Deep Time and Environmental Ethics

Abstract

This paper employs the concept of deep time to supply a philosophical argument about the kind of environmental ethics required in the present. Considerations from the evolutionary past are deployed to support the intrinsic value of health and well-being in addition to that of pleasure. The well-being of a species is held to consist in that of its individual members, past, present and future. Duties to species accordingly include promoting the well-being of future species members, since the impacts of human actions in a technological age are spread out across the future. These impacts include impacts on non-human species after humanity has become extinct; if these impacts matter, then a non-anthropocentric ethic is needed to explain why they do, since an anthropocentric ethics is incapable of explaining this.