Consequentialism, Animal Ethics, and the Value of Valuing - Essay Example

Philosophers like Peter Singer have adopted utilitarian viewpoints in order to justify a strongly favorable position to animal liberation and a respect for the environment. After all, it was Jeremy Bentham, John Stewart Mill’s family friend, who said of animals, “the question is not ‘can they reason’, and not ‘can they talk’ but ‘can they suffer’?” John Stewart Mill’s piece “Nature” discusses the extent to which human beings can listen to and derive moral truths from nature alone, and whether it is indeed a valid source for such information.

Mill looks critically at claims made by philosophers throughout time and space that human action must conform to some underlying Law, a supreme ruler and ultimate standard. He ultimately concludes that acting in accordance with any just natural laws is a physical impossibility and therefore the concept itself an absurdity. The word “nature”, whatever it means, does not confer any normative principle, whether it is endorsement or disapproval. Nature simply is what is, and not what ought to be.

“Nature,” Mill writes, “cannot be a proper model for us to imitate. Either it is right that we should kill because nature kills; torture because nature tortures; ruin and devastate because nature does the like; or we ought not to consider what nature does, but what it is good to do” (Mill, 2007). This passage encapsulates perhaps what is most significant about Mill’s essay. Holmes Rolston, in “Humans Valuing the Natural Environment” broaches this same topic by quoting Barry Commoner’s “third law of ecology”, which says Nature knows best (Rolston, Humans Valuing the Natural Environment, 1989, p. 32). This is the inversion of Mill’s thought that nature has no place in guiding human action.

It states simply because human beings value nature in some sense such means they ought to follow nature accordingly. Rolston