Environmental Ethics

I argue for an environmental virtue ethics which specifies human excellence and flourishing in relation to nature. I consider Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson as environmental virtue ethicists, and show that these writers share certain ethical positions that any environmental virtue ethics worthy of the name must embrace. These positions include putting economic life in its proper,subordinate place within human life as a whole; cultivating scientific knowledge, while appreciating its limits; extending moral considerability to the nonhuman world; and supporting wilderness protection. I argue that Thoreau, Leopold, and Carson themselves exemplify the potential for cultivating excellence in engagement with wild nature: their lives are among our most powerful arguments for its preservation.

We read the roots of contemporary ecofeminism through the lens of feminist pragmatism. After indicating the general relation between ecofeminism and feminist pragmatism, we provide a detailed analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s saga Herland and With Her in Ourland to document the strong connection between these two traditions. Gilman’s congruencies with ecofeminism make clear that she was a forerunner and perhaps a foundation for contemporary ecofeminism. However, further analyses are needed to reveal the full import of this link between ecofeminism and “ecofeminist pragmatism,” as well as bridge the gap between ecofeminist pragmatism and ecopragmatism, including environmental pragmatism.

In this paper, I challenge the work of David Abram, who makes a case for phenomenology as the only philosophical tradition amenable to restoring balanced human-nature relationships. While phenomenology provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding the environmental ethics of oral cultures, this paper considers the tradition of American pragmatism to be more applicable to theenvironmental task at hand: devising an environmental ethic of reform for modern, capitalist, Western culture. The application of phenomenology and pragmatism to environmental ethics is compared according to four main philosophical questions: the essential uncertainty of life, the existence of a human/nature divide, the necessary conditions for claiming truth, and the relative role of metaphysics or imagination and that of science in relating to the world.

Conventional wisdom suggests that environmental pragmatists balk at the mere mention of intrinsic value. Indeed, the leading expositor of the pragmatic position in environmental philosophy, Bryan Norton, has delivered withering criticisms of the concept as it has been employed by nonanthropocentrists in the field. Nevertheless, I believe that Norton has left an opening for a recognition of intrinsic value in his arguments, albeit a version that bears little resemblance to most of its traditional incarnations. Drawing from John Dewey’s contextual approach toward moral inquiry, I offer a reconstructed notion of intrinsic value that avoids the metaphysical pitfalls identified by Norton. I argue that this contextual understanding of noninstrumental claims has the advantage of turning our attention toward, and not away from, the critical realm of practice and policy, and that it is especially compatible with the norms of democratic deliberation. By way of example and in defense of my position, I conclude with a rejoinder to Holmes Rolston’s claims about the role of foundational intrinsic value commitments in settling the human-nature dilemma at Royal Chitwan National Park in Nepal.