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Production can be defined initially as the intentional transformation of materi-als from a less valued to a more valued state. Any meaningful theory of production must therefore by fleshed out with a theory of value. Environmental ethicists have made effective critiques of the theory of exchange value that is assumed and prop-agated in neoclassical economics, but have done very little to replace it with an alternative. Environmental economists have stepped in with techniques for valu-ation that do not presuppose market exchange, but they reinforce the notion that we value ecosystems either because we are directly consuming services they pro-duce (clean water, mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions) or because the intrin-sic value that people associate with nature is itself a kind of consumption (again, see Chapter 5). To be sure, environmental ethicists have insisted that intrinsic value does not depend upon a human being’s subjective act of valuation. Indeed, if taken to an extreme this theory of value prescribes the extinction of the human species: nature would be better off without us. Although this conception may not depend on the existence of consumers for environmental goods and services (though in Paul Taylor’s version, it is arguably other living creatures who are the consumers) neither does it portray any form of environmental value that speaks to production.

Agriculture, of course, is a production activity and, like logging or mining, it is the occasional target of environmentalists (see Chapter 2). Yet only a genera-tion or two ago (and still today in some quarters) farmers were thought to be the natural stewards of nature. Their production values, formed in communica-tion with nature, were though emblematic of what all persons should believe. Farmer stewardship, however, was a production ethic. It was part and parcel of a way of life organized around bringing forth food and fiber through the cultiva-tion of the Earth, the husbandry of animals and the maintenance of healthy soils. One key thesis of this book is that a re-examination of agricultural production can serve as a starting point for the development of a production ethic that could guide our food system and that could in turn become an environmental ethic in a larger sense.

This is the sense in which philosophers might learn something from agricul-ture. It starts by conceding that life as we know it depends on food production. Human life and human civilization do not exist without the intentional trans-formation of the material world. More particularly, human beings do not exist without the peculiar transformations that produce food and fiber commodities. Although one can imagine philosophical value systems that have no place for agriculture, it is difficult to see why anyone who needs to eat would tarry over such a speculative philosophical concept for long. Any environmental philosophy to be believed in or acted upon must have some place for agriculture.

This starting point takes on greater significance as one looks beyond the bor-ders of food rich societies in Europe, North America, and Australia. In the devel-oped West, shocks to the agricultural production systems from flood or drought can be accommodated. Throughout the rest of the world (and most notoriously in Africa) they produce poverty and famine. An environmental ethic that fails to

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incorporate a food production and distribution ethic will simply be inapplicable on a global scale. For a movement whose partial motto is “Think Globally,” this is a fatal flaw in logic. Juan de Onis puts the point well in his book The Green Cathe-dral. He describes ecological arguments coming from the First World that “seem to place Amazonia in the category of a permanent ecological reserve, an untouch-able rainforest conserved for humanity” or that express a romantic “yearning for nature untouched by artificial change” (p. 28). De Onis concludes:

This theory of development with environmental protection is the new belief—or fantasy—for the occupation of Amazonia. To be successful, the Amazonian Governments will have to assume the responsibility for design-ing polices and creating administrative structures that protect entire eco-systems. The creation of protection areas, national parks, biological reserves, national forests, and indigenous areas that protect ecosystems are decisions for national governments because such land use allocations usually go beyond the jurisdiction and competence of local authorities. National gov-ernments are also the natural negotiators for international environmental cooperation, which in the case of ecosystem protection, such as reforesta-tion and forest management, can involve billions of dollars.18

Agriculture is not the only source for globalizing environmental ideals: de Onis mentions housing and health along with hunger. Yet a broad notion of agricul-tural development does represent one framework in which any environmental ethic must become global; ideas that have their origins in the European intel-lectual tradition have global implications. And ethics that require the wholesale protection of natural areas also have colonizing implications in many parts of the world. Only an ethic that begins from the imperatives of food production can hope to avoid this outcome.

Yet this is only the beginning of what a production-oriented ethic could con-tribute to environmental philosophy. The larger implications extend into basic questions of moral ontology. Steve Vogel has also argued that mainstream environ-mental ethics has a blind spot when it comes to production, though his focus is on the built environment in urban areas. Vogel draws on the philosophy of Karl Marx (1818–1883) for his analysis of production.19 Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts contain a core analysis of alienated or estranged labor. For Marx himself, the goal was to understand how wage labor institutes multi-faceted changes in the laborer’s self-understanding, a transformation of the wageworker’s being. Here it is important to grasp the sense of being that is at issue. When Hamlet asks “To be or not to be?” he is not pondering whether or not to exist in the same manner as a stone, a hur-ricane, or the number 2. His question marks the difference between continuing to live, to suffer the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” or to exist as dead. To continue living or to exist as having lived is an ontological difference (as is the fact that Hamlet is, in actual fact, a character in one of Shakespeare’s plays and not

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a living person whose being is his lived experience). The ontological difference investigated by Marx is admittedly more subtle. It consists in the quality or pattern of a person’s lived experience, a difference in the human condition.

Someone whose ability to live is conditioned by the institution of working for wages—and it will be useful to recall that Marx is thinking about the monoto-nous drudgery of a nineteenth century factory hand—experiences the hours that they work as a mere means to a paycheck. In this sense, the hours of the work-week are not even part of their life; their life, their being, becomes experienced in their home life or in moments of solidarity with friends. Even if the hours of the working day permit flashes of this authentic being, it is still profoundly distinct from the work itself. As Vogel stresses, there is the brute fact that in working for the wage, their labor power has been purchased by their capitalist employer. To the extent that we identify with the situation of the wageworker, we come to see the products of work, the objects that make up the built environment, as an alien power over us. Vogel wants to stress that this alienation from our own agency as makers of the built environment makes it difficult for us to take full responsibility for the consequences of this agency. As such, we must recover a richer ontologi-cal sense of production to achieve a proper ethical relation to the environmental impact of the world that we have built.20

Vogel does not associate this richer sense of production with agriculture, but Ray Boisvert and Lisa Heldke do. Their book Philosophers at Table, also claims that we—by which they mean people living in industrialized societies during the first quarter of the twenty-first century—suffer from an attenuated sense of our own being or existence. They stress the sense in which we experience the world as spectators, and critique the manner in which “the spectator model of knowledge” has become the pervasive mode in which people experience their own subjectivity. Boisvert and Heldke claim that attention to food and to eating can be a way to reclaim the sense that we are embodied beings whose fate is both at stake in the world and made by our own activity. Their interest in this reclamation is as much aesthetic as it is moral and they make the argument as a general point in philosophy, rather than as a set of claims about environmental problems. Yet when it comes time to suggest an alternative to “the spectator,” they suggest “the farmer.” The farmer is an archetype that is suggestive of the enriched, active and embodied sense of being that Boisvert and Heldke hope to invoke because the farmer’s life is engaged in acts of production that are simultaneously attentive to the conditions of the environing world.21 Thus like Vogel, Boisvert and Heldke are calling for a transformation in the assumed moral ontology—the understanding of the human condition—that pervades philosophical inquiry in the contemporary era.

Taking agriculture seriously will bring similar themes in moral ontology squarely into environmental ethics. The philosophy of agriculture requires a the-ory of how the environed being of humanity penetrates into the human condi-tion both through our material dependence on food and through our acts of

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producing it. Some philosophies of agriculture articulate this interdependency more clearly than others, to be sure. It is virtually absent from the sophisticated consequentialism that is examined in Chapter 5, while the discussion of Wendell Berry’s agrarianism brings it front and center. As we move through four alterna-tive perspectives for understanding the environmental significance of farming, shifts in moral ontology will prove to be one of the most significant distinguish-ing characteristics. By being attentive to these shifts, the possibilities for environ-mental philosophy’s approach to questions in moral ontology can be expanded significantly.

What Agriculture Can Learn from Environmental Ethics

As hinted at already, the recent history of environmental philosophy has been doubly unfortunate for agriculture. Not only have philosophers (and to some extent environmentalists) failed to consider the imperative of production; farm-ers, agricultural scientists and agricultural leaders have failed to develop an envi-ronmental ethic. In fact, they are arguably worse off than they were before the publication of Silent Spring in 1962! Whether it was Carson’s book and the ensuing controversy over pesticides or some deeper theme in rural culture, farmers and ranchers in industrially developed countries across the globe have become some of the most adamant and reactionary critics of environmental-ism.22 This is not to say that farmers and ranchers are unwilling to be associ-ated with environmental themes entirely. Farm organizations have devoted time and money to promote the idea that famers care about the land and that they can be trusted to safeguard environmental quality. These promotions, however, are largely designed to preserve the status quo. In fact, prior to 1990 farmers and farm groups were seldom associated with any environmental causes save those (such as soil erosion) that were directly applicable to the preservation or enhancement of their resource base. As Chapters 3 and 4 will show, farmers do care about their land, but this does not mean that they can be trusted to safe-guard environmental quality.

This situation is unfortunate because prior to 1962, and certainly before World War II, one would have expected farmers to be in the vanguard of any environ-mental movement. There was a time when farm and ranch work was the last resort for the unskilled and destitute. Although some farmers and many farm laborers remain poor to this day, industrialized societies provide ample opportunities for unskilled employment out of agricultural production (that is, at least, when they provide any opportunities at all). By the depression years of the 1930s, many of those who endured rural poverty did so because, compared to urban poverty, the farm provided an opportunity to work out of doors and according to the sun. Proximity to nature continues to be highly valued even by the least educated of farmers and ranchers. Protection of nature’s beauty and bounty should have been easy to promote in the farm community.

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I will not speculate on why a farm-based environmentalism has thus far failed to materialize. As Don Stuart writes, it is in part because the issues and tactics picked by large environmental organizations have made enemies of farmers.23 This history of opposition goes back well before Silent Spring. Even the water projects opposed by Muir were supported by farmers who needed irrigation water and flood control. However, there are also elements of farmers’ own value systems that are responsible. While farmers may have chosen to farm in part because they like the natural lifestyle, they have also chosen to describe themselves as business people. They adopt short-term profit maximizing practices that are inimical to the long-term ecological stabil-ity of the regions in which they farm. Critiques of the agribusiness mentality began to appear with some regularity in the 1970s. Jim Hightower’s book Hard Times, Hard Tomatoes (1973) was an early tirade against the complex of technological innovations, financial practices, and government policies that, by the end of the 1990s, came to be known as “industrial agriculture.” It was followed in 1977 by Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, a work that will be discussed at some length in Chapter 4. By the time that the first edition of The Spirit of the Soil appeared in 1995, the list of agricul-ture’s critics had already become too long to even summarize.24 While environmental impacts do figure in some of these critiques, they are more frequently mounted as a defense of the family farm as a social institution. There are thus many sources of support for questioning the current values of mainstream industrial farmers, but the messages mix environmental with social themes.

Stuart also writes that agriculture cannot continue indefinitely in a state of war with environmentalists. Even if agricultural ecosystems do not fail in the lifetime of our current generation of farmers, the political controversy created by the con-flict between agriculture and the environment is gradually taking much of the joy out of farming. Robert Zimdahl draws upon his career as a practicing weed scien-tist to provide an in-depth study of how positivist philosophy within the agricul-tural sciences conspires with farmer’s exploitation by corporate interests who have no long-term stake in the land to defeat the possibilities of an agro-environmental ethic.25 Agricultural seed or chemical companies have largely been absorbed into the pharmaceutical industry, while farm implement companies have developed lucrative markets for machines designed for golf courses and ski resorts. Absentee landowners themselves can take profits by selling mineral rights or creating subdi-visions. None of these mining or manufacturing interests has a farmers’ long-run interest in maintaining the productivity of land. Indeed, historian Stephen Stoll documents how today’s industrial farming is heir to a practice of “skimming” rich soils, abandoning the farm and moving west to occupy virgin lands that dates back to the eighteenth century.26 Although there are today important counterthrusts to the alignment with an extractive mentality, mainstream farmers still find them-selves aligned against environmentalists who share the traditional farmer’s com-mitment to permanence and sustainability.27

The situation is not all bleak, however. When the first edition of The Spirit of the Soil appeared in 1995, organic farming movements were still in an emergent

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phase. Today they are a global phenomenon. As a global institution, organic farm-ing has yet to formulate a coherent environmental ethic, however. From a US perspective, the organic movement has been shaped significantly by the politics and land policies of California, the leading agricultural state. While organic farm-ing in California had an initial commitment to small-farm values and resisting the agribusiness mentality, it quickly became highly profitable after the establishment of the USDA organic standard in 1997. Within only a few years, the sense that organic farming would be deeply informed by an environmental ethic began to be eroded.28 One premise of this book is that more rigorous attention to the philosophy of agriculture can help. The following chapters will develop some of the conceptual tools needed for constructing an agricultural environmental ethic at the same time that arguments are put forward to undercut some of the assump-tions and opinions that have limited what Zimdahl called “agriculture’s ethical horizon.”29

Leopold and Schumacher

Two early intellectual figures in the environmental movement did offer starting points for thinking philosophically about agriculture in their writings. We have already been introduced to Aldo Leopold, best known among philosophers for his essay “The Land Ethic,” from A Sand County Almanac. In addition to serving as the hero in Norton’s drama of competing environmental thinkers, Leopold is regarded as a pivotal figure in the history of wildlife ecology and the key figure in an approach to conservation ecology that is now known as adaptive ecosystem management. E.F. Schumacher (1911–1977) was an economist and protégé of John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). As Chief Economist for the United King-dom’s National Coal Board between 1950 and 1970, he developed methods to analyze the economic impact of reliance on finite natural resources, but he is best known for two books, Small is Beautiful (1973) and A Guide for the Perplexed (1977), that popularized the rationale for seeking a way of life that maintains the integrity of natural ecosystems.

“The Land Ethic” begins with a passage in which Leopold describes the rejection of human slavery as an exemplary instance of moral progress in his-tory. The key to this event, he thinks, was in ceasing to understand human beings as property, in extending the scope of the moral community to include all human beings.30 In emphasizing the extension of a moral concept to cover hitherto neglected parties, Leopold set a pattern for the extensionist environ-mental philosophies already discussed. Leopold’s message is that we must now find a way to think of our relation to land (understood to mean the general biosphere) as something other than mere property. Leopold concludes that attempts to incorporate conservationist concerns into the optimizing calcula-tions that underlie a traditional approach to agricultural decision-making are hopelessly lacking.

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In Leopold’s view there is ample basis for care and concern about ecological values, but the problem is that the importance people place upon nature cannot be reflected in monetary terms. He writes:

When one of these non-economic categories is threatened, and if we hap-pen to love it, we invent subterfuges to give it economic importance. At the beginning of the century songbirds were supposed to be disappearing. Ornithologists jumped to the rescue with some shaky evidence to the effect that insects would eat us up if birds failed to control them. The evidence had to be economic to be valid.31

Here Leopold would also seem to be rejecting the notion that unwanted out-comes of agricultural production decisions can be accommodated by a broader framework of benefits and costs or by adding a few regulatory constraints. Indeed, it is property rights, Leopold’s target, that serve as the model for constraints. Instead of adding a few rules to protect nature from human interference, we must rethink our lives and our values so as to attain a fuller appreciation of the interdependence between human and natural communities.

Agriculture is one of the chief sources for understanding those links. Early on in the book Leopold writes, “There are two spiritual dangers in not own-ing a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from a furnace.”32 One who lives on a farm cannot, in Leopold’s view, long forget the dependence of human action upon the underlying natural ecology. Written over several decades and assem-bled in the 1940s, A Sand County Almanac does not reflect more recent critics’ concern that agriculture is on the verge of destroying its ecological base, but Leopold does express cynicism about the optimizing strategies of experiment station research:

The State College tells farmers that Chinese elms do not clog screens, and are hence preferable to cottonwoods. It also pontificates on cherry pre-serves, Bang’s disease, hybrid corn, and beautifying the farm home. The only thing it does not know about farms is where they came from. Its job is to make Illinois safe for soybeans.33

Leopold’s land ethic thus rejects the optimizing strategy that takes increasing income, increasing production and increasing benefits to consumers as its core. Instead, Leopold urges us to:

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.34

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Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful followed Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring by a decade. The central theme of the book was widely taken to be an attack on technologies that consumed large quantities of fossil fuels and required large investments of fixed capital. This was long before the climate-forcing impact of greenhouse gas emissions was understood. However, in the chapter entitled “The Proper Use of Land,” Schumacher takes up a central question in agricultural ethics. The argument of the chapter is first a criticism of what Schumacher calls “the philosophy of the townsman” and secondarily a description of Schumacher’s alternative program. The townsmen see agriculture’s economic woes as evidence that farming and ranching are declining enterprises. They see the central problem for agriculture as one of improving farm income. Schumacher finds this view deficient. He writes:

We know too much about ecology today to have any excuse for the many abuses that are currently going on in the management of the land, in the management of animals, in food storage, food processing and heedless urbanization. If we permit them, this is not due to poverty, as if we could not afford to stop them; it is due to the fact that, as a society, we have no firm basis of belief in any meta-economic values, and when there is no such belief the economic calculus takes over.35

In Schumacher’s view, the problem arises when agriculture is understood as essentially defined by its capacity to produce and market salable commodities. This is what I have come to call “the industrial philosophy of agriculture” in the years since The Spirit of the Soil’s first edition. In making a statement of the wider goals for agriculture, Schumacher writes:

A wider view sees agriculture as having to fulfill at least three tasks:

• to keep man in touch with living nature, of which he is and remainsa highly vulnerable part;

• to humanize and ennoble man’s wider habitat;• to bring forth the foodstuffs and other materials which are needed

for a becoming life.

I do not believe that a civilization which recognizes only the third of these tasks, and which pursues it with such ruthlessness and violence that the other two tasks are not merely neglected but systematically counter-acted, has any chance of long-term survival.36

These remarks on agriculture must be understood in light of Schumacher’s overall attack upon “economic values” and his campaign to substitute a norm of “Bud-dhist economics” in its place. In criticizing economic values, Schumacher means

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to attack the utilitarian emphasis upon increasing incomes; by interposing Bud-dhist economics in place of this emphasis, he means to suggest that there is an alternative way of conceptualizing economic activity, one that would trace pro-duction, distribution and exchange according to the long-term impact of these activities upon the natural systems needed to support all living things. Economic policies that encourage consumption in order to promote economic growth are, on Schumacher’s view of Buddhist economics, incompatible with the goal of a permanent and stable society.37

Although Schumacher’s choice of words has the ring of late sixties hippie jargon, his point should be understood as a shift in philosophical perspective. The unjustly neglected political theorist Paul Diesing argued that Schumacher’s critique is a complete rejection of the traditional utilitarian/consequentialist per-spective on agricultural production. On this traditional view, Diesing writes:

[Nature] appears in three forms: natural resources, cultivated land . . . and externalities of production. Natural resources are free goods, res nullus, nothings, having no value until they are “produced” and made available for exchange.38

When the central goal of agriculture is understood in terms of production, agricultural land is a form of fixed capital. This in turn suggests that agricultural lands should be devoted to their most productive use. Although unwanted outcomes can be factored into the optimizing equation either as costs or as constraints, the result looks a bit like pre-Copernican models of the solar system, where epicycles and reversing orbits were added on to the charts for planetary motion in order to preserve a theory that falsely placed the Earth at the center of the universe. In Diesing’s view, Schumacher rejects this strategy when he insists that agriculture is not a form of industry and should not be viewed as fixed capital or even as a factor of production at all. Indeed, land is the basis for life itself, a precondition for productive economic life. It is not merely one among many factors or goods available for productive appropriation. In Diesing’s view, the agrarian component of Schumacher’s thought is its essential philosophical theme. The more celebrated work on appropriate technology flows from Schumacher’s view of agriculture, rather than the reverse.39

Leopold and Schumacher situate their remarks on agriculture within works that are aimed at developing broader conceptions of environmental ethics and environmental policy. Their references to farming hint at philosophies of agricul-ture that would develop environmental ethics from the very practices of farming itself. Although A Sand County Almanac and Small Is Beautiful merely gesture in this direction, as opposed to making a full-blown argument, these gestures from two key figures in the early years of environmental thinking should lead philosophers to reconsider the way in which they have constructed their field by extending the theoretical apparatuses developed by Bentham and Kant over two hundred years ago. It is on this basis that the four worldviews developed in Chapters 3 through

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6 should be of some theoretical interest to anyone interested in the philosophical foundations for environmentally responsible decision-making.

The Spirit of the Soil

The “Green Man” of pagan religious rites personified the spirit of life thought to reside in soil (Anderson, 1990). The Greek goddess Persephone also represented fertility as a person. These personifications of the life force and of humanity’s participation in it represent the spirit of the soil as a thinking, self-aware subject. They impose the form of the human soul upon Earth. At least some elements of Christian thought have opposed the “ensoulment” of nature, moving in the thought of Rene Descartes (1596–1650) to the opposite extreme. Conceived as nothing but matter, soil is dead, lifeless. Some elements of life were restored when scientific agronomy embraced the importance of soil microorganisms that carry out the life-renewing properties long associated with fertile soils. But this view did not go so far as to restore the notion of spirit to the soil.

In our own time, the depersonalized, lifeless concept of soil still predominates. Those who reject it have been inclined toward mystical, animistic, or spiritualistic speculation. They have invested their faith in an alternative metaphysic of soil that, while not returning to literally personified spirits found in the Green Man myths, does present the spirit of the soil as a neglected life force to be called forth by rit-ual and incantation. The Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) gave lectures on agriculture that became the basis of the biodynamic farming move-ment.40 A key element of biodynamic farming is the preparation of cow-horn manure, or Preparation 500, whose basic ingredient is cow dung that has been packed in cow horns and buried for several months. There are many elaborate steps in making proper cow-horn dung, including celestial timing and rhythmic stirring of the horn dung mixed with rainwater. Preparation 500 is then sprayed in concentrations that conventional agronomists find too dilute to have any pos-sible effect on soil fertility (a practice not unlike those of homeopathic medicine).

Homeopathy has been in ill repute among the life sciences because there is physically not enough of the homeopathic agent to have any effect, given basic principles of physical chemistry. Yet in both homeopathic medicine and in biody-namic agriculture, there is the claim that the method for developing the prepara-tion dramatically increases their potency. Why cow horns? Biodynamic advocates describe the rationale this way:

The horns of the cow play a very important part in [its] digestive activity. They retain what is happening within the bodily functions of the cow. The horns (and the hoof as well), Steiner points out, stop the whole energy of this digestive activity from escaping out of the cow. . . . After the horns have been removed from the cow, they nevertheless still continue to have this energy-containing function.41

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However, biodynamic advocates also attribute the “life affirming” elements of soil to microorganisms, just as a conventional agronomist would.42 Whether this adds up to mysticism or not obviously depends as much on what one thinks about mysticism as it does on what one believes about biological potential of microor-ganisms or the practices of biodynamic farming.

In my conversations with biodynamic farmers over the years, I have found them to be split between those who proffer elaborate metaphysical explanations and those who say “all I know is that it works.” Other forms of soil mysticism have proven to be less benign. German National Socialists drew upon a metaphysics of blood and soil in their pursuit of Lebensraum, a quest for arable lands that would allow the regeneration of traditional agrarian folk cultures. The Nazi philosophy also called for the genocide of Germany’s Jewish population both to eliminate the heretical Jewish doctrine that celebrates spiritual emancipation from the soil and to insure the racial purity of those who would populate the fields that they were “liberating” from the Poles.43 It should be obvious that what follows in this book will have no truck with this kind of metaphysical speculation. The spirit of the soil has fallen on hard times as much through the efforts of its friends as through its detractors.

Nonetheless there is surely a need to revive the long-dormant feeling expressed so well by the ancient mythology. The Earth lives in and through human agri-culture. This not to say, of course, that the Earth depends upon humans for its life, but merely that human agriculture is an integral part of the life process as it exists on Earth. Agriculture is a natural activity in this sense, properly emergent within many of the ecosystems in which the human species is found. To speak this way is to take the Earth, the soils, the waters as living, if not animated. To seek understanding of life—to seek an environmental philosophy—is to seek, in senses yet to be spoken—the spirit of the soil. Of course agriculture should not be deified, as in the ancient myths. Indeed, much of what will come in the suc-ceeding chapters continues the demystification of agriculture that has arguably been underway since the dawn of rational philosophy. Yet this demystification errs when it conceives of nature as lifeless or humanity as essentially separable from the production of food.

Neither “spirit” nor “soil” is a key term of analysis in the discussion that fol-lows. What we are after is an ethic of farming, a philosophy of agriculture, with particular attention to agriculture’s impact upon and integration with the wider natural world. But this philosophy is needed as much by those who eat as by those who farm. Food consumers see too little of farming to form an idea of agricul-ture. They demand traits and characteristics in their food that have little connec-tion to its origins or its biological production. The act of eating is split between the metaphors of refueling at the pump and pleasing the senses as one might at a concert or a sporting event. Nearly gone is the spirit of raising food and eating it as an act of communion with some larger whole. In this sense, the chapters of this book do attempt to recover and reconstruct the spirit of the soil. Although

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few in the industrialized nations of the world subsist on food that they themselves have grown—monoculture has created a world where even most farmers get their food at a grocery store in town—it is in the spirit of our dependence on soil that philosophical questions for agriculture must be asked and in knowledge of that spirit that they must be answered.

Notes

1 The Dust Bowl is the subject of several dozen works by historians, social theorists and documentarians. See especially Worster, 1979; Egan, 2006; and Burns, Duncan and Dunfey, 2012.

2 Butler, 2012. 3 Stuart, 2014. 4 Pimentel, 2006. 5 Wagner and coauthors, 2009. 6 Garone, 1998. 7 Diaz and Rosenburg, 2008. 8 Lanyon, 1995. 9 I discussed this phenomenon in my book on biotechnology (Thompson, 2007), pub-

lished originally in 1997, and in non-peer reviewed newsletter article (Thompson, 2008b). It has not, to my knowledge, been picked up by economists who study how technology affects farm size and patterns of ownership in agriculture.

10 Newton and Dillingham, 1994, p. 48. 11 Newton and Dillingham, 1994, p. 51. 12 Widely read articles were published by Mark Sagoff (2003) and Les Levidow (1995);

book-length studies were authored by Sheldon Krimsky (Krimsky and Wrubel, 1996), Gary Comstock (2000), the Canadian philosopher of science R. Paul Thompson (2011) as well as myself (Thompson, 1997a).

13 Westra, 1993. 14 Norton, 1991b. 15 Hobbs and coauthors, 2013. 16 Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, in Dewey, 1982. 17 Frodeman, 2014. 18 de Onis, 1992, pp. 29–30. 19 Vogel, 2015. 20 Vogel, 2015, pp. 71–88. 21 Boisvert and Heldke, 2016. 22 Stuart, 2014. 23 Ibid. 24 At this point in the text, the first edition cites some secondary studies of a few exem-

plary criticisms in a footnote: Dunlap, 1981, who discusses chemicals, Perkins, 1982, Rosenberg, 1961, Danbom, 1979 and Marcus, 1985, who discuss agricultural science.

25 Zimdahl, 2006. 26 Stoll, 2002. 27 Stuart, 2014. 28 DeLind, 2000; Guthman, 2014. 29 Zimdahl, 2006. 30 Leopold, 1949, pp. 201–203. 31 Ibid., p. 210. 32 Ibid., p. 6. 33 Ibid., p. 117.

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34 Ibid., pp. 224–225. 35 Schumacher, 1972, p. 116. 36 Ibid., p. 113. 37 Ibid., pp. 30–32. Contra Schumacher, one might question whether “permanence” is a

Buddhist value. 38 Diesing, 2005, p. 294. 39 Ibid., p. 293. 40 Steiner, 1977. 41 Procter, 1989, p. 110. 42 La Rooji, 1989. 43 Patterson, 2015.

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