Climate Change, Ethics, and the Wildness of Wild Animals

Abstract

This chapter is a first attempt to consider ways in which anthropogenic climate change may reduce the wildness of wild animals, and explores ethical and value concerns such a reduction might raise. The chapter begins by outlining key impacts a warming climate may have on animal lives. Then it explores different meanings of “wildness” in the context of wild animals, concluding that climate change might reduce both “constitutive” and “self-willed” animal wildness—forms of wildness that many people value. Ethical responses to these potential value losses are shaped by whether a deontological or consequentialist approach to wildness value is adopted. The chapter suggests that consequentialists about wildness value have a range of positive policy options, because they can pursue the creation of new, future animal wildness. Deontologists about wildness value have fewer options, because their focus is on not compromising existing animal wildness, even when doing so would create more wildness in the future.