'The Rebugnant Conclusion: Utilitarianism, Insects, Microbes, and AI Systems' by
Jeff Sebo in (2023) Ethics, Policy and Environment comments
This paper considers questions that small animals and AI systems raise for utilitarianism. Specifically, if these beings have more welfare than humans and other large animals, then utilitarianism implies that we should prioritize them, all else equal. This could lead to a ‘rebugnant conclusion’, according to which we should, say, create large populations of small animals rather than small populations of large animals. It could also lead to a ‘Pascal’s bugging’, according to which we should, say, prioritize large populations of small animals even if they have a low chance of being sentient. I suggest that utilitarians should accept these implications in theory but might be able to avoid some of them in practice. ...
We are currently in the midst of rapid moral circle expansion. Animal advocates have made significant progress over the past fifty years by promoting the idea that we have moral duties to domesticated animals. We are now in the early stages of promoting the idea that we have moral duties to wild animals. Some of us accept that we have such duties because we think that we should help others when we can. Others of us accept that we have such duties because we think that we are harming many of these animals, and that we should reduce and repair these harms when we can. Regardless, the idea that we have duties to many nonhuman animals is fast gaining acceptance.
This moral circle expansion raises many difficult questions about our moral priorities. For instance, humans are currently harming and killing tens of billions of domesticated animals per year and hundreds of billions of wild animals per year. At least in terms of scale and neglectedness, then, our duties to current and near future nonhuman animals would seem to take priority over our duties to current and near future humans, all else equal. Granted, we might think that we should prioritize humans for other reasons, including reasons involving tractability and indirect effects, as we will see. Still, we are slowly coming to terms with the idea that nonhumans matter much more than we previously thought.
But as substantial as this moral circle expansion has been, it is not nearly complete. For instance, our discussion of duties to captive and domesticated animals tends to focus on animals such as cats, dogs, cows, pigs, and chickens. And our discussion of duties to free and wild animals tends to focus on animals such as chimpanzees, elephants, koalas, dolphins, and polar bears. While there is no single category that includes all these animals, in general we seem to focus more on large animals than on small animals, on vertebrates than on invertebrates, and on land animals than on aquatic animals. The result is a moral community that is many times larger than it was before, but still many times smaller than, I believe, it should be.
When we take seriously the possibility of a moral community that includes all sentient beings – large and small, vertebrate and invertebrate, terrestrial and aquatic – we realize that this next expansion might, if anything, be even more transformative than the last one. The world is full of conflicting interests and needs, and it is also full of very different kinds of populations. For instance, if we have to choose between improving the lives of a small number of large animals and improving the lives of a large number of small animals, then which should we choose and why? This kind of case requires us to think not only about what we owe each kind of animal but also about how to compare these duties when they conflict.
Suppose that we determine that large animals like humans have more welfare on average but that small animals like insects have more welfare in total. What follows for ethics and politics? Which populations should we prioritize within each generation, all else equal? And which populations should we prioritize across generations, all else equal? Suppose further that we determine that many beings, including microscopic organisms and current and near future AI systems, are at least possibly sentient, and that the size of these populations relative to insects rivals the size of insect populations relative to humans. How, if at all, should that possibility affect our moral priorities within and across generations?
My aim in this paper is to survey these questions from a utilitarian perspective, building on work from Horta, Ng, Tomasik, and others. I will show that utilitarianism implies that insects can take priority over humans and that microbes or AI systems can likewise take priority over insects. Granted, we might still have reason to prioritize humans at present and in the near future, since our duties regarding the distant future outweigh our duties regarding the present and near future, and since improving human lives at present and in the near future is key to improving the distant future. But in this case, what saves utilitarians from one surprising conclusion might be another surprising conclusion.
To be clear, while I focus on utilitarianism here for the sake of simplicity, I think that other moral theories face versions of these questions as well. Any theory that involves a duty of beneficence or a duty of non-maleficence will have to deal with questions about, say, how to set priorities between small populations of large animals and large populations of small animals, since there might be many cases where we have the power to help or avoid harming either the former populations or the latter populations but not both at the same time. So while my discussion here might focus on how one moral theory might navigate this strange future, we should keep in mind that this strange future awaits us all.
'A novel way of being together? On the depoliticising effects of attributing rights to nature' by Agnese Bellina in (2023) Environmental Politics comments
The recent trend of attributing rights to nature arguably introduces a novel way of ordering the relationship between humans and nonhumans. But to what extent does it challenge the political, legal, and economic categories of modernity? By analysing the processes that led to the inclusion of the rights of Mother Earth in the Bolivian legal system, I explore whether and how rights of nature express a distinct form of relating to the environment. Using the lenses of juridical symmetry and political conflict, I argue that attempts to ascribe rights to ecosystems can be read as examples of hyperpoliticisation which ultimately result in depoliticisation. I contend that rights of nature bring together the neutralisation of political conflict by extending the logic of juridical symmetry to nonhuman entities. Thus, far from constituting a renewed way of being together, these processes reiterate the aporia of the modern Western conceptual horizon. ...
In September 2008, Ecuador became the first country to attribute legal rights to nature by incorporating the Derechos de la Pacha Mama (Rights of Nature) into the new constitution (Tanasescu 2013). In January 2009, the Bolivian Constituent Assembly adopted the Political Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, therein constitutionalising the protection of Mother Earth. These initiatives soon gave rise to flourishing global movements, which resulted in a broader attribution of rights to ecosystems around the world. In 2010, the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature was established to coordinate grassroots initiatives working towards the implementation of rights of nature. In 2014, the New Zealand Parliament passed the Te Urewera Act recognizing the Te Urewera National Park as a legal entity with all the rights, power, and obligations of a legal person (Sanders 2018). In 2017, the Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Indian Ganges, with the Yamuna as its main tributary, became legal and living entities (Kothari et al. 2017). More recently, in April 2020, the municipality of Curridabat in Costa Rica attributed citizenship to pollinators, trees, and native plants (Greenfield 2020). In July 2020, the Spanish municipality of Los Alcazares recognized the Mar Menor lagoon as a subject of rights (Alvarez 2020).
This trend of attributing rights and legal personhood to ecosystems raises a series of theoretical and empirical questions regarding the stakes of such attempts. The inclusion of a diverse array of nonhuman entities within the modern legal rights framework requires a critical analysis of modern conceptual categories. Existing literature often assumes that ascribing legal rights to the ecosystem expresses a novel way of ordering the relationship between humans and nonhuman entities. Recent debates on the attribution of legal rights to nature have focussed either on the normative foundations and procedural implications of rights of nature (hereafter, RoN) within the legal framework of environmental law (Calzadilla and Kotzé 2018, Kauffman and Martin 2018, Bétaille 2019, Kinkaid 2019), or they have examined the philosophical premises and consequences of the ontological extension which allows nature to be conceived as a bearer of rights. These latter contributions have positioned themselves as partaking in the ontological turn and in the formation of post-humanist, new materialist, object-oriented ontological approaches in contemporary philosophy and social theory.
They are enthusiastic about attempts to ascribe rights to nature, which is portrayed as a revolutionary means to positively reorient interaction between humans and nonhumans (Burdon 2011, Maloney and Burdon 2014, Demos 2015, Boyd 2017, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Some have specifically argued for extending the legal right to own property to wildlife as a way to halt its destruction (Bradshaw 2020, Davies et al. 2021), while others have focussed on the potential of extending agency to nonhuman entities and using RoN as a tool to enhance political change (Winter 2021). However, as I will demonstrate, the above-mentioned streams of literature fall short when it comes to critically analysing the intrinsic aporetic dimension of rights-based claims and their consequent legal recognition. In other words, the literature on attributing rights to nature fails to analyse the extent to which RoN challenge the political, legal, and economic categories of modernity, such as the state’s monopoly of power, individual rights, and private property.
More recently, increased attention has been directed at the need to problematise the implications of RoN, especially concerning the Eurocentric assumptions and exclusions entailed in such a paradigm. Some scholars within this stream of literature have addressed the overstated identification of RoN with Indigenous knowledge systems and the consequent risk of both depriving them of, and flattening out, their radical political potential (Todd 2016, Rawson and Mansfield 2018, Tanasescu 2020, Celermajer et al. 2021, Fitz-Henry 2021). Others have focussed critically on the political context in which RoN have flourished, raising concerns over the triumphalism often inherent in RoN narratives (Marshall 2020, Reeves and Peters 2021, Tanasescu 2021). This article builds on this latter stream of literature and contributes to the growing chorus of concern about the political implications of RoN. It does so by exploring the (un)intentional consequences of RoN, namely the implicit assumption of modern Western conceptual categories and the levelling of conflictual asymmetries through the positive affirmation of a flat juridical symmetry. When referring to juridical symmetry, I mean a characteristically modern mechanism through which formal juridical equality between equally free subjects is established by the state’s coercive power to found a lasting order (Chignola and Duso 2008, Hobbes 2018). Such a mechanism, which nowadays is extended to nonhuman entities, operates through the progressive neutralisation, and hence depoliticisation, of conflict and the consequent accumulation of a monopoly of power in the hands of the modern nation state (Benjamin 2021).
My contribution further problematises the conversation about RoN in environmental politics, by exposing the shortcomings of a paradigm that has increasingly been mobilised as a novel way of being together, that is a more equal and just way to engage with and regulate the relationship between humans and nonhumans. I will critically explore a specific case of attributing rights to the ecosystem – the broad processes which led to the inclusion of the rights of Mother Earth in the Bolivian legal system – and consider whether these forms of relating disrupt the dominant socio-ecological arrangements built on individual rights, the state’s monopoly of power, and a proprietary regime of ownership. I scrutinise different gradients of juridical (a)symmetry and political conflict with the aim of tracing their inversely proportional relationship. I argue that attempts of ascribing rights to the ecosystem can be read as instances of hyperpoliticisation (i.e. a monopolisation of the political by the state) which ultimately result in depoliticisation (i.e. the foreclosure of the political). As such, far from constituting a way of challenging the modern logic of individual rights, private property, and the absolutisation of the state’s power, these processes reiterate the aporia of these specific modern Western conceptual categories.
I conceive ‘the political’ as the conflictual dimension constitutive of social relationships where a given order is rendered visible and contested by those who are excluded from it (Lefort 1988, p. 11, Mouffe 2005 −9; Rancière 1999, p. 11). Conceived as such, the political brings forth the problematisation and disruption of an established configuration of power, and introduces the possibility of radical change in the form of conflicting alternatives. My use of ‘depoliticisation’ refers instead to the attempted neutralisation and foreclosure of conflict by means of displacing it from the field of public dissensus to that of techno-managerial manageable consensus (Rancière 2004, Swyngedouw 2011). By removing the space of contestation and debate, depoliticisation obliterates the possibility of change and thus reduces the political to an administrative instrument devoid of transformative potential (Zizek 2006). These notions of ‘the political’ and the process of depoliticisation guide the analysis of the cases presented here. The rationale for choosing the Bolivian case is that it offers an opportunity to trace the problematic dynamic underpinning the mobilisation of RoN by showcasing both the theoretical and practical implications inherent in such paradigm. I do not mean to universalise the Bolivian example by focussing on one particular case. Rather, I aim to show how a close reading of the legal and political processes through which legal rights have been attributed to nature can be a productive approach for advancing a critique of RoN. Although I can only offer a close reading of one case, this approach may well resonate with similar cases elsewhere.
Section two of the paper provides an overview of the process that led to the adoption of the two laws that have operationalised the rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia. Section three offers a critical analysis of the text of these two laws and the Draft Law, with the aim of outlining the progressive depoliticisation of the most radical political claims contained within these texts. Section four turns to the TIPNIS conflict as a means to bring to the fore yet another dimension of the weakening of the political linked to a rights-based legal framework. Section five delves deeper into the aporetic implications of attributing rights to nature through the analysis of the homogenising effects of juridical symmetry applied to the cases presented. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these arguments for environmental politics.
'A Wrong Turn with the Rights of Nature Movement' by Noah Sachs in Georgetown Environmental Law Review (Forthcoming) comments -
Environmentalists have long dreamed of granting enforceable legal rights to nature, and their vision has recently become reality. Governments in the United States and abroad are enacting Rights of Nature laws, and many scholars have championed this burgeoning movement as one of the best hopes for preserving the environment.
Legal rights for nature seem visionary, but policymakers and scholars are overlooking considerable problems with this approach. This Article spotlights these problems, including the vague and incoherent content of nature’s rights, the difficulty of defining the boundaries of natural entities, the absence of limiting principles for the rights, and the legislation’s lack of guidance for humans. Because the Rights of Nature movement relies on ad hoc litigation to enforce nebulous rights in court, it will likely lead to arbitrary and oppressive outcomes for humans while under-protecting nature. For these reasons, Rights of Nature is a wrong turn in environmental law and policy.
While showing why the Rights of Nature project is likely to be ineffective and even unjust, this Article also examines possible reforms to make it palatable. I conclude that none of the reforms are workable. Rights of Nature offers a resonant battle cry for activists, but it is the wrong approach for addressing the global environmental crisis – and it could take us backward to a more polluted, degraded environment.
