Intrinsic value for pragmatists?

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 57-75

  Minteer, Ben A ^a  

^a GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0141766782     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200123138     Document Type: Review

References (46)

1. In making this claim, I do not mean to imply a metaethical commitment to any version of moral realism. Rather, I simply believe that given the cruelty of my boyish actions (a constructed sentiment learned, like most values, at the knees of my parents), shooting the snakes was wrong in this situation. Perhaps if they had threatened me with physical harm, the moral atmosphere of this encounter would have been different (and presumably the snakes themselves would have been of a more vicious variety than the benign garter snakes in my mother's garden).
2. Ben A. Minteer, "No Experience Necessary? Foundationalism and the Retreat from Culture in Environmental Ethics," Environmental Values 7 (1998): 333-48.
3. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Pantheon, 1996).
4. I am here employing the term intrinsic value to mean "noninstrumental value." One anonymous reviewer for Environmental Ethics has pointed out that in doing so I am essentially changing the subject from what many intrinsic value theorists in environmental philosophy find so appealing in the concept (e.g., its apparent universalism, its metaphysical import, and so on). While I concede that the version of intrinsic/noninstrumental value I'm working with in this paper is a breed apart from, say, Holmes Rolston's realist account of intrinsic value, I do think that my contextual alternative represents an important and valid dimension of the concept. As I mention above, Dewey famously rejected all incarnations of "ends-in-themselves"; i.e., absolutist and universalist forms of intrinsic value posited to exist outside of the specific temporal and existential circumstances of the problematic situation. But he never denied that individuals may recognize and endorse noninstrumental values, as I suggest. Norton's intrinsic value critics, such as Baird Callicott and Laura Westra, seem to conclude that pragmatists can only be narrow instrumentalists about nature; if my argument in this paper is correct, such a judgment is unfounded. John O'Neill has done us all a service by distinguishing several usages of the intrinsic value concept by environmental philosophers. See his "The Varieties of Intrinsic Value," The Monist 75 (1992): 119-37.
5. As mentioned in the previous note, most commentators have described Norton as an exclusive instrumentalist. See, for example, the discussions of his position in Eugene Hargrove, "Weak Anthropocentric Intrinsic Value," The Monist 75 (1992): 183-207; J. Baird Callicott, "Intrinsic Value in Nature: A Metaethical Analysis," The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (1995): http//phil.indiana.edu/ejap; Laura Westra, "Why Norton's Approach is Insufficient for Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 19 (1997): 279-297; Alan McQuillan, "Passion and Instrumentality: Further Thoughts on the Callicott-Norton Debate," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 317-24; and Christopher Preston, "Epistemology and Intrinsic Values: Norton and Callicott's Critiques of Rolston," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 409-28.
6. As mentioned in the previous note, most commentators have described Norton as an exclusive instrumentalist. See, for example, the discussions of his position in Eugene Hargrove, "Weak Anthropocentric Intrinsic Value," The Monist 75 (1992): 183-207; J. Baird Callicott, "Intrinsic Value in Nature: A Metaethical Analysis," The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (1995): http//phil.indiana.edu/ejap; Laura Westra, "Why Norton's Approach is Insufficient for Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 19 (1997): 279-297; Alan McQuillan, "Passion and Instrumentality: Further Thoughts on the Callicott-Norton Debate," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 317-24; and Christopher Preston, "Epistemology and Intrinsic Values: Norton and Callicott's Critiques of Rolston," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 409-28.
7. As mentioned in the previous note, most commentators have described Norton as an exclusive instrumentalist. See, for example, the discussions of his position in Eugene Hargrove, "Weak Anthropocentric Intrinsic Value," The Monist 75 (1992): 183-207; J. Baird Callicott, "Intrinsic Value in Nature: A Metaethical Analysis," The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (1995): http//phil.indiana.edu/ejap; Laura Westra, "Why Norton's Approach is Insufficient for Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 19 (1997): 279-297; Alan McQuillan, "Passion and Instrumentality: Further Thoughts on the Callicott-Norton Debate," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 317-24; and Christopher Preston, "Epistemology and Intrinsic Values: Norton and Callicott's Critiques of Rolston," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 409-28.
8. As mentioned in the previous note, most commentators have described Norton as an exclusive instrumentalist. See, for example, the discussions of his position in Eugene Hargrove, "Weak Anthropocentric Intrinsic Value," The Monist 75 (1992): 183-207; J. Baird Callicott, "Intrinsic Value in Nature: A Metaethical Analysis," The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (1995): http//phil.indiana.edu/ejap; Laura Westra, "Why Norton's Approach is Insufficient for Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 19 (1997): 279-297; Alan McQuillan, "Passion and Instrumentality: Further Thoughts on the Callicott-Norton Debate," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 317-24; and Christopher Preston, "Epistemology and Intrinsic Values: Norton and Callicott's Critiques of Rolston," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 409-28.
9. As mentioned in the previous note, most commentators have described Norton as an exclusive instrumentalist. See, for example, the discussions of his position in Eugene Hargrove, "Weak Anthropocentric Intrinsic Value," The Monist 75 (1992): 183-207; J. Baird Callicott, "Intrinsic Value in Nature: A Metaethical Analysis," The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (1995): http//phil.indiana.edu/ejap; Laura Westra, "Why Norton's Approach is Insufficient for Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 19 (1997): 279-297; Alan McQuillan, "Passion and Instrumentality: Further Thoughts on the Callicott-Norton Debate," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 317-24; and Christopher Preston, "Epistemology and Intrinsic Values: Norton and Callicott's Critiques of Rolston," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 409-28.
10. Minteer, "No Experience Necessary?"
11. Bryan Norton, "Epistemology and Environmental Values," The Monist 75 (1992): 208-26.
12. Bryan Norton, "Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthropocentrism," Environmental Ethics 6 (1984): 131-148.
13. Norton, "Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthropocentrism," p. 138.
14. Ibid., p. 137.
15. Ibid., p. 148.
16. Bryan Norton, "Conservation and Preservation: A Conceptual Rehabilitation," Environmental Ethics 8 (1986): 195-220.
17. Norton, "Conservation and Preservation," pp. 213-14.
18. Bryan Norton, "Why I am Not a Nonanthropocentrist: Callicott and the Failure of Monistic Inherentism," Environmental Ethics 17 (1995): 341-58.
19. Norton, "Why I am Not a Nonanthropocentrist," p. 356.
20. Ibid., p. 358.
21. Ibid., p. 355.
22. Norton, "Epistemology and Environmental Values," pp. 221-22 (emphasis added).
23. John Dewey, The Middle Works, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 12 (1920; reprint ed., Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982 ), p.180 (emphasis added).
24. I borrow this characterization of Dewey's moral project from Gregory Pappas. See his "Dewey's Ethics: Morality as Experience," in Larry Hickman, ed., Reading Dewey. Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998): 100-23.
25. Dewey, Middle Works, vol. 12, p. 176.
26. John Dewey, The Later Works, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (1932; reprint ed., Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), vol. 7, p. 212.
27. Dewey, Middle Works, vol. 12, p. 176.
28. Dewey, Later Works, vol. 7, p. 283.
29. Dewey, Middle Works, vol. 12, p. 176.
30. Dewey, Later Works, vol. 12, p. 112.
31. Ibid., pp. 169-70.
32. Dewey, Middle Works, vol. 12, pp. 173-74.
33. Ibid., p. 176.
34. Holmes Rolston, III, "Saving Nature, Feeding People, and the Foundations of Ethics," Environmental Values 7 (1998): 349-57. Rolston's paper was a partial response to my criticisms of his work (as well as that of Eric Katz and Baird Callicott), in Minteer, "No Experience Necessary?"
35. Holmes Rolston, III, "Saving Nature, Feeding People, and the Foundations of Ethics," Environmental Values 7 (1998): 349-57. Rolston's paper was a partial response to my criticisms of his work (as well as that of Eric Katz and Baird Callicott), in Minteer, "No Experience Necessary?"
36. Rolston, "Saving Nature," p. 350.
37. Ibid., p. 356.
38. Ibid., p. 356.
39. Minteer, "No Experience Necessary?" p. 335 (emphasis added).
40. Ibid., p. 336.
41. Rolston, "Saving Nature," p. 356.
42. Sanjay K. Nepal and Karl E. Weber, "The Quandary of Local People: Park Relations in Nepal's Royal Chitwan National Park," Environmental Management 19 (1995): 853-66.
43. Ibid., p. 863.
44. Ibid., pp. 863-64.
45. I owe this point to my many thought-provoking conversations about environmental political theory with Bob Pepperman Taylor.
46. Dewey, Later Works, vol. 2, p. 365.