IPP 503: Environmental Ethics

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 7: The Intrinic Value of nature: meta-ethics

I. Environmental ethics, meta-ethics and intrinsic value

New environmental ethic
Over the last few weeks we have considered the moral considerability of the non-human world: How far should we push the bounds of moral considerability – persons, humans, sentient beings, living things, ecosystems, beyond this? Proponents of the need for a ‘new environmental ethic’ often hold that to hold an environmental ethic is to hold that we should push the boundaries further to include non-humans.

One central formulation of an environmental ethic is that which puts it in terms of ‘intrinsic value’ of non-human nature.

To hold a environmental ethic is to hold that non human beings and states of affairs in the natural world have intrinsic value.

From A. Naess and G. Sessions The Deep Ecology Platform

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have
   value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth, intrinsic value, inherent value).
   These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human
   purposes.
   
2. Richness and diversity of life-forms contribute to the realization of these
   values and are also values in themselves.

What is meant by ‘intrinsic value’?

1. Non instrumental value – ‘ends in themselves’. Objects, activities and states of affair have instrumental value insofar as they are a means to some other end. They have intrinsic value if they are ends in themselves. Under pain of an infinite regress, not everything can have only instrumental value.

   a). Non-instrumental is sometimes predicated of objects, states and activities that an agent pursues:

   e.g. a person climbs mountains for its own sake; the person might also be said to value for their own sake; or that he admires states of these for their own sake, the beauty of mountains.

   b) To assert a being is an end it itself and not just a means to an end is to assert that it has ethical standing (Kant).

   A central move in much environmental ethics has been to extend ethical standing beyond persons. To say that elephants, wolves, plants matter in the sense that their good must be considered in making choices is to assign standing to them. (To say one values climbing mountains, the beauty of mountains or mountains themselves for their own sake need not involve the ascription of any such standing.)

2. Intrinsic value is used to refer to the value an object has solely in virtue of its ”intrinsic properties” i.e. its non relational properties.

   ‘To say a kind of value is ”intrinsic” means merely that the question whether a thing possesses it, and in what degree it possesses it, depends solely on the intrinsic nature of the thing in question. (G. E. Moore)

3. Intrinsic value is used as a synonym for ”objective value” i.e. value that an object possesses independently of the valuations of valuers. To claim that non human beings have intrinsic value in this sense is not to make an ethical but a meta ethical claim. It is to assert a form of realism about ethical claims which denies the view that the source of all value lies in valuers in their attitudes, preferences and so on.

Meta-ethics

Proponents of that new environmental ethic often claim that changes in ethical theory will require a change in our meta-ethical theories at the same time: ‘A radical change in a theory sometimes forces a change in meta-theory’ (Richard Routley ‘Is there a need for a new, an environmental, ethic?’ in Light and Rolston p.51). The central reason for this shift to meta-ethics is as just noted the third sense of intrinsic value.

Meta-ethics is concerned with the status and nature of the ethical claims we make.
As such meta-ethics deals not with substantive questions in ethics but with questions about ethics.

Meta-ethical questions:

A. Are ethical utterances assertions that can be true or false?

Some answers to that question:

1. No

Non-cognitivism: Ethical statements are not assertions about the way the world is. They are not true or false, since there is nothing for them to be true or false of.

Expressivism
The most influential version of non-cognitivism is expressivism. Ethical utterances are expressions of the speaker's attitudes or commitments towards the world. They do not state facts, they express attitudes to the facts. The most influential version of expressivism is emotivism (Ayer, Stevenson).
For the emotivist, ethical propositions have no factual content. Emotivists argue that moral utterances evince our attitudes. Saying ‘X is good’ is like saying ‘Hurrah for X!’; saying ‘X is bad’ is like saying ‘Boo for X!’.

2. Yes

a) Error theory: Normative claims are assertions which are either true or false, but in fact they are all false (Mackie).

b) Ethical Realism
Ethical statements are descriptions of states of the world and, in virtue of being so they are, they are like other fact stating assertions, true or false. The job of ethical judgements to track properties in the world, to get something right about the way the world is. It is not the case that all moral statement are false (vs. error theory)

Versions of ethical realism
Naturalism: Ethical facts are natural facts. The moral properties that ethical statements describe are properties we can specify using a naturalistic language. For example, some versions of utilitarianism – an act that maximises happiness is the right act.

Non-naturalism: There are ethical facts but they are not natural facts of the kind that could be the object of the natural sciences. Goodness is a non-natural property of things and events. (G.E. Moore and the intuitionists.)

Other related meta-ethical questions

B. Reason and ethics:
Are ethical judgements open to rational justification? Could we expect all rational agents to converge in their moral judgements?

C. Logic of ethical concepts:
What are the logical properties of ethical concepts? What is the conceptual relationship between general ethical concepts - good, bad, right and wrong - and particular concepts - courageous, cowardly, kind, cruel, just, unjust and the like?

D. Relation of ethics and actions:
How are ethical judgements connected with actions? Is the case that to accept an ethical judgement is necessarily to be motivated to act upon it?

II. Sources and Objects of Value

It is often assumed a non-cognitivist meta ethics entails that non humans can have only instrumental value.

Meta ethical argument against an environmental ethic:

1. To claim that items in the non human world have intrinsic values commits one to a realist view of values;
2. A realist view of values is indefensible;
3. Hence the non human world contains nothing of intrinsic value.

Exercise:

Should the argument be accepted? Which premise, if any, should be rejected?
Is premise 1 correct?

One standard response within the environmental ethics literature has been to reject the second premise. This is a central source of the tendency to forms of ethical realism in environmental philosophy. However, it is not clear that we need to reject this premise (although there maybe good independent reasons to do so). It is possible to reject the first premise.

Against the first premise: the premise is based on a confusion of claims about the source of values with claims about their object.

The expressivist claims that the only source of value are the evaluative attitudes of humans. This does not entail that the only ultimate objects of value are the states of human beings.
(Likewise, to be a realist about the source of value, i.e. to claim that whether or not something has value does not depend on the attitudes of valuers, is compatible with a thoroughly anthropocentric view of the object of value that the only things which do in fact have value are humans and their states, such that a world without humans would have no value whatsoever.)

To illustrate the point consider emotivism:

For the emotivist evaluative utterances merely evince the speaker’s attitudes with the purpose of changing the attitudes of the hearer. They state no facts.
“X is intrinsically good” asserts that the speaker approves of X intrinsically, and acts emotively to make the hearer or hearers likewise approve of X intrinsically. (Stevenson)
However there are no reasons why the emotivist should not fill the X place by entities and states of the non human world.

Let H! operator express hurrah attitudes and B! express boo attitudes. Her ultimate values might for example include the following:

H! (The existence of natural ecosystems)
B! (The destruction of natural ecosystems by humans).
H! (My great grand children live in a world without poverty).
H! (Rain forests exist after the extinction of the human species) (vs. last man’s vandalism)
H!(the possible world in which humans never came into existence)

To claim that non-humans have intrinsic value in the sense of having non-instrumental value does not commit you to a realist view of ethics.

III. Values and Non relational Properties

In its second sense intrinsic value refers to the value an object has solely in virtue of its ”intrinsic properties ie. its non relational properties.

What is meant by ”non relational properties”? The non relational properties of an object are those that persist regardless of the existence or non existence of other objects (weak interpretation) or can be characterized without reference to other objects (strong interpretation).

Some properties in environmental valuation are non-relational in both senses. eg. ‘rarity’, ‘diversity’.

Exercise:

Why is ‘rarity’ a relational property?

Can relational properties have a place in an environmental ethic which holds non humans have intrinsic value?

Here is an argument that has been used to suggest that they cannot:

1. To hold an environmental ethic is to hold that natural objects have intrinsic value.
2. The values objects have in virtue of their relational properties, e.g. their rarity, cannot be intrinsic values.
3. Hence, the value objects have in virtue of their relational properties have no place in an environmental ethic.

Exercise:

Is this argument convincing?

I do not think it is. This argument commits a fallacy of equivocation (an apparently valid argument which is invalid since it uses the same term in different senses in different premises).

• In premise 1, the term intrinsic value is used in its first sense – to refer to non-instrumental value.
• In premise 2 it is used in a different second sense – to refer to the value an object has in virtue of its non-relational properties.

The senses are distinct.. We might value an object in virtue of its relational properties, for example its rarity, without thereby seeing it as having only instrumental value for human satisfactions.

We need to distinguish:

1. values objects can have in virtue of their relations to other objects; and
2. values objects can have in virtue of their relations to human beings.

   The second set of values is a proper subset of the first. Moreover, the second set of values is still not co extensive with

3. values objects can have in virtue of being instrumental for human satisfaction.

   An object might have value in virtue of its relation with human beings without thereby being of only instrumental value for humans. To say “x has value because it is untouched by humans” is to say that it has value in virtue of a relation it has to humans and their activities. Wilderness might have value in virtue of our absence. However, the value is not necessarily possessed by wilderness in virtue of its instrumental usefulness for the satisfaction of human desires.

IV. Objective Value and the Natural World

The claim that nature has non instrumental value does not commit one to an realist meta-ethics. But there might be other reasons particularly pertinent in the field of environmental ethics that would lead us to hold an realist account of value. I show in this section that there are.

The ethical realist holds that the evaluative properties of objects are real properties of objects, that is, that they are properties that objects possess independently of the valuations of valuers.

Are good reasons for believing that there are objective values in a strong sense: are there evaluative properties that can be characterized without reference to the experiences of human observers and valuers?

Part of the pull for strong realism in the environmental sphere lies in a broadly Aristotelian observation that there is a sense in which we can talk of what it is for natural entities to flourish and what is good and bad for them without this being dependent upon human interests.

Consider the gardener’s use of the phrase “x is good for greenfly”. The term “good for” can be understood in two distinct ways.

• To refer to what is conducive to the destruction of greenfly, as in “detergent sprays are good for greenfly”,
  
• To describe what causes greenfly to flourish, as in “mild winters are good for greenfly”.
  

The term “good for” in the first use describes what is instrumentally good for the gardener: given the ordinary gardener’s interest in the flourishing of her rosebushes, detergent sprays satisfy that interest. The second use describes what is instrumentally good for the greenfly, quite independently the gardener’s interests. This instrumental goodness is possible in virtue of the fact that greenflies are the sorts of things that can flourish or be injured. In consequence they have their own goods that are independent of both human interests and any tendency they might have to produce in human observers feelings of approval or disapproval. What beings have such goods?

A being, of whose good it is meaningful to talk, is one who can meaningfully be said to be well or ill, to thrive, to flourish, be happy or miserable...The attributes, which go along with the meaningful use of the phrase ”the good of X”, may be called biological in a broad sense. By this I do not mean that they were terms, of which biologists make frequent use. “Happiness” and “welfare” cannot be said to belong to the professional vocabulary of biologists. What I mean by calling the terms “biological” is that they are used as attributes of beings, of whom it is meaningful to say they have a life. The question “What kinds or species of being have a good?” is therefore broadly identical with the question “What kinds or species of being have a life”. (Von Wright)

Question:

Even if living things have goods in this sense does it give us reasons for moral concern for them?

Intrinsic value and moral considerability

It is standard in much environmental literature to argue that possession of goods does entail moral considerability: 'moral standing or considerability belongs to whatever has a good of its own' (Attfield 1987, p.21) However, this claim demands an argument. It is possible to talk in an objective sense of what constitutes the goods of entities, without making any claims that these ought to be realized. Our gardener knows what it is for greenfly to flourish, recognizes they have their own goods, and has a practical knowledge of what is good for them. No moral injunction follows. 'Y is a good of X' does not immediately entail 'Y ought to be realized' (Taylor 1986 pp.71-2).

How might this gap be closed?
Possible arguments:

In week 5 we discussed one line of argument and possible problems with it. Here is another line of argument.

Rolston: Since for any living being x there are objects and states of affairs y1...yn that are of value to x, it follows that x values y1...yn. By consistency if we value ourselves in virtue of being valuing agents then we have to extend this to all living things. (Rolston, 1988)

Exercise:

Is this a good line of argument?

Here is a worry I have about the argument. The inference from 'y is of value to x' to 'x values y' looks fallacious. There are differences in the logical properties of the two types of sentence:

• 'y is of value to a' is extensional i.e. if y is of value to a, and y=z, then z is of value to a;
• 'a values y' is intensional i.e. it is not the case that if a values y and y=z then a values z'.

Example: 'Joseph is of great value to Martha' - unbeknownst to her he has assisted her through her education. Since Joseph is the local priest, it follows that 'the local priest is of great value to Martha'. But 'Martha values the unknown benefactor who has assisted her through her education' does not entail 'Martha values Joseph' or 'Martha values the local priest'. She may despise Joseph and loath the clergy.

Whether or not something is of value to someone depends on the nature of the object, its capacities to contribute to the flourishing of a being however that is defined. Whether an object is valued by someone depends upon the nature of the person's beliefs about and attitudes towards the object. Valuing appears to require certain cognitive and affective capacities that are not displayed by nonrational living things.

Exercise:

In my chapter ‘Meta-ethics’ in D. Jamieson ed. A Companion to Environmental Philosophy I discuss other possible ways of understanding the relation of the goods of non-human nature to human ethical sensibilities. Read that chapter and consider if you think any of these arguments are convincing.