Assignment task:
1. Read this quote by Baxter: "My criteria are oriented to people, not penguins. Damage to penguins... is, without more, simply irrelevant. One must go further, by my criteria, and say: Penguins are important only because people enjoy seeing them walk about rocks" (People or Penguins 5). (1) State if this is an anthropocentric or ecocentric approach to environmental ethics and (2) explain why you
2. Read this quote by Baxter: "[Baxter's] attitude does not portend any massive destruction of nonhuman flora and fauna, for people depend on them in many obvious ways. ... What is good for humans is, in many respects, good for penguins and pine trees - clean air for example. So that humans are, in these respects, surrogates for plant and animal life" (People or Penguins 5, 6). Does holding an anthropocentric view mean that one has license to destroy entirely the environment? Explain.
3. Read this quote by Baxter: "Let me point out that the set of environmental issues under discussion... ultimately raise a normative question: what ought we to do. Questions of ought are unique to the human mind and world - they are meaningless as applied to nonhuman situations"(People of Penguins 7). Explain how this quote may help Baxter's anthropocentric argument.
4. This is a Baxterian definition of the optimal state of pollution: "We should divert our capacities from the production of existing goods to the production of a cleaner environment up to the point at which we value more highly the next good." Explain what it means.
5. This is a Baxterian definition of the optimal state of pollution: "We should divert our capacities from the production of existing goods to the production of a cleaner environment up to the point at which we value more highly the next good." (1) Give an example to illustrate it.