We've seen that using economic approaches to placing a value on biological diversity poses great challenges, and we've seen that an important part of using those approaches must be incorporating non-use values into the economic framework. We've just finished a very brief review of philosophical approaches to ethics, and I've already suggested that under both consequentialist and some non-consequentialist views biodiversity seems to have only instrumental value. Now it's vital to remember that instrumental value is not the same thing as use value.

• Use values are those derived either from using a resource, e.g., the commercial value of lumber extracted from a forest, or from the costs we incur from failing to protect a resource, e.g., the cost of levees and dams used to control river flooding when floodplain wetlands are converted to residential or industrial use.
• Non-use values include those associated with pleasure or appreciation, i.e., aesthetic values, and those associated with obligation or duty, i.e., ethical values.

It is therefore not problematic for an adherent of any ethical system to incorporate non-use values of biodiversity into decisions about what is right or just, so long as the non-use values concerned are aesthetic values. An interesting question is, however, is there some sense in which we have a duty, an ethical or moral obligation, to conserve biodiversity (or protect the biological integrity of a system or ensure the ecological sustainability of our use of a system and its resources)?¹

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