How should we treat our one and only home, Earth? What obligations do we have to other living or non-living things? How should we think about climate change and its denial? How does biodiversity and species extinction impact human beings? And how should we think about environmental justice, the rights of animals, and the ways we consume the natural world?

In this episode, Ryan McAnnally-Linz welcomes Ryan Darr (Assistant Professor, Yale Divinity School) to reflect on some of the most pressing issues in environmental ethics and consider them through philosophical, ecological, and theological frameworks.

Together they discuss:

• What and who matters in environmental ethics: Only humans? Only sentient animals? Every life form? The inorganic natural world?
• The significance and difference between global and individual scale of climate issues
• The ethics of climate change denial
• Environmental justice and moral obligations to the environment—the question of what we owe to animals and the rest of the natural world
• The importance of biodiversity and the impact of species loss and extinction
• The ethics of eating animals
• The problems with human consumption of the natural world
• And the impact of cultivating a wider moral imagination of our ecological future

About Ryan Darr

Ryan Darr Ryan Darr is Assistant Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Environment at Yale Divinity School. His research interests include environmental ethics, multispecies justice, structural injustice, ethical theory, and the history of religious and philosophical ethics. He is currently writing a book that defends an account of environmental and multispecies justice as a framework for thinking ethically about the crisis of biodiversity loss and mass extinction. He is also developing an ongoing research project exploring the relationship between individual agency and responsibility and structural justice and injustice with a particular focus on environmental and climate issues.

His first book, The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023. The book offers a new, robustly theological story of the origin of consequentialism, one of the most influential views in modern moral theory. It uses the new historical account to intervene in contemporary ethical debates about consequentialism and about how ethicists conceive of goods, ends, agency, and causality.

Prior to joining the YDS faculty, Ryan held postdoctoral fellowships at the Princeton University Center for Human Values (2019-22) and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music (2022-24).

Show Notes

• Get your copy of Ryan Darr’s The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism
• Complex ethical questions about climate change
• Enmeshed in environmental systems
• A crash course in environmental ethics
• Which entities should we be thinking about ethically?
• Are human beings the most important morally and ethically speaking?
• What about animals, plants, or other kinds of life?
• What about other species of animals
• Anthropocentrism: Only humans matter.
• Sentientism: Only sentient animals matter
• Biocentrism: Every life form matters
• Can we apply justice and rights to animals?
• The polar bear on melting ice was the poster child for climate change; but this was a mistake because the effects on human beings is massive.
• “All of us are affected.”
• “We’re all vulnerable to climate change. …. kidding themselves and need to think more about this.”
• Global south
• Climate negotiations: Who needs to lower emissions and how? And how do we adapt?
• Massive overwhelm at the scope of environmental problems: “Only massive changes can make a difference.” But “I have to change my life.”
• How should we navigate the scale issue?
• Don’t let large scale or small scale issues or changes eclipse the other.
• Political action is crucial
• “We need people willing to respond in the ways they can, where they are.”
• Climate change denial
• “There’s a lot of money flowing here.” Fossil fuel interests and others muddy the waters and create conflicts
• “If it’s the case that millions of lives are at stake … I don’t see how some doubt
• Reasons why people might deny climate change
• “It’d be nice if climate change wasn’t real, but …”
• Environmental justice and injustice
• Toxicities released into the natural environment
• Conservation and biodiversity loss
• Approximately 8 million species on earth
• It’s standard to lose a handful per million per year
• Generally, you’re supposed to get more species on earth, short of a mass extinction event
• But extinction rate is something like 100x to 1000x faster
• Defaunation—reduction of fauna on earth
• Measuring the biomass of various species (Humans make up 30% of the world’s biomass.)
• Changes linked to colonialism and global capitalism
• Why would God have created such a diverse species
• Thomas Aquinas on why God created a world full of biodiversity: to reflect God’s extensive perfection
• “On this view, the world is show less
• What are the ethics of
• Example: Wolves were intentionally eradicated in America, because “who wants a wolf in their neighborhood.”
• Justice-oriented “Rights” and what we owe to each other, versus non-justice
• Do we have obligations to animals?
• Example: Kicking a Cat
• “The Incredulous Stare”
• Jainism and “ahiṃsā” (non-injury, no-harm, or non-violence toward all life forms, down to microbes)
• “I’m inclined to think that I have obligations to almost all animals.”
• At least “animals who are sentient”—desires, frustration of desires, pain, etc.
• Is it permissible to eat meat?
• Factory-farmed meat (effectively tormented)
• Animal life has become commodity—valuable solely because of its use and with no regard for their well-being.
• Consumers, Producers, and Wendell Berry: How should social roles relate to each other?
• “Any question about justice have to begin from concrete social positions.”
• Maintaining action and creativity
• Practical recommendation for action to align our lives with our values
• “I read fiction and short stories that tell stories of human beings in futures drastically affected by climate change as a way to open up my imagination to what’s possible.”
• Dystopian narratives: leading to a sense of futility and hopelessness.
• “I don’t think we know where anything is headed.”
• “Humans have lived through upheaval so many times, and have found ways. … ‘People kept on baking bread as the Roman Empire fell.’”
• Yale Divinity School class: “Eco-Futures”—imagining lives lived well in painful situations
• If not hope, a sense of determination to do what can be done with the time that we have.
• Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future: a technocratic novel about politics and policy solutions
• Short fiction on Grist—Imagine 2200: Write the Future
• Margaret Atwood, Everything Change

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Ryan Darr and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, Zoë Halaban, Kacie Barrett, and Emily Brookfield
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give