Heroes or thieves? The ethical grounds for lingering concerns about new conservation

After several years of intense debate surrounding so-called new conservation, there has been a general trend toward reconciliation among previously dissenting voices in the conservation community, a “more is more” mentality premised upon the belief that a greater diversity of conservation approaches will yield greater conservation benefits. However, there seems good reason to remain uneasy about the new conservation platform. We seek to clarify the reasons behind this lingering unease, which we suspect is shared by others in the conservation community, by re-examining new conservation through an ethical lens. The debates around new conservation have focused predominantly on the outcomes it promises to produce, reasoning by way of a consequentialist ethical framework. We introduce an alternative ethical framework, deontology, suggesting it provides novel insights that an exclusively consequentialist perspective fails to appreciate. A deontological ethic is concerned not with effects and outcomes, but with intentions, and whether those intentions align with moral principles and duties. From a deontological perspective, a strategy such as new conservation, which is exclusively focused on outcomes, appears highly suspect, especially when it endorses what is arguably an indefensible ethical orientation, anthropocentrism. We therefore suggest lingering concerns over new conservation are well-founded, and that, at least from a deontological perspective, the conservation community has a moral obligation to act on the express principle that non-human species possess intrinsic value, which should be protected.