Deck 15: The Environment, Consumption, and Climate Change

Question 1

Biocentrism is the view that

A) the only beings that possess direct moral standing are human beings.
B) all and only sentient creatures have direct moral standing.
C) all living beings, because they are living, possess direct moral standing.
D) the primary bearers of direct moral standing are ecosystems in virtue of their functional integrity.

Answer 1

C

Question 2

Ecoholism is the view that

A) only whole ecosystems (not any of the individuals that make up those ecosystems) have direct moral standing.
B) ecosystems and some of the individuals that make them up have direct moral standing.
C) ecosystems do not have direct moral standing but some of the individuals that make them up do.
D) none of the above

Answer 2

B

Question 3

Suppose Mary says, "I understand that the use of the pesticide DDT will prevent thousands of human beings from dying of malaria. But it is still wrong to use DDT, because ultimately all that matters is the functional integrity of the ecosystems in which human beings live, and using DDT will severely damage this integrity." Mary is most likely a proponent of

A) Biocentrism.
B) Anthropocentrism.
C) Ecoholism.
D) ecocentrism.

Answer 3

D

Question 4

A truly environmental ethic must hold that which of the following has direct moral standing?

A) at least some nonhuman beings
B) at least some nonconscious beings
C) both A and B
D) neither A nor B; an environmental ethic may deny that there are any nonhuman and nonconscious beings with direct moral standing.

Question 5

Suppose Nathan argues that while neither nonhuman nor nonsentient beings have direct moral standing, we still ought to have a certain noninstrumental regard for the environment because failing to do so involves a deficiency in one's moral character. Nathan is most likely applying what moral theory?

A) virtue ethics
B) consequentialism
C) Kantian theory
D) an ethics of prima facie duty

Question 6

Baxter argues that we should view our treatment of the environment as a matter of various trade-offs whose aim is

A) to minimize damage incurred by all individual living beings.
B) to minimize the suffering of all sentient creatures.
C) to promote the functional integrity of ecosystems.
D) to promote human welfare.

Question 7

If it were known that a policy would wipe out several animal species without negatively affecting human beings, Baxter would most likely say that

A) this policy is morally problematic because it harms the environment.
B) this policy is morally problematic because it damages the integrity of the ecosystem.
C) this policy is morally obligatory because the environment ought not to exist.
D) this policy is morally unproblematic.

Question 8

In Baxter's view, the first and foremost step toward a solution of our environmental problems is a clear recognition that our objective is not pure air or water but rather

A) some optimal state of pollution
B) an overall maximally clean environment.
C) some maximal state of pollution.
D) the preservation of all living species.

Question 9

Baxter claims that his "very general way" of stating what we should strive for environmentally assumes that

A) we have a god-like control over the environment.
B) we can measure in some way the incremental units of human satisfaction.
C) nonhuman animals have no value whatsoever.
D) all of the above

Question 10

Baxter's view allows that animals like penguins have some kind of moral standing because

A) they are sentient creatures.
B) they are biological beings.
C) human beings enjoy watching them.
D) they form social relationships with other penguins.

Question 11

Leopold claims that history has shown that "the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating." It is self-defeating, in this view, because

A) the conqueror doesn't understand what makes the conquered community tick.
B) the conqueror doesn't know what and who within the community is valuable.
C) the conqueror doesn't know what and who is worthless in community life.
D) all of the above

Question 12

What is wrong with a conservation system based wholly on economic motives according to Leopold?

A) It assumes that the economic parts of the biotic system will function without the uneconomic parts.
B) It assumes that economic motives are morally relevant.
C) It implies that nonhuman creatures are necessarily without any moral standing.
D) none of the above

Question 13

Leopold most likely describes the "land pyramid" to

A) argue that nature is not inherently normative.
B) provide a description of a mechanism that "we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in."
C) give a detailed description of how plants absorb energy from the sun.
D) argue that even the noneconomic parts of the "biotic clock" have economic value.

Question 14

Which of the following claims would Leopold clearly accept?

A) The problems associated with how we should use our natural environment ultimately concern how human beings should treat each other.
B) We should think in terms of "the balance of nature" to properly appreciate the value of the natural environment.
C) The problems associated with how we should use our natural environment are not merely economic problems.
D) We should ignore all economic motives in deciding questions about land use.

Question 15

Instead of asking why the act of destroying the environment might be immoral, Hill wants to ask

A) why the act of destroying nature might be immoral.
B) why people who destroy the environment might be bad people.
C) how the decision to preserve the environment benefits the environment.
D) whether plants have interests.

Question 16

Which of the following statements would Hill most likely agree with?

A) Being ignorant of facts about the environment logically entails that one will not properly appreciate one's place in nature.
B) Whether one understands facts about the environment has no correlation with whether one properly appreciates one's place in nature.
C) Being ignorant of facts about the environment makes it very likely that one will not properly appreciate one's place in nature
D) Animals and plants have interests and rights, and we ought to respect both.

Question 17

According to Gardiner, which of the following is an important implication of the fact that carbon dioxide is a long-lived greenhouse gas?

A) That climate change is a resilient phenomenon.
B) That the impacts of climate change are seriously back-loaded.
C) That climate change is a substantially deferred phenomenon
D) all of the above

Question 18

In Gardiner's analysis, which of the following is a characteristic of the climate change problem?

A) institutional adequacy
B) dispersion of causes and effects
C) fragmentation of agency
D) all of the above

Question 19

In the context of Gardiner's article, what is "the dispersion of causes and effects"?

A) the dispersion of the impacts of emissions of greenhouse gases to other actors and regions of the Earth
B) the dispersion of the causes of greenhouse gas emissions across the Earth
C) the dispersion of carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere
D) the dispersion of fault and blame for causing greenhouse gas emissions.

Question 20

In the context of Gardiner's article, "the fragmentation of agency" refers to what?

A) an agent's inability to acknowledge his or her contribution to climate change
B) the fragmentation of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions across generations
C) the vast number of individuals and agents who contribute to climate change
D) the idea that it's not rational for each individual to restrict his or her own pollution

Question 21

What is an example of "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon"?

A) all countries cooperating to change the existing incentive structure by introducing a system of enforceable sanctions to curb climate change.
B) the agreement of more powerful nations to require less powerful nations to curb greenhouse gas emissions for the benefit of all humanity.
C) the agreement of less powerful nations to boycott trade with more powerful nations until the latter agree to curb their greenhouse gas emissions.
D) the agreement of a large number of individual agents to restrict their own pollution.

Question 22

What is the "intergenerational storm" of climate change?

A) the problem of massive world overpopulation over generations.
B) the problem that the bad effects of current carbon dioxide emissions will fall largely on future generations.
C) the problem that the compounding effects of greenhouse gas emissions require the current generation to, in effect, cooperate with future generations.
D) the problem that countries are possibly biased toward the interests of the current generation, which largely benefits from carbon dioxide emissions.

Question 23

Sinnott-Armstrong is most interested in examining issues about the moral obligations of

A) Individuals.
B) Societies.
C) Governments.
D) Families.

Question 24

According to Sinnott-Armstrong, the fact your government morally ought to do something

A) does not prove that government officials ought to promote it.
B) does not prove that you ought to do it.
C) proves that you ought not to do it.
D) proves that you ought to do it, too.

Question 25

The main difference between "actual act principles" (like the harm principle) and "internal principles" (like the universalizability principle) is that

A) internal principles focus on the agent's motives for acting.
B) internal principles focus only on the immediate effects of an action.
C) actual act principles focus on the agent's actual motives for acting.
D) actual act principles concern how we ought to think about other people.

Question 26

According to Sinnott-Armstrong, if we cannot find any moral principle to back up our intuition that wasteful driving (of the sort mentioned in his article) is wrong, then

A) we know that wasteful driving is morally permissible.
B) we know that particularism is true.
C) we do not know whether wasteful driving is wrong.
D) we know that wasteful driving is not wrong.

Question 27

Hourdequin argues that one flaw of consequentialist calculation is that

A) it fails to reconcile prima facie duties.
B) it can run counter to a person's being able to integrate her commitments at various levels.
C) it can run counter to the idea that persons are atomistic and individually rational actors.
D) it fails to recognize that possibility that the persons are best understood in relation to one another.

Question 28

According to Confucian the model of persons,

A) we learn to be persons through familial relations and by learning from other's example.
B) we are persons because we have immortal, individual souls.
C) we learn to be persons by slowing developing rational capacities.
D) all of the above.

Question 29

In contrast to Garrett Hardin's approach, the Confucian model rejects coercion because

A) the costs of eliminating a collective action problem are not irrelevant to its solution
B) it affirms the autonomy of individuals apart from others
C) it cannot lead to real social change, which involves changes of mind as well as action
D) The Confucian model actually accepts coercion.

Question 30

What two problems does individualism lead us into, according to Hourdequin?

A) It leads to failures of developing integration and integrality.
B) They lead us into "tragedy of the commons" situations and they instill in us an atomistic view of persons.
C) It leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions and increased consumption of non-recyclable goods.
D) We both tend to think of our moral obligations as only personal obligations, and so think that we can only advocate for policy in "tragedy of the commons" situations.

Question 31

The main philosophical issue in chapter 15 concerns the scope of indirect moral standing.

Question 32

Any ethic that accords direct moral standing to nonhuman creatures is an environmental ethic

Question 33

An ethic for the use of the environment does not count as an environmental ethic, because it is consistent with anthropocentrism.

Question 34

Baxter defends an anthropocentric approach to ethical issues concerning the environment.

Question 35

According to Baxter, questions like "Was it 'wrong' for plants to reproduce themselves and alter the atmospheric composition in favor of oxygen?" all have the answer "no."

Question 36

In Baxter's view, the costs of controlling pollution are best expressed in terms of the number of dollars that will need to be spent.

Question 37

Leopold proposes an ecocentric environmental ethic.

Question 38

In Leopold's view, all ethics so far evolved rest upon the premise that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.

Question 39

Hill claims that it's possible to not regard an act as wrong while at the same time seeing it as reflecting something objectionable about the person who performed that act.

Question 40

Indifference to nonsentient nature, says Hill, does not necessarily reflect the absence of virtues.

Question 41

According to Hill, understanding one's place in nature is the same thing as appreciating one's place in nature.

Question 42

A "tragedy of the commons" is essentially a prisoner's dilemma involving a common resource.

Question 43

According to Gardiner, the "fragmentation of agency" leads to humanity's relative inability to respond to climate change due to the lack of an effective, centralized system of global governance.

Question 44

Gardiner believes that "temporal fragmentation" is much worse (for climate change) than the associated "spatial fragmentation."

Question 45

According to Gardiner, the main problem inherent in the theoretical storm of climate change is that of moral corruption.

Question 46

Sinnott-Armstrong claims that it is morally better for individuals to not engage in activities like driving a gas-guzzling car just for fun.

Question 47

In Sinnott-Armstrong's view, governments do not have a moral obligation to address the problem of global warming.

Question 48

According to Sinnott-Armstrong, the fact that we cannot find any moral principle (to support our moral intuitions) shows that we don't need such principles.

Question 49

Hourdequin argues that individual rationality is just a matter of preference satisfaction, irrespective of how one's actions effect other people.

Question 50

According to Hourdequin, the integrity of a person committed to opposing climate change grounds a prima facie duty to control his or her greenhouse gas emissions.

Question 51

_________ is the view that all living beings, because they are living, possess direct moral standing, and thus morality includes requirements that include direct moral concern for all living beings.

Question 52

A(n) _________ is a whole composed of both living and nonliving things including animals, plants, bodies of water, sunlight, and other geological factors.

Question 53

_________ is the view that the only beings who possess direct moral standing are human beings and all other beings (living and nonliving) are of mere indirect moral concern.

Question 54

According to Baxter's "spheres of _________" criterion, every person should be free to do whatever he or she wishes in contexts where his or her actions do not interfere with other human beings.

Question 55

Because Baxter appeals to the idea that "every human being should be regarded as an end," we can think of him as invoking the _________ formulation of Kant's categorical imperative.

Question 56

Baxter argues that to understand the true costs of pollution control we must first achieve an understanding of the difference between dollars and _________, where the latter, unlike dollars, is "the wealth of our nation" and "of vital importance."

Question 57

Leopold says, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the _________ community [including soils, waters, plants, animals]. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

Question 58

The term "the balance of nature," says Leopold, fails to adequately describe what little we know about the land mechanism. He suggests we instead think of the "much truer image . . . employed in ecology": that of the biotic _________.

Question 59

"The major obstacle to humility . . . ," says Hill, "is _________, a tendency to measure the significance of everything by its relation to oneself."

Question 60

One aspect of humility, what Hill calls _________, "involves acknowledging, in more than a merely intellectual way, that we are the sort of creatures we are."

Question 61

The logical possibility of being humble while seeing all nonsentient nature as a mere resource is, according to Hill, a(n) "_________ rarity."

Question 62

In Gardiner's analysis, climate change is a normal tragedy of the _________.

Question 63

According to Gardiner, the problem of overpollution can be characterized as a prisoner's dilemma. On one horn of the dilemma, it is _________ rational for all agents to cooperate and restrict overall pollution.

Question 64

According to Gardiner, the problem of overpollution can be characterized as a prisoner's dilemma. On one horn of the dilemma, it is _________ rational not to restrict one's own pollution.

Question 65

As Gardiner notes, the implementation of "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" would seem to eliminate the option of _________ riding.

Question 66

"One way to confirm the truth of my moral intuitions," says Sinnott-Armstrong, "would be to derive them from a general moral _________."

Question 67

According to what Sinnott-Armstrong calls the _________ principle, we have a moral obligation not to make problems worse.

Question 68

Sinnott-Armstrong claims that the test of what moral rule can be rejected "reasonably" depends on moral _________.

Question 69

In developing her response to Sinnott- Armstrong, Hourdequin appeals to the _________ nature of Confucius's account of persons.

Question 70

Hourdequin argues against people do not act in ways that the framing of _________ action problems assume that they do.