The Ethics of Human Intervention on Behalf of 'Others (original) (raw)

I regularly pass several homeless persons surviving on the streets even in winter. One sits on a folded scrap of a blanket leaning against a wall looking thin, pale and resigned, doing some calligraphy of messages on card for those who want them. Almost everyone walks quickly past, some manoeuvring to the opposite side of the wide pavement, others almost treading on some of their sparse belongings. Hardly anyone makes eye contact. The harsh reality of living on the street is some days without enough food and basic provisions. Christmas produces a spike of concern and generosity that vanishes immediately afterwards. Advice issued by the local authorities and charities cautions against giving money, on the basis of characterising all street people as substance abusers. Since the rise of Thatcherist meritocracy and neoliberalism, homelessness, living and dying on the streets has become rife in the UK. This policy failure suggests a moral obligation on 'witnesses' to help, to prevent or reduce suffering, but what interventions on what basis? A recent newspaper article by a once homeless person (Lavelle, 2019) offers sobering simple guidance to those who wish to help, and that includes talking and engaging with those suffering. Sympathy and engagement seem hard enough with other humans, but they at least have the potential to directly express their concerns and communicate, while there are many who remain effectively silent-such as children, future generations and non-humans. In environmental ethics strong themes have been to debate human obligations toward the last of these groups and Nature more generally. Arguments are put forward for moral status of sentient beings as well as other non-human organisms and entities (such as rivers or lakes) in decision-making and seeking to enable flourishing and enforce rights. This raises the problem of how intervention should be undertaken when rights or flourishing-potential of different morally considerable subjects conflict. The major alternative, consequentialist reasoning, has its own problems such as reduction of values to utilitarian pain and pleasure principles. More generally, in this materialist managerial age, there are concerns over objectification of the other and excessive technocratic 'solutions' that pay little attention to the constituent values of 'others' and their autonomy. This issue of Environmental Values concerns a range of arguments about what is appropriate intervention on the behalf of non-human 'others'. According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, 2019) the top three drivers for biodiversity loss are: (i) changes in land and sea use; (ii) direct exploitation of organisms; and (iii) accelerated climate change. These human-induced factors involve a complex web of interests, interactions, dependencies and different levels of