Conservation biology emerged in the 1980s as a rigorous science focused on protecting biodiversity and as a discipline distinct from ecology. Two breakthroughs in information processing made this possible: place-prioritization algorithms and GIS. They provided a defensible, data-driven methodology for designing reserves to conserve biodiversity, obviating the need for largely intuitive and highly problematic appeals to ecological theory to design reserves. They also supplied quantitative, critical assessments of existing reserves; most had been designated on unsystematic, ad hoc grounds and thus poorly represented biodiversity. Demonstrating this convincingly was crucial to ensuring biodiversity would be protected in future policy-making contexts. Despite these unquestionable advances, that they constitute scientific “progress” has recently been criticized. Ecological theory, it is claimed, is required for genuine progress about reserve design; algorithmic innovation in data processing is insufficient. Place-prioritization algorithms are also supposedly less scientifically grounded and produce reserves that poorly protect biodiversity. On all accounts this criticism is indefensible. It involves numerous inaccuracies about the science and relies on an untenable conception of progress for applied sciences with ethical objectives such as conservation biology.

Ecology is receiving more attention from philosophers as the severity and complexity of environmental problems, and ecology’s potential role in solving them, becomes apparent. Threats to coral reefs and management strategies developed in response is a vivid example. This chapter explores the ways values influence both applied ecology and policy making informed by it. Most sciences are concerned with discovering and explaining new truths. But some applied sciences pursue more immediately pressing, ethical goals, such as improving health or conserving biodiversity. Nonepistemic values permeate these ethically driven sciences. This perception has recently encouraged the view they are value-laden in a strong sense: both ethical values and nonnormative facts factor indispensably in these sciences, and their respective contributions cannot be clearly demarcated. In fact, the inextricable suffusion of value has even been taken to challenge the cogency of a fact/value distinction. Such claims are overstated. Ethically driven sciences are best conceptualized as conditionalized endeavors. Achieving ethically valued objectives dictates some of their structure, but this influence can be demarcated from the factual status of claims made within them. The conditional nature of ethically driven sciences grounds this delineation and reaffirms the fact/value distinction remains distinct.