From ecological politics to intrinsic value: An examination of Kovel's value theory

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

Volumn 21, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 81-101

  Peterson, Keith R ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ECOLOGY; POLITICS; SOCIALISM; THEORETICAL STUDY;

EID: 77956305075     PISSN: 10455752     EISSN: 15483290     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2010.509484     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Joel Kovel,"Ecosocialism, Global Justice, and Climate Change," Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2008, p. 9.
2. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Zed Books, 2007), p. 214.
3. Ibid,.
4. More than two decades ago the pragmatist Anthony Weston argued that the concept of"intrinsic value" could never form a suitable foundation for environmental ethics in"Beyond Intrinsic Value: Pragmatism in Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 7, No. 4, Winter 1985, pp. 321-339. Seven years later Tom Regan's"Does Environmental Ethics Rest on a Mistake?" and Weston's"Between Means and Ends" both appeared in The Monist, Vol. 75, No. 2, 1992, an issue devoted to the theme,"The Intrinsic Value of Nature." Here both writers again seriously question the fruitfulness of the concept of intrinsic value for ethics. Pragmatist Bryan G. Norton has also consistently criticized the language of"intrinsic value" throughout his work, most recently in"Beyond Positivist Ecology: Toward an Integrated Ecological Ethics," Science, Engineering, Ethics, 14, 2008, pp. 581-592. While I appreciate these criticisms and sometimes agree with their results, I am approaching these issues from an entirely different perspective. In addition to major figures like Holmes Rolston, III, and J. Baird Callicott, those who insist on retaining the language of intrinsic value include, 88 for example, Katie McShane,"Why Environmental Ethics Shouldn't Give Up on Intrinsic Value," Environmental Ethics, 29, 2007, pp. 43-61;
5. and Mark Rowlands, The Environmental Crisis: Understanding the Value of Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
6. For the most recent, see John O'Neill, Alan Holland, and Andrew Light's Environmental Values (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), especially chapters 2-5.
7. From another perspective, see Gretchen Daily (ed.), Nature's Services, (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1997), particularly Goulder and Kennedy's"Valuing Ecosystem Services: Philosophical Bases and Empirical Methods," pp. 23-47.
8. This is the title of a widely anthologized talk by Richard Sylvan, first presented at the XVth World Congress of Philosophy, Varna, Bulgaria, 1973.
9. Reprinted in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston, III (eds.), Environmental Ethics: An Anthology (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 47-52.
10. Bryan Norton,"Values in Nature: A Pluralistic Approach" in Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), p. 302. This is a brief introduction to the debates about intrinsic value in the literature by one of the main participants.
11. O'Neill, et al., Environmental Values, 2008, p. 47.
12. One of the few examples of an examination of contrasting value priorities in environmental ethics occurs in J. Baird Callicott, Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany, NY:State University of New York Press1999) 59-76. That discussion of first and second order principles is an important starting point, but is hardly the definitive statement on the subject, though Callicott thereafter seems to believe it is.
13. Callicott's more recent comments in Wayne Ouderkirk and Jim Hill, Land, Value, Community: Callicott and Environmental Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press 2002), pp. 298-99
14. Cf. O'Neill, et al., Environmental Values, 2008, pp. 109-110."Our plea here is to begin ethical reflection from the actual thick and plural ethical vocabularies which our everyday encounters with both human and nonhuman worlds evoke. If we start with a thick and plural ethical vocabulary we invoke a similarly thick and plural set of relations and responses appropriate to different kinds of beings. These are lost if we start from a picture of moral theory as an exercise in the derivation of specific moral norms from some set of moral primitive concepts or propositions." (My emphasis.)
15. Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, 2007, p. 214.
16. Ibid., p. 212. I think use of the term"deployment" is unfortunate (as well as the term"projection" [p. 134]), as it perpetuates the Modernist delusion (particularly clear in Nietzsche) that human beings are the sole originators of all values. This rests on the metaphysical presumption that nature or the world has no value or meaning in itself prior to the arrival of human consciousness. This Modernist bad faith metaphysics lies equally at the root of Cartesian dualism as well as the instrumental/intrinsic distinction. But I don't think Kovel means to fall back into this tradition. In order to bypass this episode altogether, it is better to adopt a"problematic realism" about values (see Part III of this essay).
17. "Agency" in both senses is a recurring theme in the last works of the late Val Plumwood. See"The Concept of a Cultural Landscape: Nature, Culture and Agency in the Land," Ethics & The Environment, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2006
18. "Nature as Agency and the Prospects for a Progressive Naturalism," Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 12, No. 4, 2001
19. and Environmental Culture (New York: Routledge, 2002).
20. Cf. Arne Naess's discussion of such properties in Ecology, Community, Lifestyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 48-51, where he explicitly contrasts them with the subjective and relative, as well as the supposedly objective primary qualities of things.
21. Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, 2007, p. 135.
22. Ibid., p. 214.
23. Ibid., p. 213.
24. Ibid., p. 235.
25. A similar view is expressed by O'Neill, et al., Environmental Values, p. 79."[A]n environment matters because it expresses a particular set of relations to one's community that would be betrayed if a price were accepted for it. The treatment of the natural world is expressive of one's attitude to those who passed the land on to you and to those who will follow you. Money is not a neutral measuring rod for comparing the losses and gains in different values. Values cannot all be caught within a monetary currency.
26. Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, 2007, p. 134 and p. 140.
27. See also John Bellamy Foster on the"laws of ecology" in The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment, Rev. ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), pp. 118-124.
28. Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, 2007, p. 214. And again,"capitalism comprises the society which sees to it that xv-uv [exchange value is weighed more than use value] so that people internalize the signals of the market and obey them as gospel.
29. Ibid., p. 215.
30. Ibid., my emphasis.
31. See opening epigraph and note 1.
32. Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, 2007, p. 212. I take Kovel's phrase"for each person" as an important step toward overcoming the formalistic elements of his theory. See Part III, section 2 below.
33. See Val Plumwood,"Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism" Hypatia, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring, 1991
34. also Environmental Culture, 2002.
35. Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, 2007, pp. 212-13.
36. Analogous arguments are made by feminists like Donna Haraway who insist that"difference" feminism invites continued marginalization of women by retaining traditional dualisms.
37. Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, 2007, p. 216.
38. Ibid,.
39. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 89-90.
40. Nicolai Hartmann, Ethics, Vol. 1, trans. Stanton Coit (London: George Allen & Unwin/Humanities Press, 1932), p. 39. The following citation is from the same page.
41. Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, 2007, p. 216.
42. Value ethics is a minority tradition in the history of philosophical ethics. There is both an Anglo and Continental tradition in axiological ethics, including figures such as Moore and Ross in England, Dewey, Perry, and Pepper in the U.S., and Brentano, Meinong, Scheler, and Hartmann in Austria and Germany. See the brief text by J.N. Findlay, Axiological Ethics (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1970) for a general survey. Most recently, figures like Charles Taylor and Joseph Raz are working in this value pluralist tradition. The remarks that follow draw primarily from Continental sources, particularly Nicolai Hartmann's Ethics, Vol. 1, 1932.
43. Charles Taylor, "What is Human Agency?," in Philosophical Papers I: Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 35. The influence of Taylor's thought throughout should be evident.
44. Hartmann, Ethics, Vol. 1, 1932, p. 224.
45. Kovel himself says that human beings"reject the merely natural given" and have a"restless need to remake the world," The Enemy of Nature, 2007, p. 111. We stand poised between reality and its denial, the denial of what is for the sake of what ought to be.
46. The term"preference" means"an intentional feeling which discloses height and strength of values" to the value sense. It has no resemblance to the neoliberal economists' sense of the term.
47. Max Scheler recognized these elements of capitalist culture: the subordination of the values of the spiritual, the vital, and of enjoyment to"utility;" the radical"subjectivization" of values; and the pernicious narrowing of the value sense. He traces all of these to the ressentiment of the bourgeois class. See Ressentiment, trans. Lawrence Coser (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003), final chapter.
48. Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, 2007, pp. 235-36.
49. Ibid., p. 228.
50. Cf. Bryan Norton's claim that traditionally"entification precedes evaluation," in"Beyond Positivist Ecology: Toward an Integrated Ecological Ethics," Science, Engineering, Ethics, 14, 2008, p. 587.