Regarding Duties to Critters

I found it surprisingly difficult to identify a particular moral claim in relation to the environment (or animals in particular)that cannot be justified in terms of either indirect or direct duties, since assenting to either course does not in of itself specify what those duties are.

Take eating animals. One could take the view that animals are worthy of moral-considerability in of themselves, and therefore we ought not to destroy them or cause them pain, and hence eating meat is unjustified. Equally, one could argue in favor of vegetarianism on the basis that destruction of animal life is unjustified because it is not necessary (since we can arguably satisfy our nutritional needs from other sources) and because the destructiveness that characterizes killing other creatures is harmful to our moral sensibility in our dealings with other humans. Likewise, the reverse position (that it's acceptable to eat animals) can be justified by arguing either that we have no direct duties to animals (and, furthermore that indirect duties are superseded by direct benefits to humans), or that such direct duties as may exist but nonetheless be secondary to concern for humans in a given situation.

Hence, the bare assertion or denial of direct duties to animals does not necessarily imply any particular set of moral judgements as to individual actions. Nonetheless, in reality one would expect the adherents of these positions to often reach different conclusions, with perhaps the major difference being that since the notion of indirect duties to animals is part of a moral system with humans (as the only moral agents) as its end-all and be-all, proponents of this idea would be more likely to assent to actions which promote the tangible well-being of humans at the expense of animals. In other words, in this ethical system, it may be immoral to wantonly destroy natural life (such behavior being degrading to humanity), but the use of natural life for legitimate human purposes is morally unimpeachable (animals and other nonhuman life being means rather than ends, in Kantian terms). The mourning hippies from Colin's video would take another view, of course, and one can safely assume that they adhere to the idea of direct moral duties to the natural world.

One can assert therefore that these two positions regarding duties towards nature are not ethical straitjackets, but their basic outlook does incline their proponents towards positions more or less balanced towards the interests of humanity (in the case of the Kantian, indirect-duty paradigm) or towards non-human nature (in the case of the partisans of direct duties).