Last person argument
The last person argument is an argument in environmental ethics . The argument goes back to the lecture Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic? (English; in German Do we need a new, an environmental ethic? ) from Richard Routley , whom he held at the 15th World Congress of Philosophy in 1973 in Varna .
argument
It is a thought experiment that aims to show that liberal theories of justice can only provide an unsatisfactory basis for environmental ethics. According to Routley, these ethics all have a principle of freedom in common, which states that all moral agents can essentially do what they want as long as they do not harm anyone else or harm themselves. According to Routley, this structure of argument means that only human (or generalized human) interests can be taken into account, and he suggests the term human chauvinism for this narrative .
“The last person (or the last person) to survive the collapse of the worldly order begins to thrash and, if possible, eliminates every living being, whether animal, whether plant (for my part also painlessly, as in the best slaughterhouses). What this person is doing is completely unproblematic in the context of [human] chauvinism, but from an environmental perspective these actions are wrong. "
Richard Routley developed this argument further in (Routley & Routley 1982) and it can also be found in a similar form in (Rolston 1975) , (Attfield 1975) , (Warren 1983) . These authors deduce from moral intuition that even a “last person” has duties, that an environment must have an intrinsic value . These metaethical positions are then called biocentric or depth ecological .
Counter arguments
Counter-arguments can simply reject the intuition that the last person is acting "wrongly" in a moral sense:
"Assume that after the last person dies, [...] a group of aliens will find the planet that is radically different in taste from us. They have a penchant for flat landscapes and find all mountains and trees around the world extremely ugly. A philosopher in this group who had previously suggested a last person argument would be pretty stupid. "
Jamieson (2008) , following a suggestion by Elliot (1985), argues that the value of an environment by people who exist before or after the “world of the last person” can justify a moral significance of this environment. According to them, the argument of the last person does not necessarily follow an intrinsic value of an environment, even under the assumption that the last person acts wrong.
literature
- Richard Routley: Environmental ethics: An anthology . 2002, ISBN 0-631-22294-4 , Is there a need for a new, an environmental, ethic ?, p. 47-52 ( online ).
- Richard Routley, Val Routley: Environmental philosophy . Ridgeview Pub Co, 1982, ISBN 0-909596-39-5 , Human Chauvinism and Environmental Ethics, pp. 385 .
- Holmes Rolston: Is There an Ecological Ethic? . In: Ethics . 85, No. 2, January 1, 1975, ISSN 0014-1704 , pp. 93-109.
- Mary Anne Warren: Environmental philosophy: a collection of readings . University of Queensland Press, 1983, ISBN 0-7022-1991-6 , The Rights of the Nonhuman World.
- R. Attfield: The good of trees . In: The Journal of Value Inquiry . 15, No. 1, 1981, pp. 35-54.
- Secondary literature
- Alan Carter: Projectivism and the Last Person Argument . In: American Philosophical Quarterly . 41, No. 1, January 1, 2004, ISSN 0003-0481 , pp. 51-62.
- William Gray: Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy . Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, ISBN 0-02-866137-0 , Last Man Arguments, pp. 40–41 ( online - issue 1).
- John O'Neill: A companion to environmental philosophy (= Blackwell Companions to Philosophy ). John Wiley & Sons, Northfield, Minnesota 2003, ISBN 978-1-4051-0659-7 , Is the rejection of meta-ethical realism compatible with an environmental ethic ?, pp. 165-168 .
- R. Elliot: Meta-ethics and environmental ethics . In: Metaphilosophy . 16, No. 2-3, 1985, pp. 103-117.
- Dale Jamieson: Ethics and the Environment: an Introduction . Cambridge University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-521-86421-3 , Intrinsic Value, pp. 68-75 .
- Wilfred Beckermann, Joanna Pasek: Environmental ethics: the big questions . John Wiley and Sons, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4051-7639-2 , In Defense of Anthropocentrism ( online ).
- David Schmidtz, Elizabeth Willott: Environmental ethics: what really matters, what really works . Oxford University Press, New York 2002, ISBN 0-19-513909-7 , Why Environmental Ethics ?, pp. xi-xxi ( online ).