Environmental Ethics

There is a widespread conviction amongst nature lovers, environmental activists, and many writers on environmental ethics that the value of the natural world is not restricted to its utility to humankind, but contains an independent intrinsic worth as weIl. Most contemporary value theories, however, are psychologically based and thus ill-suited to characterize such natural intrinsic value. The theory of “value asrichness” presented in this paper attempts to articulate a plausible nonpsychological theory of value that accomodates environmentalist convictions as weIl as more traditional value concems. It has implications not only for our care for and preservation of nature, but also for the enrichment of human lives.

By attempting to divorce attributions of value from judgments of the interest of the attributor, developing the concept ofa locus of value, exploring the interconnections between the goods of individuals and the goods of populations and species, and suggesting the reasonableness ofthe attributions of rights to certain sorts of individuals, I try to indicate the degree to which an environmental ethic can be atomisticwithout being anthropocentric.

Prevailing accounts of natural values as the subjective response of the human mind are reviewed and contested. Discoveries in the physical sciences tempt us to strip the reality away from many native-range qualities, including values, but discoveries in the biological sciences counterbalance this by finding sophisticated structures and selective processes in earthen nature. On the one hand, all human knowing and valuing contain subjective components, being theory-Iaden. On the other hand, in ordinary natural affairs, in scientific knowing, and in valuing, we achieve some objective knowing of the world, agreeably with and mediated by the subjective coefficient. An ecological model of valuing is proposed, which is set in an evolutionary context. Natural value in its relation to consciousness is, examined as an epiphenomenon, an echo, an emergent, an entrance, and an education, with emphasis on the latter categories. An account of intrinsic and instrumental natural value is related both to natural objects, life fonns and land forms, and to experiencing subjects, extending the ecological model. Ethical imperatives follow from this redescription of natural value and the valuing process.

Ecological ethics, in which ecological science informs the basic principles of morality, requires a significant revision of traditional metaethics, especially regarding the views (1) that moral judgments are justified by deductive argument, and (2) that there is a dichotomy between fact and value. This interpretation of the relationship between knowledge and obligation is grounded in the phenomenology of perception with special attention to the role of a person’s world view in the perception of both facts and values and the fittingness relation between perception, world view, and obligation.

Environmental ethics in its modem classical expression by Aldo Leopold appears to fall afoul of Hume’s prohibition against deriving ought-statements from is-statements since it is presented as a logical consequence of the science of ecology. Hume’s is/ought dichotomy is reviewed in its historical theoretical context. A general formulation bridging is and ought, in Hume’s terms, meeting his own criteria for sound practical argument, is found. It is then shown that Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is expressible as a special case of this general formulation. Hence Leopold’s land ethic, despite its direct passage from descriptive scientific premises to prescriptive normative conclusions, is not in violation of any logical strictures which Hume would impose upon axiological reasoning.

This essay is an inquiry into the relevance of psychology to morality-particularly, the relevance of a capacity to treat nature with respect and restraint to a responsibility to do so. I begin with a presentation of Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” (which I also designate with the term ecological morality). I then examine two notions of moral psychology that have recently attracted the interest of moral philosophers: first, “the moral sense,” a concept that has gained prominence, in part, through the recent work of the philosopher, John Rawls; and second, Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of the development of moral cognition. Finally, I consider how these prospectives on moral psychology might apply to ecological morality.