Why environmental ethics shouldn't give up on intrinsic value

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 43-61

  McShane, Katie ^a  

^a NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33947378370     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200729128     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. Throughout this paper I refer to the intrinsic value of "the natural environment" and "nature." Doing so is intended to be a concise way of saying something like "the nonhuman natural world and/or its parts," including nonhuman animals, plants, ecosystems, rock formations, and so on. In order to keep the focus on value theory in this paper, I do not discuss the issue of how, if at all, one should draw the distinction between the natural and the artifactual. Doing so is an important matter, however, and how one resolves it will have a significant impact on what one is saying (or not saying) when attributing intrinsic value to nature.
2. See, e.g., Andrew Light, "Contemporary Environmental Ethics: From Metaethics to Public Philosophy," Metaphilosophy 33 (2002): 426-49;
3. Bruce Morito, "Intrinsic Value: A Modern Albatross for the Ecological Approach," Environmental Values 12 (2003): 317-36;
4. Bryan G. Norton, "Why I Am Not a Nonanthropocentrist: Callicott and the Failure of Monistic Inherentism," Environmental Ethics 17 (1995): 341-58;
5. and Anthony Weston, "Beyond Intrinsic Value: Pragmatism in Environmental Ethics," in Environmental Pragmatism, ed. Andrew Light and Eric Katz (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 285-306.
6. See Morito, "Intrinsic Value: A Modern Albatross" and Weston, "Beyond Intrinsic Value."
7. Weston, "Beyond Intrinsic Value," p. 285.
8. Morito, "Intrinsic Value: A Modern Albatross," p. 317.
9. Bryan G. Norton, Toward Unity among Environmentalists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 235.
10. See also Bryan G. Norton, Why Preserve Natural Variety? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 180-82;
11. and J. Baird Callicott, "Rolston on Intrinsic Value: A Deconstruction," Environmental Ethics 14 (1992): 129-43.
12. For replies to these criticisms, see Christopher J. Preston, "Epistemology and Intrinsic Values: Norton and Callicott's Critiques of Rolston," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 409-28
13. and Robin Attfield, "Postmodernism, Value and Objectivity," Environmental Values 10 (2001): 145-62. Norton claims that his worry is epistemological, since he believes that intrinsic value claims "cannot be supported by scientific or any other cultural resources - [they] must be supported independently of all experience" (p. 235). This is a puzzling explanation, however. One might well think that water exists in the world in a way that is prior to any human conceptualizations of water, but it does not follow from this that claims about the existence of water here or there must be justified independently of experience.
14. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 38-42.
15. See, e.g., Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988),
16. and Holmes Rolston, III, "Are Values in Nature Subjective or Objective?" Environmental Ethics 4 (1982): 125-51.
17. Rolston's view of intrinsic value is very similar in structure to the view of G. E. Moore. The main difference between them is that Moore believes that value is a nonnatural property and Rolston believes that it is a natural property. See G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, ed. Thomas Baldwin, 2d rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The similarity between these two views has not been lost on commentators - one often finds references to Moore in articles where people run this second line of criticism. In fact, one gets the distinct impression that Moore's view is next in line behind Rolston's on the critics' list of "Bad Ways a Theory Could Turn Out."
18. See, e.g., Light, "Contemporary Environmental Ethics,"
19. Norton, Toward Unity among Environmentalists,
20. and Weston, "Beyond Intrinsic Value."
21. For an opposing view within environmental pragmatism, see Ben A. Minteer, "Intrinsic Value for Pragmatists?" Environmental Ethics 22 (2001): 57-75.
22. Light, "Contemporary Environmental Ethics," p. 427.
23. See Norton, "Why I Am Not a Nonanthropocentrist," pp. 343-44,
24. and Bryan G. Norton, "Integration or Reduction: Two Approaches to Environmental Values," in Environmental Pragmatism, ed. Andrew Light and Eric Katz (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 121.
25. The field of environmental economics has tried overcome some of these problems in a different way, at least with respect to the gap between ethics and economics. In response to some of the claims made by environmentalists and environmental ethicists about nature's value, environmental economists have come up with different kinds of value that try to capture some nonanthropocentric intuitions. So they have introduced concepts such as existence value, bequest value, and even an economist-sanctioned version of the concept of intrinsic value. But I think that the results of these attempts have been decidedly mixed, at least so far. There is still widespread disagreement even among environmental economists about how to understand these concepts and whether to accept them at all. It is also not clear that these concepts can capture the intuitions they were meant to capture. See, e.g., Jonathan Aldred, "Existence Value, Welfare and Altruism," Environmental Values 3 (1994): 381-401,
26. and Mark Sagoff, "Existence Value and Intrinsic Value," Ecological Economics 24 (1998): 163-68.
27. Norton, "Why I Am Not a Nonanthropocentrist," p. 343.
28. See also Morito, "Intrinsic Value: A Modern Albatross."