In “Duties to Endangered Species”, Rolston argues for a mixture of biology and ethics that will produce an ethic sufficient for preserving species. Though he states that there are ethics that exist with the outcome of protecting species that are threatened, these ethics have humans at their centre, not the endangered species themselves. Rolston outlines this to emphasize the lack of ‘interspecific altruism’ (720). By this concept he means to expand the duties humans have to species themselves, as opposed to the preservation of species for the purposes of human exploitation and enjoyment. The latter represents duties to humans, not duties to species. This is an important concept to grasp, as the centre of Rolston’s argument is that species should be valued for their own existence, not that of human usefulness.

I agree with Rolston that humans must expand past their limited intraspecific altruism to an interspecific version (720). However, from a policy standpoint which Rolston sometimes mentions, what difference does this truly make. Humans have already created a legal standard for when they will choose to lawfully protect animals. These laws however are often not sufficient for protecting the animals, but I cannot see humans advancing past legal protections. Rolston also cites barriers to his proposed line of thinking, stating that there are scientific considerations that surpass ethical ones (720). 

Rolston seems to support the existence of ‘species’ as a concept, but cites Darwin to state that ‘species’ as a categorical tool often draws lines arbitrarily between two species that may be slightly different. Species therefore, Rolston follows, are merely inventions. Rolston follows this line of reasoning only to state that not only scientifically, but historically, ‘species’ as a concept is a useful term in order to be logically correct about orientating what life falls into what categories (721). Rolston focuses on this clash between ethical thinking of ‘life should be respected because it is life’, and the scientific purposes of utilizing categories. From here Rolston takes a very interesting argumentative stance, that humans ought to respect and consider the genetic lifelines that exist and persist over millions of years of evolution. This, to me, begins to form a more usable logic for ascribing duties to species that are not humans. By this sort of roundabout explanation, Rolston seems to want to stress to us that ‘species’ as a term is useful not to create hierarchical importance of different species, but to highlight that respecting current members of a species is akin to respecting the species as it existed in the past and present. 

So how do we form an ethical connection with species that are not our own? We cannot create contracts with endangered species to ensure reciprocal duties and rights as prevailing theories of justice would have us make, as Rolston mentions (722). However we as individuals still have duties to others who cannot communicate with us in the same way the majority of the population can. We do not forsake those who hold less power than we do in the ethical sense, so why can this not extend to other forms of human life, as Rolston proposes in his easiest conclusion (722). But my argument here is that though we extend the same moral value to those who are powerless, we do not ascribe them the same rights in a legal sense. In this same way, we can respect life on the basis of life, but we may still destroy their habitats, or reduce their food supply, or any number of things that are outcomes of not giving species the same rights as our own.

Though Rolston provides many useful arguments on behalf of ascribing moral worth to other species, I do not see how it would pan out in a practical way. We ought not to harm other species, but to what extent? Species are easily endangered when humans are utilizing their fragile ecosystems for our own purposes. It is prudent to note here that Rolston holds that a species is inseparable from its environment, which implies that any harm we do to an ecosystem is direct harm to a species itself. Though we should not harm species, is it correct to say we cannot utilize resources located in the environments of every species? How should we survive if we cannot drink the water that the fish live in? If we cannot separate species from their environments, we cannot survive as a species ourselves. Therefore, though I can support his ethical standpoint, I cannot advocate for his mixture of ethics and biological science. So though Rolston provides many interesting ethical features, I cannot say definitively that his ethical argument is complete.

~Suzanah

 

Rolston, Holmes. “Duties to Endangered Species,” BioScience 35(1985):718-726