Chapter 16 Self Quiz

. The decision in the Deepwater Horizon case to drill without the centralizers was made on what basis?

They could always put centralizers in later.

The drilling engineer thought they were not necessary in this situation.

The risk of drilling without centralizers was worth the reward of saving money.

Centralizers were an unnecessary environmental requirement.

. Which of the following definitions of "sustainable development" best fits the notion of sustainability endorsed by the EPA in the past?

Development that makes everyone in all generations happy.

Development that is fully virtuous in an Aristotelian sense.

Development that does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

. Broad and strong sustainability is best described as sustainability that

maximizes the well-being of the present.

permits significant long-term depletion of natural, social, or economic resources so long as the total aggregated value it preserved.

does not permit losses in one dimension of resources to be compensation by gains in other dimensions.

does not permit significant long-term depletion of natural resources.

. For hundreds of years, Mandragoraofficinarum (a poisonous plant) was widely used for curing a variety of diseases. Today you can, however, find plenty of equally good or better synthetic medicines in your local drug store. Let us imagine, contrary to the historical facts, that some new technology had been introduced 20 years ago that we knew would kill all Mandragora plants. Would that have been of any concern to us if we knew that no sentient being would ever need the plant again for medical (or any other) purposes?

The answer to this question depends primarily on how much money we would have been willing to pay for preserving Mandragora.

The answer to this question depends primarily on how much happiness or well-being Mandragora created for us.

The answer to this question depends primarily on whether Mandragora was valuable in an intrinsic or instrumental sense.

The answer to this question depends primarily on whether Mandragora was valuable in a Kantian or utilitarian sense.

. Someone who believes that nature has instrumental but no intrinsic value might say that the instrumental value of the poisonous plant MandragoraOfficinarum

depends on the effects that MandragoraOfficinarum has on the health or welfare for human beings.

is independent of the effects that MandragoraOfficinarum has on the health or welfare for human beings.

supervenes on the intrinsic properties of MandragoraOfficinarum.

depends entirely on the nonrelations properties of MandragoraOfficinarum.

. If the natural world is intrinsically valuable, then

nature's value depends on what humans (and possibly other sentient beings) can do with them.

nature is valuable for its own sake.

natural resources can be permissibly bought and sold on a free market.

None of the above

. The distant nuclear fireworks example has us consider the last man on a spaceship watching as Earth is about to crash into the Sun, killing all the life on it. The last man can delay this inevitable event by five years by firing a missile from the spaceship. The authors think our intuitive moral judgment should be that the last man has no such obligation. What would this show?

The vice of wrath does all the moral work in the original last man case.

Nature has intrinsic value.

Nature only has instrumental value.

Nuclear power is environmentally friendly.

. In the case where students can save a little time walking to class by taking a shortcut through the lawn, why is it rational for every student to take the shortcut even if they value the health of the lawn?

Walking on the lawn does not harm it at all.

The damage to the lawn is imperceptible, while the benefit of time saved is perceptible.

The students do not truly value the health of the lawn.

If the lawn will be destroyed anyway by others, it no longer matters.

. "The tragedy of the commons" is a type of

tragic outcome in which everyone is harmed by not acting according to the NSPE Code of Ethics.

tragic outcome in which everyone is harmed by not acting according to the TEPA.

situation in which everyone is acting independently and rationally according to their own self-interest, but the outcome is worse for everyone than it would have been if the agents had cooperated.

All of the above

. The lesson of prisoner's dilemmas for sustainability is:

The most rational thing is for everyone to choose not to cooperate.

What is rational is purely subjective.

Most people are not capable of being rational.

Cooperation is rational, but this requires enforcement mechanisms.

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