When you hear the word ``value'' used to justify conservation, it is often associated with economic or financial value. As we have seen over the past couple of lectures, there are some serious concerns about whether applying economic approaches to valuing biodiversity are likely to be useful in helping to conserve biodiversity.1 The difficulties with an economic approach to valuation are often attributed to its focus on what's of value to humans. It's important to understand, however, that the anthropocentric focus does not mean that only humans are valuable. It means that only humans do the valuing. ``Deep ecology'' and related approaches would argue that values exist independently of humans and that those values deserve respect.2
Broadly speaking there are three reasons why we might place a value on biodiversity:
We've talked a lot about the ways in which we derive benefit from biological diversity - food, feed, fiber, pharmaceuticals, and ecosystem services. These are use values. What we haven't talked about, or haven't talked about much are values that derive from aesthetics or morality. We discussed methods of trying to quantify these non-use values when we talked about economic approaches to estimating ``willingness to pay'' or ``willingness to accept''. I'm going to focus on talking about the different ways we can understand what they are, i.e. we're going to have a very short course in ethics, and I'll describe a few of the major strains in ethics that emerge from the history of western philosophy. It may feel a little uncomfortable introducing ethical ideas into a science course, but as van Houtan [5] points out,
Conservation, even if conceived on scientific grounds, is a framework for a specific ``right'' outcome. Protecting species, designing nature preserves, restoring degraded ecosystems, promoting sustainable use - these are thought of as ``good'' undertakings....
``Right'' and ``good'' are ethical concepts. An underlying theme throughout this course has been that we have to determine what outcomes are desirable. Now I want to explore whether we can argue that certain outcomes are ``right'' or ``good'', not merely desirable.