Foundations of the Proposal to Help Victims of Natural Processes

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume VII, p. 19 of the PDF edition · English translation

5.1. Introduction

In Chapter 1 we briefly saw some of the reasons on which the proposal to help animals in the wild who are victims of natural processes is based. In this chapter, the foundations of this proposal will be explained in more detail.

5.2. The Argument from the Existence of Reasons

The argument from the existence of reasons holds that the explanation of why we should prevent anthropogenic harms implies that we should prevent natural harms. If it is the negative character of harms that generates reasons for us to avoid them in our practices, then we have equal reasons to prevent natural harms (since they are still negative). Harms are negative because of their own characteristics, which do not depend on their origin (therefore, natural harms are negative, not neutral in terms of value).

5.3. The Argument from the Strength of Reasons

The argument from the strength of reasons holds that if it is the negative character of harms that generates reasons for us to prevent them, then the strength of these reasons depends on the magnitude of the harms (and not on their origin). That is, given two harms of equal magnitude, one anthropogenic and the other not, all else being equal (for example, the possibility of preventing both to the same extent), we have direct reasons of equal weight to try to prevent both. And, given two harms of different magnitude, all else being equal, we have reasons to prioritize preventing the greater harm. This implies that the reasons to prevent natural harms will be stronger whenever doing so means preventing a greater magnitude of harm with the same amount of resources.

5.4. Implications of Both Arguments

If the argument from the existence of reasons and the argument from the strength of reasons are sound, we must reject not only the view that we have no reasons to prevent or minimize natural harms, but also the view that these reasons exist but are weaker compared with equivalent anthropogenic harms.

5.5. The Argument from the Weight of the Criterion

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that anthropogenic harms should carry greater weight . Even so, this would not imply that minimizing anthropogenic harms would always have priority over minimizing natural harms. That would be the case only if minimizing anthropogenic harms were a trump. If it had greater weight (even much greater), but did not amount to a trump, the priority could be reversed in certain cases. There would have to be a point beyond which, given the possibility of greatly minimizing natural harms at the cost of slightly less minimization of anthropogenic harms, we would have to prioritize minimizing natural harms. Assigning greater weight to anthropogenic harms would also not imply that minimizing natural harms is praiseworthy but not obligatory. These would be somewhat lesser obligations (but not small ones for that reason; they would even take priority depending on the situation).

Important: this supposition was made merely for the sake of argument, in order to show that, even if we gave greater weight to anthropogenic harms, we would still have strong reasons to minimize natural harms. However, given what we have discussed in this section, there do not seem to be good reasons to give greater weight to anthropogenic harms: what matters is the magnitude of harm that could be prevented with a given amount of resources, not the origin of the harm.