Environmental ethics and ethics in general are currently subject to three fundamental problems. The obligation of omniscience, the denial of akrasia, and the insistence on discrete valuation are all concepts fundamental to the workings of ethical philosophy, and all three of these are deeply untenable. By rejecting discrete valuation, we hope to present a meta-ethical system which handles the other two problems as well. That is, we would like to present a framework for understanding ethics which incorporates continuous valuation and which therefore allows for the meaningful inclusion of ignorant and morally weak agents who are nevertheless working within the ethical framework. By addressing these fundamental components, the valuative continuum also has applications with regards to the overall feasibility of considering environmental ethics—both by adaptation of extant ethical frameworks to considerations of the environment and by creation of wholly new ethical frameworks, such as Aldo Leopold's land ethic. We begin by more clearly explicating what we mean by the three problems embedded in the foundation of contemporary ethics.

The first of these is the most straightforward: the obligation of omniscience. That is to say, most ethical frameworks either explicitly oblige total awareness, or grow increasingly useless if any ignorance is allowed. Consider utilitarianism, in any form. The bare minimum knowledge necessary for proper utilitarianism can be found in its slogan, "the greatest good for the greatest number." Broadly, then, a utilitarian must know be able to answer two questions: "What is the greatest good?" and "Who is the greatest number?" These questions are not as straightforward as they appear. The simple identification of "good" and "number" can be given by assertion. Jeremy Bentham defined "good" as "happiness" and "number" as "people"; we therefore have relatively little difficulty identifying when something is greatly good and when something affects a great number. Clearly any action which promotes more happiness is better than an action which promotes less, and similarly any action which gladdens a vast number of people is superior to an action which only benefits a paltry few. Certainly these modest questions have modest answers, given easily and memorably by the philosophers who wrote down the tenets of utilitarianism. Hardly an expectation of omniscience!

Beyond these simple generalities, however, we find a significant demand for very non-trivial knowledge. In order to discern to what extent one's actions produce good for people, one must be able to answer the extremely difficult question "What are the consequences of my actions?" The answer to this question must be absolutely comprehensive. In terms of contract theory, we must have total awareness of all the externalities of our actions, positive and negative. It is not sufficient to know what happiness our actions will produce for us; we must know what happiness our actions will produce for everyone. We must know not just what happiness it will produce over the course of the next five years, but what happiness it will produce until the end of eternity. Countless examples may be constructed of actions which produce significant happiness in the short run for a sizeable population, only to result in long-term misery for a far greater group. Indeed, many examples come from the field of environmental ethics: cautionary tales of human intervention that initially yielded undeniable benefits but which later caused exceptional harm. Consider the case of the inoculation of stock cattle against a variety of maladies by the regular injection of antibiotics. A straightforward utilitarian reckoning would identify the immediate benefits of healthier cattle and thus more useable meat. However, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that the use of antibiotics led to the rise of multiple-antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and a general weakening of the immune system, and so currently we think of the practice as deleterious. Another form of environmental intervention that solves an immediate problem but leads to long-term misfortunate is the introduction of new species to an ecosystem. We may decide to bring in a new species into an area to depopulate a pest, but the new species proves hardy to the extent that it displaces all native flora or fauna.
We have learned, by now, that it is extremely difficult to predict any consequences of our actions beyond the very immediate vicinity, both spatially and temporally. To be a good utilitarian, local knowledge of causality is insufficient. We cannot merely look around and see what consequences our actions will have in the short term, because to do will inevitably result in decisions whose long-term ramifications are a great deal of unhappiness for a great many people—clearly a bad choice for a utilitarian to make. Thus, at least for utilitarians, to act reliably ethically necessitates an awareness far greater than what is acheiveable. Leibniz was not far from the truth when he described the universe as being too huge and too interconnected for humans to fully perceive the consequences and causes of everything, across time and space.

Even if we did have this impossible awareness, which is far from omniscience, we would still be far from the required level of knowledge for proper utilitarianism. We must not merely be able to maintain awareness of the consequences of one particular course of actions. After all, utilitarianism does not recommend working toward a great good for a great number of people—it must be the greatest good for the greatest number. We must therefore have full awareness of all possible courses of action and the relative merits of each. Our knowledge must not only cover much of the world as it is, but vast realms of the subjunctive and counterfactual worlds-that-could-be. To the extent that utilitarianism is manageable at all, it is only insofar as it ignores these tenets and relaxes its standards. That is, utilitarianism is only feasible as a decision procedure or an ethical metric when we cease adhering to its actual tenets, and only use it as a general principle that it is better to make lots of people happy than to make lots of people miserable. If we can only act ethically by attaining an impossible level of awareness or by sacrificing the actual tenets of our ethical framework for practicality, then our ethical framework needs serious overhaul.

Environmental ethics tends to be subject to the same obligation of omniscience—although in a distinct variation. In the case of dealing with the environment, pervasive is brought up as evidence that environmental ethics is impossible to fruitfully pursue. That is, because the biosphere is so much larger and more complicated than the realm of interpersonal interaction, it is impossible (or at least unfeasibly difficult) to apply judgment to it. This criticism is interesting, not necessarily because it overstates the challenge of coming to grips with the nature of a broader ecological universe but because it understates the challenge of fully accounting for interpersonal actions. It is certainly more difficult to understand the totality of a multi-trillion actor system than to understand a merely multi-billion actor system, but to present the latter as relatively solved and the former as incomprehensible in its magnitude is a curiously romanticized depiction of how ethics on the human scale works. Certainly, the upscaling of the moral universe by multiple orders of magnitude makes the comprehension of it a much more challenging task, but not in a qualitative way. We already experience enormous difficulty attempting to account for the totality of the human sphere; any criticisms of the incomprehensibility of environmental ethics are qualitatively applicable to ethics in general. At the present time, our goal is not to provide a total reckoning of all ethical agents, either human or environmental; but to provide a system which does not demand omniscience from its users.

Similar considerations apply to the question of akrasia, or moral weakness. That is, how do we deal with people who want an ethical decision procedure, but are not consistently capable of recognizing the best possible choice, or who are not constitutionally strong enough to act upon that choice? This is intimately related to the problem of discrete valuation: the practice of assigning every considered action or intention one of two values. In Kantian categorical imperative theory, everything is either an absolute duty or absolutely forbidden. Similarly, any moral agent must either act perfectly or be excluded from moral consideration. These problems have been addressed more thoroughly than the question of omniscience, though not so thoroughly as we believe is sufficient. Kant provides some guidelines for establishing the precedence of one obligation over another, should such a necessity arise; and utilitarianism be configured so as to provide a relative ranking mechanism for courses of action. Ultimately, however, these are piecemeal attempts to reconcile the absolutism of ethical frameworks with the practicalities of everyday life. We can see the problems of gradually conceding to practical concerns in the works of Peter Singer. Initially, he encouraged the practice of marginal utility: giving aid to underprivileged people until one has as much money as the recipients of one's aid. Marginal utility didn't catch on. He scaled his recommendation down to tithing, to giving ten percent of one's income to charitable causes. Once again, people were unmoved by his recommendation, due to the practicalities of the tithing practice. He continued to change the suggesting donation level, from one percent back up to five percent, but ultimately Singer's point was lost in the struggle to achieve a practically feasible recommendation. This example illustrates the necessity of including practical applicability as a fundamental element of the ethical judgment process, rather than making after-the-fact concessions to reality. After all, ethics must be practically applicable; it is foolhardy to devise a system almost entirely in isolation with reality and only at the last minute allow actual people and concerns to change the established conclusions.

In contrast to Peter Singer, Aristotle's virtue ethics are a more comprehensive revocation of the expectation of perfection; it is possible to be an imperfect actor and still be a good person at the end of one's life. In the entirety of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle is concerned with people who are basically good, but may not be able to reliably take the most correct course of action. Similarly, James Sterba's "ought implies can" principle allows the actual concerns of an imperfect agent to be a relevant consideration during the process of ethical judgment, rather than a last-minute concession to reality after the real decision-making has been completed. "Ought implies can" might be used as a terminally-implemented consideration, much like Singer's adaptations of his charity recommendation; but Sterba uses it thoroughly in the foundational aspects of his ethical constructions. These considerations are admirable, as they show an understanding of ethics as it relates to the reality of human moral agents beyond a post-analysis incorporation that, as in the case of utilitarianism, tends to do nothing but devalue the ethical system itself. We hope to allow for a fuller realization of these considerations in our presentation of the valuative continuum.

The valuative continuum itself is a three-part system, intended to act as an overarching structure into which extant or novel ethical frameworks can be embedded. The first part of the system, and the most difficult part, is the value assignment process. Broadly speaking, this is the process by which numerical values are assigned to ethical choices. "Ethical choices" here is used in a fairly general sense. The value assignment process can be an enumeration of normative actions, in the case of an implementation of a utilitarian framework; it can be an enumeration of intentions, in the case of a deontological framework. Essentially, whatever normative or deontological or other choices are being judged by the embedded framework are the subjects of the value assignment process. For the sake of clarity, we will refer to that which is judged as ethical choices. Please understand this to mean whatever element of human experience is the subject of ethical judgment. The difficulties of this phase are the defense of one's choice of an assignment process and the actual generation of explicit numbers. Does this mechanism beg the omniscience for which we have criticized extant ethical practices? We hope this is not so in all cases. Generally speaking, the value assignment process can be any method of generating a numerical depiction of ethical choices, but for the sake of clarity we would like to entertain only those processes which assign values in somewhat constrained ways. Specifically, choices which are better to endorse than to reject ought to be positive, while choices which are better to reject than endorse ought to be negative. Choices which are irrelevant should have a value of zero. The farther from zero choice's value is, the stronger the recommendation for or against that choice.

The second part, and the namesake of the system as a whole, is the value continuum, and it follows immediately from the value assignment process. This is basically a function which maps ethical choices onto values. It is distinct from the value assignment process, since the process is the system by which values are discovered and assigned; the continuum is the actual values themselves. To speak mathematically, the domain of the value continuum must be whatever ethical choices are the subject of the value assignment process, and the codomain is the real number line. Possible variations in the value continuum would result directly from variations in the value assignment process. Note that the value continuum is, at this point, solely descriptive. Without the third part of the overall system, the continuum cannot be used to mandate any particular ethical choice; it merely describes their relative worth as assigned by the value assignment process.

The final part is the decision procedure. This is the system of principles by which the value continuum is used as raw data for an actual normative recommendation. This is the prescriptive component of the system as a whole. The primary reason for the separation of the prescriptive decision procedure from the descriptive assignment process and value continuum is the belief in the distinctness of "is" statements and "ought" statements. No matter how well-described we find the world, we believe it takes an additional set of principles to extract any prescriptive recommendation.
As an example, we present the embedding of a simplified form of utilitarianism into the value continuum. We will attempt to encode the following maxim: Always act so that you produce happiness in as many people as possible.

The value assignment process, then, is not terribly difficult. First, we identify our universe of agents and choices. In this case, our universe is rational humans, and our choices are courses of action rather than intentions. We shall judge them by how many people the actions make happy and how many people the actions make unhappy. For any given action A, the value f(A) is equal to the number of people who would be made happy if A came to pass minus the number of people who would be made unhappy if A came to pass. This is not the richest possible value assignment process, and one notes that the output of f(A) will only be integers, never fractions. Nevertheless, it has the advantage of being readily comprehensible. Consider the case of a student writing a paper. We estimate that this makes the student unhappy, but it makes his teacher and parents happy. Therefore, the value of writing a paper is 2. The student would thus be better off writing the paper than ignoring it. Note that it is possible for the value of a choice to be unequal to the opposite of the value of the negation of that choice. That is, if –A is the student choosing not to write his paper, then f(-A) does not necessarily equal -2. After all, not writing the paper may well lead to the student's failure of the class, which would make nobody happy and all four people involved unhappy, leading to f(-A) = –4.
The value continuum is then simply a function which maps all possible courses of action onto their values.

The decision procedure is similarly straightforward. Three maxims neatly encapsulate the utilitarianism at work. One: Only take actions with positive values. Two: In deciding between two courses of action, select the one whose value is higher. Three: In the case of a tie, choose either one. By following these three axioms, an agent will only ever act so that she makes more people happy than she makes unhappy, which is a generally noble goal.
Logistical details with this implementation should be immediately apparent, but the purpose of this exercise was not to create an infallible ethical system, but merely to illustrate how extant ethical systems can be embedded in the value continuum. Much more sophisticated value assignment procedures can easily be imagined. We suggest one guideline: Decrement the assigned value of an ethical choice in proportion to the uncertainty and ignorance one has with respect to that choice. That is, less confidence in a particular choice should bestow a lower value. This will tend to encourage more confident decision-making, rather than a "wait and see" approach to consequences. Further variations could involve modifying each value in proportion to the freedom available to the chooser at the time; if one is coerced into only one choice, then the value of that choice would approach zero. These modifications are not necessary, but serve to illustrate the possible variations and subtleties this system allows for.

One advantage of this system is that it clearly delineates the descriptive and prescriptive components of ethical frameworks, rather than allowing them to become conflated. Often, the descriptive valuation of ethical choices is identical with or inextricably related to the corresponding prescriptive obligations. By distinguishing between these two elements, we allow for a clearer epistemological and normative framework, where description is description and prescription is prescription. In the vein of Spinoza's Ethics, it is hoped that we can make absolutely clear the underlying assumptions, definitions, and presuppositions that are necessary for any ethical discussion.

We hope that well-devised decision procedures will eliminate the expectation of absolutely perfect moral agents. Anything predicated along the lines of "always choose so that the values of your choices are non-negative" or "act so that the sum total of the values of your actions, over the course of your life, is positive" will allow a certain amount of wiggle room for people who are, on the whole, more good than bad, but who nevertheless are not completely ideal ethical machines. By comparison, a more conventional decision procedure might look like "always select the choice the highest possible value." Note that these decision procedures can be applied to any value continuum, but they give rise to substantially different bodies of normative recommendations. Always selecting the highest-valued choice is more reminiscent of Kantian deontology, where anything short of total fulfillment of all duties is suspect; merely ensuring that the totality of one's life is positive is a more Aristotelian decision procedure.

We would strongly encourage omitting acts of omission from the domain of the value continuum. Rather than attempting to give value to the negation of a choice, one rather gives value to all the other possible choices at the given juncture. Thus, the refutation of a particular omission takes place at the decision procedure level. If it is immoral to refrain from donating to charities, it is not because the act of not donating is itself problematic, but because every acceptable course of action involves donating to charity. We hope that this implementation of acts of omission is, at the very least, more streamlined than attempts to explicitly enumerate negations. However, nothing in the system prevents anyone from devising a value assignment procedure which explicitly includes acts of omission in its domain.

Environmental ethics, in the value continuum system, can be as straightforward as appropriately expanding the domain of ethical choices. If one wished to make our simple utilitarian example more environmentally conscious, then one would merely have to revise the value assignment procedure so that the number of non-humans made happy or unhappy is included in the calculation. More complex implementations are also easily incorporated. We would do well to consider Aldo Leopold's land ethic, and how we would have to include aesthetic values in our assignments. Perhaps we would have to handle multiple levels of abstraction, and include the consequences on the environment as a collective entity as well as the consequences on each individual component of the environment. Naturally, we could construct entirely novel environmental ethical frameworks for embedding in the value continuum system.

We wish to address one criticism that must surely be directed toward the value continuum system: The difficulty or impossibility of successfully devising a value assignment procedure. After all, one cannot put a number on ethics, can one? We believe one can. Earlier, we presented an example where the specific enumeration is quite straightforward, conceptually, though difficult to actually implement in practice. Another easy example of a numerical approach to decision-making is cost-benefit analysis, in all its forms; the monetary value of a choice is an easy way to assign a number to it. However, the easy ways are not necessarily the best ways, and we concede that it is not always appropriate to use such simple value assignment procedures. To a certain extent, a value assignment procedure will be arbitrary; the translation of a Kantian moral imperative into a number will have to rely on fairly explicit assumptions about relative values. However, arbitrariness is not necessarily a flaw, especially if the arbitrary choice of valuation is made explicit and agreed upon. The point of this system is that it can incorporate valuation in general, not necessarily any specific process by which choices are assigned numbers. Were this system to become widespread, the most prevalent value assignment procedures would surely be ones where the values can actually be discovered, justified, and publicized.

We believe that the value continuum system allows us to dissociate descriptive valuation from prescriptive recommendation, to encourage courses of action in addition to unattainable moral perfection, to allow for inexcoriable ignorance and moral weakness when constructing an ethical framework, to provide a unified conceptual framework for ethical programs of wildly varying scale, and to make public the assumptions and systems which allow us to make ethical judgments. At its most basic, this system is merely a way of clarifying and separating the constituent components of extant ethical frameworks; at its most advanced, we hope that it can allow for the expression of subtle and helpful truths. The value continuum system can accommodate environmentally conscious ethics with the same capacity as any human-only framework; this demonstrates a certain qualitative equivalence between environmental and non-environmental ethics. Ultimately, we believe this to be a helpful meta-ethical framework through which ethics itself can be better understood.