Henry Imler April 26th, 2006

In an earlier post, I asserted that since humans are animals, they have a certain minimum level of responsibility to the environment:”The Unsound Argument(Humans and the Environment, Part I)”:http://unsoundargument.com/ethics/humans-and-the-environment-a-minimum-level-of-responsibility. If push comes to shove, humans must at least maintain their environment at survival levels. However, humans are not merely animals, they are also persons. Not only are they persons in the objective sense, but are persons in the subjective sense, i.e. moral agents.

I don’t have all of this worked out yet, but I want to posit that with increasing levels of personhood, there comes an increasing level of responsibility to the environment. At one level (animal) there is a responsibility to survive and that overrides all other responsibilities. At another there is moral agents and that they are responsible to how they treat other beings and their environment and at another level there is an awareness of nature and its beauty and that for its sake moral agents that are aware of it have the duty to protect that beauty.

I know how to build the bridge from self-survival to species-survival to all other species-survival, but I am not sure how to build towards the environment for its own sake. I think I am there but I am not sure how to put it into words. I will need to sketch out levels of personhood and match them with the levels of responsibility. So actually this paper will need a strong, developed view of personhood.

• Ethics
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