Underneath every ethical framework sit two ways of valuing something: for what it does for us, and for what it is. This page takes both apart properly, then asks the harder question they lead to — which things have moral standing at all, and whether that includes rivers, forests and people not yet born.
📚 What you need to know
Instrumental value is the usefulness of something to humans. It comes as goods, services and opportunities for human development.
Intrinsic value is the value attached to something for its inherent nature, regardless of usefulness.
Something with intrinsic value can still be worth a great deal even with no obvious economic value.
Different groups, with different value systems, find intrinsic value in different things.
Moral standing is whether an entity should be considered in our moral decisions.
Ecocentrists extend moral standing to all living things, and sometimes to rivers, rocks and landscapes.
Aldo Leopold’s land ethic argued that ethics should extend beyond people to the whole biotic community.
Granting future generations moral standing creates a duty to them in the decisions we make today.
Instrumental value: three kinds of usefulness
Instrumental value is the value something has because of what it does for people. The syllabus splits it into three categories, and using those categories is the quickest way to make an answer look organised.
Bees are the classic case. Nobody pays for pollination, so it carries no price, yet a large share of food production depends on it.
Goods. Food and water provide the sustenance humans need to survive. Crops such as wheat and rice are valued for their role as staple foods sustaining populations worldwide.
Services. Decomposers break down waste and dead organisms, recycling nutrients. Bees pollinate, supporting the crops that human food production depends on.
Opportunities for human development. Nature provides knowledge and creative inspiration that feed human progress, and access to education gives people the skills to contribute to society.
Intrinsic value: worth without use
Intrinsic value is the value we attach to something for its inherent nature, whether or not it is useful to us.
Non-living things
Landscapes can hold intrinsic value through their wildness, cultural significance or aesthetic beauty. The Grand Canyon is valued for its natural beauty and geological significance, quite apart from the tourism it generates.
Living organisms
Living things can be held to have intrinsic value because they share fundamental characteristics with us: they have parts, processes and behaviours organised to help them survive and reproduce. On that reasoning, their continued existence and well-being deserve respect. Endangered species such as the giant panda are valued not only for their ecological role but for what they are in themselves.
Intrinsic value is not economic value
Something can have intrinsic value while having no obvious monetary value. This is genuinely hard to hold onto, because modern societies price almost everything — housing, food, water, heating, electricity, holidays — so anything without a price can look like it has no value at all.
Try this test on any environmental argument you read. If the writer would accept a large enough cash payment to allow the destruction, they are treating the thing as instrumentally valuable. If no sum would be enough, they are treating it as intrinsically valuable. The test is crude, but it sorts almost every argument correctly.
Different people, different intrinsic values
Groups with different environmental value systems find intrinsic value in different things.
National and spiritual identity. Places can matter to a whole country: Mount Fuji in Japan, or Uluru in Australia, which holds deep spiritual importance for Aboriginal people.
Rarity in your own life. Someone living in a dense city with little wildlife may place great value on the abundance of insects and plants during a day in the countryside, precisely because it is not something they normally experience.
Familiarity and use. A gardener who works with insects and plants daily may value the same organisms for the services they provide — recycling dead leaves, pollinating flowers — which is an instrumental reason for valuing the same thing.
The same object, two different values, held by two reasonable people. The city visitor values the insects intrinsically; the gardener values them instrumentally. Neither is wrong, and noticing that the type of value differs, not just the amount, is a strong exam point.
Moral standing
Morals are principles about right and wrong that guide behaviour and decision-making, shaped by cultural, religious and personal influences. Moral standing asks a narrower question: should this entity be considered in our moral decisions at all?
Asking whether animals have moral standing means asking whether their well-being should count when we decide how to treat them. It is not asking whether they are useful, or whether we like them. It is asking whether they belong in the calculation.
The anthropocentric column still cares about forests and animals — but through their effect on people, not in their own right. Caring about something is not the same as granting it moral standing.
Ecocentric perspectives
Ecocentrists argue that all living things have moral standing because of their intrinsic value, so trees, animals and whole forests carry moral significance. Some go further and extend standing to non-living parts of the environment: rivers, rocks and landscapes.
That sounds abstract until you apply it. In a debate about damming a river, an ecocentric position holds that the moral standing of the river itself should be part of the discussion, alongside the harm to ecosystems and biotic communities downstream. The river is not only a resource being allocated; it is a party to the decision.
Aldo Leopold and the land ethic
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) was an American forester, ecologist, writer and conservationist. Working in the early twentieth century, he watched natural landscapes degrade and saw the consequences of the systematic shooting of top predators — deer populations exploding, then hillsides stripped bare by overgrazing. What began as pest control turned out to damage the whole mountainside, and it changed how he thought about nature.
His essay “The Land Ethic”, published as a chapter of A Sand County Almanac in 1949, set out a moral framework for how people should treat the land they live on. His argument had three moves:
Ethical behaviour should extend beyond human-to-human relationships to include the land and its non-human inhabitants.
The health and integrity of the biotic community — all living organisms together with their habitats — should be central to ethical decision-making.
Actions that protect the stability and beauty of ecosystems are morally right; those that degrade them are morally wrong.
What made Leopold influential was that he arrived at ecocentrism through fieldwork rather than philosophy. He was a forester doing a job, and the ecology forced the ethics on him. That is a useful thing to say in an essay: the land ethic is an empirical argument as much as a moral one.
Future generations
Granting future generations moral standing raises the question of what we owe people who do not yet exist. Do we have a duty towards future individuals and societies even where it brings no benefit to us today?
If they have moral standing, then yes: we are obliged to consider them in the actions we take now. Increasingly, environmental policy on climate change and sustainable development is built on exactly that assumption, aiming to ensure future generations inherit a habitable planet. That is a moral consideration reaching beyond present human interests — and it is why sustainability is an ethical commitment, not just good management.
The awkward feature of future generations. They cannot vote, negotiate, protest or sue. Every argument made on their behalf is made by someone else. That is precisely why the question of their moral standing matters: nothing else forces them into the calculation.
WORKED EXAMPLE
A coastal mangrove forest is proposed for clearance to build shrimp ponds. Identify the instrumental and intrinsic values of the mangrove, using the correct categories.
Step 1: instrumental value as goods
Timber, firewood, honey, crabs and fish harvested directly by local people.
Step 2: instrumental value as servicesCoastal protection from storm surge, nursery habitat for fish stocks, water filtration, carbon storage.
These are free and unpriced, so they rarely appear in the developer’s accounts.
Step 3: instrumental value as opportunities
Scientific research, education, and cultural knowledge built up by communities living alongside the forest.
Step 4: intrinsic value
The mangrove ecosystem and its species have worth in themselves, independent of any human use.
Three instrumental categories plus intrinsic valueThe strongest point here is that the shrimp ponds capture the goods while destroying the services — and the services protect the very coastline the ponds sit on.
WORKED EXAMPLE
Discuss whether a river should be granted moral standing, using Leopold’s land ethic in your answer.
Step 1: the case for
Leopold argued ethics should extend to the whole biotic community, and a river is inseparable from the community it supports. Judged by his criterion, damming it degrades stability and integrity, so it is morally wrong.
Step 2: the practical case
Granting standing changes who may speak. Legal personhood for rivers, granted in several countries, lets guardians act for the river directly rather than relying on people proving harm to themselves.
Step 3: the case against
A river has no interests, preferences or capacity to suffer, so an anthropocentric view holds that only the people and organisms affected can have standing.
Granting rights to a non-sentient entity may also be unworkable in law.Step 4: judgementStanding for the river is defensible, and mainly changes who gets to argue
Even without agreeing that the river has interests, treating it as having standing produces better decisions, because downstream ecosystems otherwise go unrepresented.
Giving a clear judgement and saying what work it does is what “discuss” is asking for.
💡 Exam tip
Use the three instrumental categories by name: goods, services, opportunities. It structures the answer instantly.
Always add intrinsic value as a separate final point, so your answer is complete.
Say clearly that intrinsic value is not economic value. Many candidates blur the two.
Define moral standing as whether an entity should be considered in our moral decisions.
Know Leopold’s dates, the essay title and the 1949 book, plus his central criterion.
Mention that future generations cannot represent themselves. It is the point that makes their moral standing matter.
⚠ Common mix-ups
Confusing intrinsic value with high economic value. Something priceless in the market may still be valued instrumentally.
Calling ecosystem services intrinsic value. Pollination and flood protection are useful to us, so they are instrumental.
Treating moral standing as the same as being valuable. An anthropocentrist can value a forest highly and still grant it no standing.
Assuming intrinsic value means “everyone agrees it is precious”. Different value systems find it in different things.
Reducing Leopold to “nature is good”. His claim is specific: judge actions by their effect on the biotic community.
Forgetting the opportunities category. Knowledge, inspiration and education are examinable and frequently missed.
That completes 11.2 Ethical Frameworks. Read it alongside What Environmental Ethics Is For in 11.1: that page asked how far moral concern reaches, and these two pages give the named positions and the vocabulary to argue about it.
Want this explained one-to-one?
Book a free session with an experienced IB ESS tutor and get your trickiest topics made simple.
