When Utilitarians Should Be Virtue Theorists

1. I begin with an assumption that few would deny, but about which many are in denial: human beings are transforming earth in ways that are devastating for other forms of life, future human beings, and many of our human contemporaries. The epidemic of extinction now under way is an expression of this. So is the changing climate. Ozone depletion, which continues at a very high rate, is potentially the most lethal expression of these transformations, for without an ozone layer, no life on earth could exist. Call anthropogenic mass extinctions, climate change, and ozone depletion “the problem of global environmental change” (or “the problem” for short). 2. Philosophers in their professional roles have by and large remained silent about the problem. There are many reasons for this. I believe that one reason is that it is hard to know what to say from the perspective of the reigning moral theories: Kantianism, contractarianism, and commonsense pluralism. While I cannot fully justify this claim here, some background remarks may help to motivate my interest in exploring utilitarian approaches to the problem. 3. Consider first Kantianism. Christine Korsgaard writes that it is “nonaccidental” that utilitarians are “obsessed” with “population control” and “the preservation of the environment.” For “a basic feature of the consequentialist outlook still pervades and distorts our thinking: the view that the business of morality is to bring something about.” Korsgaard leaves the impression that a properly conceived moral theory would have little to say about the environment, for such a theory would reject this false picture of the “business of morality.” This impression is reinforced by the fact that her remark about the environmental obsessions of utilitarians is the only mention of the environment in a book of more than 400 pages. It is not surprising that a view that renounces as “the business of morality” the question of what we should bring about would be disabled when it comes to thinking about how to respond to global environmental change.