Abstract
A central question of environmental ethics remains one of how best to account for the intuitions generated by the Last Man scenarios; that is, it is a question of how to explain our experience of value in nature and, more importantly, whether that experience is justified. Seeking an alternative to extrinsic views, according to which nonhuman entities possess normative features that obligate us, I turn to constitutive views, which make value or whatever other limits nonhuman nature places on action dependent on features intrinsic to human beings and constitutive of them or their obligations. After examining two kinds of constitutive views—environmental virtue ethics and Korsgaard’s Kantianism—I suggest an alternative that takes up the strengths of both while avoiding their shortcomings. On this view, we have an indirect obligation to experience nature as obligating us, although we have direct obligations only to human beings.
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Notes
It is worth noting that the intuition that the last man does something wrong is not universal—plenty of my students, at least, do not see most of the cases as involving wrong action. In any case, no less a figure in the environmental philosophy movement than Peter Singer has questioned appeals to intuition in ethical debate (Singer 2005).
See Carter (2004) for a discussion of and response to this objection.
Readers sensitive to the alleged incompatibility between animal liberation and environmental approaches will no doubt notice that I seem to be running the two strands together. But it is clear that a number of arguments for the moral considerability of plants, species, and ecosystems draw on strategies similar to those used in the animal liberation debates. Taylor (1986), for example, relies on arguments virtually identical to those used by Singer and Regan to point out that we lack principled ways of giving human interests a higher value than nonhuman entities. Such strategies are especially evident in classics like Goodpaster (1978), as well as newer appropriations of Taylor, such as Sterba (1998).
The two types of views I am distinguishing here, extrinsic and constitutive, should not be taken to be mutually exclusive. A number of approaches in environmental ethics blend features of both, and can be usefully classified as hybrid views. It seems likely that most views in environmental ethics will fall somewhere on the continuum between extrinsic and constitutive, though authors may emphasize one side over the other, as well as present one or the other as foundational. My attempt to develop a constitutive view, then, should be viewed as a supplement to extrinsic views as much as a competitor.
Thus the famous claim that morality is a symbol of beauty, in Kant (1987).
This is a very condensed version of a Kantian argument, though I hope a recognizable one. I return to a more nuanced reading of Kant’s view below. It is interesting in this regard to note that it was a Kantian, Thomas Hill (1983), who kicked off the wave of environmental virtue ethics along these lines.
See, for example, Hursthouse (2007).
For criticism along these lines, see McShane et al. (2008).
Treanor (2008) argues that narrative can allow individuals to “try out” such virtues, in a sense, before taking them on; thus, narratives can convince us that certain character traits really are constitutive of eudaimonia. So in this sense, reading Thoreau or another nature writer might convince us to adopt the relevant virtue of respect for nature. Of course this is plausible; but it is unclear why narratives glorifying the destruction of nature might not be written as well—many have been—or why these latter sorts of narratives might not, ultimately, prove more convincing.
Leopold (1966) argued that loving something requires us to have a mental image of it, and he suggested the biotic pyramid as such an image of the Land as our wider community. But this image has markedly little in common with the images we typically have of our human communities.
I take this to be the gist of Žižek’s rambling—but as always entertaining—monologue in Astra Taylor’s film, Examined Life (queryTaylor 2008).
The notion of reactive attitudes is introduced in recent ethics by Strawson (1962). Wallace (1994) develops and extends the account, pointing out that reactive attitudes are constituted by the normative expectations they contain, which determine the situations in which it is—or isn’t—appropriate to feel these attitudes. So, for example, it is of course possible for me to feel gratitude towards someone who has done nothing good for me or anyone I care about, but this fact will make it clear that I am mistaken to feel gratitude in this situation. Reactive attitudes, because of their normative content, can be appropriate or inappropriate.
In the case of children, especially, having the proper reactive attitudes also aims at training them to take their place within adult social relations.
See Derrida (1994).
Of course some subjectivist theories will not allow such a distinction. On an emotivist view, or some varieties of expressivism, for example, my judgment that X is valuable simply depends on my experience of X as valuable, and there is no further fact of the matter aside from that experience. The two could diverge only if my judgment is mistaken about my experience. Here I will simply assume without argument that such views are false, and that we can correctly make claims of the sort, “I have an obligation to that tree to water it, although there is no reason to have an obligation to trees” (the statement may well seem to be Moore-paradoxical, as in the famous “it’s raining but I don’t believe it” example; the point is that Moore-paradoxical or not, the statement may be true).
I use the term “worldview” here as shorthand for the way one perceives, understands, and—most importantly for my purposes here—values the entities one encounters in the world.
In comparing cruelty to animals with cruelty to humans, Warren notes that “[u]nless we view the deliberate infliction of needless pain as inherently wrong we will not be able to understand the moral objection to cruelty of either kind,” insofar as it is precisely the badness of pain that makes it wrong to inflict it unnecessarily on humans in the first place (Warren 1983).
Technically, for Velleman self-understanding it the constitutive aim of agency. This claim is both harder to defend and, conveniently, unnecessary for my argument here.
Though of course this aim need not be one agents are aware of pursuing. As Velleman notes, the aim may be set by a sub-personal mechanism (Velleman 2000).
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Acknowledgments
An early version of this paper was presented at the 2009 meeting of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy in Arlington, VA. I would like to thank the other participants there for their thoughtful feedback, as well as Collin O’Neil and two anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments on previous drafts.
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Altshuler, R. The Value of Nonhuman Nature: A Constitutive View. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 469–485 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9447-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9447-y