4 Ethical Reasoning and Conservation Planning
I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever “written.” . . . It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.
—Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac
Learning Objectives
- Identify ethical dilemmas, intrinsic and extrinsic values, and value chains.
- Distinguish between normative and factual statements in an ethical argument.
- Compare and contrast common ethical theories and advantages and disadvantages.
- Recognize ethical dilemmas common to managing different types of fisheries and conserving rare and endangered species.
- Examine our personal values and how they influence our ethical norms.
- Identify the ethical principles involved in co-management and collaborative planning.
- Examine different ethical codes of conduct.
- Apply ethical reasoning steps in issues involving uses of fish.
4.1 Ethical Questions and Practical Ethics
Ethics involves deliberating about the moral principles that inform (or should inform) our actions. The human and natural worlds are too complex to expect easy-to-identify rules and absolute truths to guide our actions. In our modern world, people follow many different ethical theories to help them identify what actions are right. Ethical thinkers are needed today more than ever to help us understand our own and each other’s ethics and work together to develop policies for humans to coexist with each other and fish in natural and human-altered ecosystems.
In policy making, just as in our personal lives, we are often faced with a difficult choice between two possible moral imperatives, neither of which is clearly acceptable nor preferable. For example, regulating the take from a fish population to conserve options for future generations conflicts with the moral imperative of freedom to pursue fishing without restriction. The complexity arises because following one moral imperative (freedom) would result in transgressing another (conservation). Is it acceptable to displace people from their local community to create a protected area to save an endangered species? Should we kill all nonnative trout to restore a unique population of Cutthroat Trout? How do you restrict access to fishing to maintain productivity of fish and provide livelihood opportunities for future generations? Should we compensate for salmon losses at hydroelectric projects with mass release of hatchery-reared salmon from large-scale artificial production facilities? Should you eat farmed fish raised in cages or wild-caught fish?
Depending on your needs, preferences, and interests, you may differ in how you answer these questions. Our conscience is that inner feeling or voice that guides us to a morally right behavior, yet when two actions with morally laudable goals conflict, we have an ethical dilemma. In these cases, explicit consideration of values at stake should be part of careful debate about human involvemen