Metz’s Relational Moral Theory and Environmental Ethics

Metz’s contribution to environmental ethics is a novel theory of moral status, which he argues explains the intuition that although we have direct moral duties to some nonhuman animals, our duties to fellow human beings are always weightier. The theory takes the moral status of an individual to depend on it being the subject and object of friendly relations with human. This paper argues that the account of moral status explains the intuition about the existence and relative weight of duties to nonhuman animals only if evidence of human-nonhuman animal cooperation is ignored. The paper argues additionally that a focus on the moral status of individual nonhuman animals offers no insight into one the most pressing environmental problems of our time, the threat of mass species extinction. Finally, the duties that would seem to follow from the account of moral status are contrary a traditional environmental concern of nature preservation.