Essay: conservation a normative concept
Why is “conservation” a normative concept?
Tiffany Tong
September 28th, 2007
Conservation is a normative concept because the principles of conservation are based on value judgements that cannot be rationalized or proven true, except by the norms of a society. First of all, conservation is the ideology that promotes protection of natural resources to strike a balance between consumption and preservation so that enough resources will be available for future generations to use and enjoy1. In addition, a normative concept is where a norm, or a cultural standard, is backed with good reasoning, and usually strong scientific evidence, to become a guiding principle for society’s actions2. Normative concepts are prescriptive: they talk about what we should and ought to do, as opposed to descriptive statements which attempts to describe reality as it is. They are essentially a value judgement made by the society as a whole, regarding which actions are right or wrong, good or bad, and which actions we should prioritize (Wikipedia). Therefore, by definition, conservation is a normative concept because it judges the value of our environment and descendants by the norms of our society and results in statements about what we should or ought to do in order to preserve those values.
Normative concepts are so abundant and ubiquitous in most societies that we normally do not think deeply about their implications. Taking conservation for an example, one might ask, “Why do we have to think for future generations?” Or “Why do we believe nature is important and should be preserved?” The answers to these questions cannot be logically deduced without coming back to the fundamental premise that it is the norm, or the “correct” way, to do so. Hence, if our society thought that either future generations or nature is not important, then we might not even have the concept of conservation at all.
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