Abstract Summary
Katie McShane (Colorado State University) - This paper explores difficulties that can arise when units of analysis from one field (in this case, philosophy of biology) are employed by a second field (in this case, ethics). Using as a case study the debates about the nature of biological interests in ethics, the paper illustrates a general problem: that categories helpful for biological explanation can have unintended effects in other fields. In the 1980s and 1990s, conservationists sought a theoretical grounding for claims commonly made within conservation about what is beneficial or harmful to superorganismic entities such as ecosystems, biomes, communities, and species. Environmental ethics took up this task, hoping to find an account of well-being that could be applied to a wide range of biological phenomena. At the time, the standard theories of well-being could not account for the well-being of nonconscious, nonsentient entities of any kind, organismic or superorganismic. Many ethicists looked to the then-emerging literature on biological functions from the philosophy of biology to explain what merely biological interests might consist in. Attracted by the ability of the etiological account of function to pick out the function of a particular part or trait of an organism, and the resultant account of functioning and malfunctioning, these theorists posited that biological interests consist in maintaining functioning, understood etiologically. However, the reliance on etiological accounts of function meant that only entities that were bearers of traits or parts with etiological functions—so-called units of selection—could have interests. Ethicists concluded that individual organisms, as reproducers and bearers of phenotypes, possessed traits that were selected for by natural selection and so could be bearers of interests. Meanwhile, ecosystems, communities, biomes, and species were ruled out. Since these superorganismic entities do not reproduce, they could not be units of selection, and thus could not possess interests. The result of this analysis was an individualism that persisted in environmental ethics for decades. Claims about harms to species or ecosystems are still typically regarded as, at best, merely a shorthand for claims about harms to their constituent organisms. While progress on the units of selection problem has created challenges for this view, authors continue to assert that ecosystems, etc., cannot have interests because they are not units of selection. Philosophers of biology discussing the units of selection problem aimed to find concepts that were useful for explaining the mechanisms of evolution; they did not aim to establish moral categories. Ethicists discussing the nature of biological interests aimed to find concepts that were consistent with the best scientific understanding of biological phenomena. However, in relying on claims about etiological function, ethicists imported biological categories that greatly constrained their ethical theorizing. They were left with the claim that only things that can reproduce have a well-being, and conservationists were left with the conclusion that their claims about the well-being of ecosystems, biomes, communities, and species were not theoretically sound.
