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Notes
As described in Ross (1930), prima facie duties are duties intuitively recognized as valid but non-absolute by common sense. Any prima facie duty may be overridden by any other depending on the circumstances obtaining in particular cases.
At least those future generations not so distant in time from our own to trigger non-identity paradoxes of the sort Parfit (1984) discusses. Oddly the authors do not comment on the answer Russow or Sober suggest to the question of whether we have a moral duty to preserve aesthetic goods for our successors. Possibly it is passed over because they consider Russow’s and Sober’s approaches fatally flawed in other respects discussed below.
For an illustration, compare the respective contributions of the ingredients of a peach pie (peaches, sugar, flour, spices) and the instruments used to make it (mixing bowl, pie-plate, rolling pin, oven.) Whereas the instruments which assist in the creation of the pie are external to it, the ingredients are internal constituents. The overall goodness of pie is a function of the goodness of its constituents.
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Welchman, J. Commentary on Jonathan A. Newman, Gary Varner, and Stefan Linquist: Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics, chapter 11: should biodiversity be conserved for its aesthetic value?. Biol Philos 35, 13 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-019-9720-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-019-9720-0