IPP 503: Environmental Ethics

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

Week 8: The value of nature

I. Natural

1. Senses of ‘natural’.

"[O]ur answer to this question depends upon the definition of the word, Nature, than which there is none more ambiguous and equivocal". Hume A Treatise of Human Nature III.I.ii

“Nature,” “natural,” and the group of words derived from them, or allied to them in etymology, have at all times filled a great place in the thoughts and taken a strong hold on the feelings of mankind . . . The words have . . . become entangled in so many foreign associations, mostly of a very powerful and tenacious character, that they have come to excite, and to be the symbols of, feelings which their original meaning will by no means justify, and which have made them one of the most copious sources of false taste, false philosophy, false morality, and even bad law . . . . J. S. Mill, 'On Nature'.

‘Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language’ (Williams, 1976, p.184)

The claim that the meaning of the word nature is complex, ambiguous and equivocal has a long history.

What do we mean in calling an object or event ‘natural’?

A useful starting point is Hume’s discussion of the question of whether the principles of morals and specifically the sentiments of vice and virtue are natural.

Read the following extract:

If nature be oppos'd to miracles, not only the distinction betwixt vice and virtue is natural, but also every event, which has ever happen'd in the world, excepting those miracles, on which our religion is founded. In saying, then, that the sentiments of vice and virtue are natural in this sense, we make no very extraordinary discovery.

But nature may also be opposed to rare and unusual; and in this sense of the word, which is the common one, there may often arise disputes concerning what is natural or unnatural; and one may in general affirm, that we are not possess'd of any very precise standard, by which these disputes can be decided. Frequent and rare depend upon the number of examples we have observ'd; and as this number may gradually encrease or diminish, `twill be impossible to fix any exact boundaries betwixt them. We may only affirm on this head, that if ever there was any thing, which cou'd be call'd natural in this sense, the sentiments of morality certainly may; since there never was any nation of the world, nor any single person in any nation, who was utterly depriv'd of them, and who never, in any instance, shew'd the least approbation or dislike of manners. These sentiments are so rooted in our constitution and temper, that without entirely confounding the human mind by disease or madness, `tis impossible to extirpate and destroy them.

But nature may also be opposed to artifice, as well as to what is rare and unusual; and in this sense it may be disputed, whether the notions of virtue be natural or not. We readily forget, that the designs, and projects, and views of men are principles as necessary in their operation as heat and cold, moist and dry: But taking them to be free and entirely our own, `tis usual for us to set them in opposition to the other principles of nature. Shou'd it, therefore, be demanded, whether the sense of virtue be natural or artificial, I am of opinion, that `tis impossible for me at present to give any precise answer to this question. Perhaps it will appear afterwards, that our sense of some virtues is artificial, and that of others natural. The discussion of this question will be more proper, when we enter upon an exact detail of each particular vice and virtue.

Mean while it may not be amiss to observe from these definitions of natural and unnatural, that nothing can be more unphilosophical than those systems, which assert, that virtue is the same with what is natural, and vice with what is unnatural. For in the first sense of the word, Nature, as opposed to miracles, both vice and virtue are equally natural; and in the second sense, as oppos'd to what is unusual, perhaps virtue will be found to be the most unnatural. At least it must be own'd, that heroic virtue, being as unusual, is as little natural as the most brutal barbarity. As to the third sense of the word, `tis certain, that both vice and virtue are equally artificial, and out of nature. For however it may be disputed, whether the notion of a merit or demerit in certain actions be natural or artificial, `tis evident, that the actions themselves are artificial, and are perform'd with a certain design and intention; otherwise they cou'd never be rank'd under any of these denominations. Tis impossible, therefore, that the character of natural and unnatural can ever, in any sense, mark the boundaries of vice and virtue. (Hume A Treatise of Human Nature III.I.ii)

Exercise:

What are the different senses of nature that Hume distinguishes in this extract?

Hume here distinguishes three different senses:

1. ‘Natural’ vs. ‘miraculous’
   
2. ‘Natural’ vs. ‘unusual;
   
3. ‘Natural’ vs ‘artificial’

(Another distinction that is implicit later in the Treatise is between the between ‘natural’ and ‘civil’, ‘social’ or ‘cultural’. To use a modern example think of the distinctions between ‘natural science’ and ‘social science’ or ‘natural landscapes’ and ‘cultural landscapes’. I return to this below.)

The first, and third of these distinctions have remained central to more recent discussions.

‘Natural’ vs. ‘miraculous’: The first distinction is part of a more general distinction between the natural and the supernatural. If one rejects the idea that there is a realm of the miraculous or the supernatural then as Hume notes 'every event, which has ever happened in the world' is natural. Nature in this sense will then include everything.

‘Natural’ vs ‘artificial’: The third distinction employs nature in a narrower sense: 'nature may also be opposed to artifice'. It is this sense that has become central. How are we to understand the distinction?

One possible starting is a discussion of J. S. Mill which draws a similar distinction to that employed by Hume.

It thus appears that we must recognise at least two principal meanings in the word “nature”. In one sense, it means all the powers existing in either the outer or the inner world and everything which takes place by means of those powers. In another sense, it means, not everything which happens, but only what takes place without the agency, or without the voluntary and intentional agency, of man. This distinction is far from exhausting the ambiguities of the word; but it is the key to most of those on which important consequences depend . . . (Mill, 'Essay On Nature', pp.8-9).

Exercise:

What are the distinctions the Mill is drawing here and how do they relate to those of Hume?

Mill distinguishes two meanings of the word ‘nature’ that parallel the distinction drawn by Hume: first, a broader sense in which it refers to 'all the powers existing in either the outer or the inner world and everything which takes place by means of those powers' or as he puts it more pithily earlier in the essay, in which 'nature...is a collective name for all facts actual and possible' (Mill, 1874, p.6).; second, a narrower sense in which it refers to what takes place 'without the agency, or without the voluntary and intentional agency, of man'. The first sense of the term signifies roughly what is ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘supernatural’. The second sense registers the contrast between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’.

2. Natural and Artificial

The concept of the artificial is used in a number of different, though connected, senses. As a rough and ready starting point consider the following:

1. ‘phoney’ or ‘bogus’ e.g. ‘artificial laughter’.
   
2. ‘substitute’. E.g. an ‘artificial limb’, or ‘artificial light’.
   
3. ‘human-made’. E.g. an ‘artificial lake’ - the lake might be a substitute for a natural lake, but again, it might not.
   

Sense 3 is what concerns us here – but further analysis is needed – not all human-made products are artificial – consider tears. While tears can be artificial – crocodile tears, they need not be. To capture the meaning of the term ‘artificial’ we need to introduce the idea of contrivance, and this is precisely what Mill does with his reference to “voluntary and intentional agency”.

Something is artificial only if it is the result of a deliberate or intentional act.

Note also the distinction between being the result and the aim of a deliberate or intentional act e.g. the phenomenon of global warming, which is the result, though it was not of course the original aim, of the accumulation of deliberate choices.

While something is artificial only if it is the result of deliberate and intentional act, it does not follow that that if something is the result or aim of a deliberate or intentional act it is thereby artificial. Being the result of a deliberate and intentional act is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for artificiality. For example, human beings are often the result of deliberate and intentional acts but they are still ‘natural beings’ and not artefacts.

A further distinction that may take us further: intentions which simply bring a thing into existence and intentions which determine and shape the nature of the thing, of what it is.

Consider - a highly cultivated rose or a genetically modified plant. Such a plant might be said to be ‘an artefact’ – what makes it so is not that humans planted it but that human skill went into making it the kind of thing it is.

A working definition of the term ‘artificial’:

• Something is artificial if and only if it is what it is at least partly as the result of a deliberate or intentional act, usually involving the application of some art or skill.

Something's being artificial is a matter of its nature being determined by a deliberate and intentional act.

3. Natural and Cultural/Social

A further distinction that is often drawn is between the natural and the cultural or social.

Consider for example: ‘natural science’ vs. ‘social science’; ‘natural landscapes’ vs ‘cultural landscapes’

A version of the distinction between the natural and the social is found in Hume later in the Treatise where he contrasts the natural and the civil. This contrast picks up a central distinction in early modern political theory. Thus from Hobbes through to Rousseau a distinction was drawn between the ‘state of nature’ and ‘civil society’ in which political and social institutions of a particular kind were said to exist. Historically the distinction is used to different effect. While in Hobbes the contrast indicates the awful fate that would befall us in the absence of political institutions, in Rousseau’s early writings civil society is taken to be a realm of artificiality disconnecting us from our original, benign state of nature.
Rousseau’s theme is taken up by many in the romantic tradition: the natural is where we find what is authentic in contrast to the social artificialities and contrivances of the social world. Raymond Williams notes of this view

‘one of the most powerful uses of nature since the eighteenth century has been this selective sense of goodness and innocence. Nature has meant the ‘countryside’, the ‘unspoiled places’, plants and creatures other than man. The use is especially current in contrasts between town and county: nature is what man has not made, though if he made it long enough ago - a hedgerow or a desert - it will usually be included as natural. Nature-lover and nature poetry date from this phase’ (Williams, Keywords, p.188).

This use of ‘natural’ as what is ‘rural’ is however one that is likely to be confined now only to Europe. In the ‘new worlds’ the term is 'natural' more often used much more starkly to refer to ‘wilderness’ marked by, in John Muir’s words, the absence of ‘all . . . marks of man’s work’.

We will discuss wilderness further next week.

4. Strong constructivism: Is anything natural?

Some strong social constructivists deny there is something called ‘nature’ to be defended. There may be a variety of arguments for this. Here I want to consider one set of arguments that I think are popular but fallacious. Consider the following passages:

• 'Nature per se does not exist...Nature is only the name given to a certain contemporary state of science' (C. Larrere 'Ethics, Politics, Science, and the Environment: Concerning the Natural Contract' in J Baird Callicott and F. de Rocha eds. Earth Summit Ethics: Toward a Reconstructive Postmodern Philosophy of Environmental Education p.122)
  
• ‘It is fair to say that before the word was invented, there was no nature...' (N. Evernden The Social Creation of Nature p.89)

These particular passages appear on the surface to involve use-mention confusions

The distinction between use and mention: Consider two sentences

A. Copper conducts electricity.

B. Copper is a word of six letters.

Sentence A is about copper. In sentence A the word ‘copper’ is used.
Sentence B is about a word – strictly we should write: ‘Copper’ is a word of six letters. In sentence B the word ‘copper’ is mentioned.

An invalid argument: 1. Copper conducts electricity; 2. Copper is a word of six letters.
Hence 3. A word of six letters conducts electricity.

Consider now sentences from Evernden and Larrere quoted earlier:

A. In the sentences 'Nature per se does not exist’ ‘There was no nature’ the term ‘nature’ is used.

B. In the sentences ‘Nature is only the name given to a certain contemporary state of science' ‘The word nature was invented’ the term ‘nature’ is mentioned.

The claims in B do not entail the claims in A.

[Compare Evernden’s claim ‘It is fair to say that before the word was invented, there was no nature...' with the claim 'Before the word "dinosaur" was invented there were no dinosaurs'. Understood literally the latter statement is false. Dinosaurs existed before 1841, the date the term 'dinosaur' was coined by Richard Owen. The only charitable reading of the latter statement is the banal claim 'before the word "dinosaur" was invented nothing was called "a dinosaur"’. Likewise the charitable reading of Evernden’s claim is the banal 'before the word "nature" was invented nothing was called "nature"’.]

II. Do things and processes have value in virtue of being ‘natural’?

Can natural things or events said to have a value just because they are natural? Consider the following passages that appear to offer differing views on the value of what is natural

a) J. S. Mill: ‘the doctrine that man ought to follow nature, or, in other words, ought to make the spontaneous course of things the model of his voluntary actions, is equally irrational and immoral.’ (Mill 'On Nature')

‘The word "nature" has two principal meanings: it either denotes the entire system of things, with the aggregates of all their properties, or it denotes things as they would be, apart from human intervention. In the first of these senses, the doctrine that man ought to follow nature is unmeaning; since man has no power to do anything else than follow nature; all his actions are done through, and in obedience to, some one or many of nature's physical or mental laws. In the other sense of the term, the doctrine that man ought to follow nature, or, in other words, ought to make the spontaneous course of things the model of his voluntary actions, is equally irrational and immoral. Irrational, because all human action whatever consists in altering, and all useful action in improving, the spontaneous course of nature. Immoral, because the course of natural phenomena being replete with everything which when committed by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, any one who endeavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course of things would be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men. The scheme of Nature, regarded in its whole extent, cannot have had, for its sole or even principal object, the good of human or other sentient beings. What good it brings to them is mostly the result of their own exertions. Whatsoever, in nature, gives indication of beneficent design proves this beneficence to be armed only with limited power; and the duty of man is to cooperate with the beneficent powers, not by imitating, but by perpetually striving to amend, the course of nature and bringing that part of it over which we can exercise control more nearly into conformity with a high standard of justice and goodness.’ (J.S. Mill 'Essay On Nature')

Download Mill's 'On Nature'

b) Katz: Artefacts only have instrumental value for humans. Some natural beings have their own good and autonomous forms of development. We ought to respect at least some of these.

‘Artefacts are fundamentally connected to human concerns and interests, in both their existence and their value. Natural entities and systems have a value in their own right, a value that transcends the instrumentality of human projects and interests. Nature is not merely the physical matter which is the object of human artefactual practice; nature is a subject, with its own history of development independent of human cultural intervention. As with any autonomous subject, nature thus has a value that can be subverted and destroyed by the process of human domination. The normative implication for environmental policy is that this value ought to be preserved.’ (E. Katz "Artefacts and Functions: A Note on the Value of Nature", Environmental Values 2, 1993)

Exercise:

Are Mill’s and Katz’s views inconsistent?

Does either present a defensible argument?

[It is also worth comparing Mill’s comments in his essay on nature with a passage in his Principles of Political Economy which have discussed earlier in the course:

It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it. (J.S. Mill 1848 book IV, ch.6 section 2)

Now itlooks as if there might be a tension between the two passages from Mill. A question to consider is whether if there are really any inconsistencies between them.

III. Can nature be restored?

Nature conservation is one of the primary expressions of environmental concern. One justification behind all forms of nature protection is the belief that, in conserving nature, we are conserving something of value. However, nature conservation, and associated projects such as nature restoration, present us with a fresh set of problems.

For the purpose of our present discussion we might broadly distinguish three related projects:

1. protecting nature from human incursion,
2. restoring natural features if they are damaged,
3. restitution for natural features that have been destroyed.

Thus, in protecting nature we conceive ourselves as protecting something of value; in restoring nature we conceive ourselves as restoring something of value; while restitution involves the attempt to make amends for a loss that has been caused by creating something of value that in some way makes up for what is lost.

The programme of nature restoration has been of particular philosophical concern. Given the distinction between artificial and natural that is drawn by Mill there appears to be a paradox around the idea that humans can deliberately restore nature. The paradox is at the centre of Elliot’s paper ‘Faking Nature’ and Katz’s paper ‘The Big Lie: the Human Restoration of Nature’. Both are to be found in Light and Rolston eds. Environmental Ethics. For a critical discussion see A. Light ‘Ecological Restoration and the Culture of Nature’ in Light and Rolston eds. Environmental Ethics. Another relevant paper by Andrew Light is "Faking Nature" Revisted.

Download Andrew Light's paper '"Faking Nature" Revisited'

Before considering the philosophical arguments it is worth looking at some actual restoration projects.

The web-pages for The Society for Ecological Restoration can be found at:

http://www.ser.org/

You will find particular examples of ecological restoration at:

http://www.ser.org/project_showcase.asp#ShowcaseListing

Elliot, ‘Faking nature’: This paper is not aimed not directly at restoration projects as such, but one defence for them - ‘the restoration thesis’, the claim that it is possible to restore fully the value of a natural feature which has been destroyed.

1. Restoration attempts to replace natural ecological systems with a fake.

   
   ‘environmental engineers are proposing is that we accept a fake or a forgery instead of the real thing. If the claim can be made good then perhaps an adequate response to restoration proposals is to point out they merely fake nature’
   

2. A restoration is a fake without the value of a natural ecological system because it necessarily lacks one of the central features of the ‘real thing’ which is a source of its value – its ‘naturalness’.
   

   ‘The appeal that many find in areas of natural wilderness, in natural forests and wild rivers depends very much on the naturalness of such places.’

3. Naturalness is not by definition open to artificial reproduction, since it is a matter of the causal history of an object. No human reproduction could in principle replicate that history:
   

   ‘The environmentalist's complaint concerning restoration proposals is that nature is not replaceable without depreciation of one aspect of its value which has to do with its genesis, its history… What is significance about wilderness is its causal continuity with the past.’

Exercise:

Is this a good argument?

Consider each stage of the argument.
Should one accept the claims being made?

Consider some possible objections.

1. Is ecological restoration necessarily fakery in the literal sense? Does it involve an intention to deceive?
2. Is ‘naturalness’ in itself a source of value? If not what is the basis of the value of many natural ecosystems? If it is what sort of value is it?
3. Is the appeal to causal continuity y strong enough to do the work that Elliot needs it to do?

Here are some thoughts on the previous questions.

1. Most ecological restoration is not fakery in the literal sense – it involves no intention to deceive. If the objection to ecological restoration has force it is against the possibility of the reproduction or replacement of particular environmental objects, not against fakes.

2. The question of whether naturalness is a source of value is one that we have already touched upon. One different view is to be found in Robin Attfield in his paper ‘Rehabilitating nature and making nature habitable’, in Philosophy and the Natural Environment eds. R. Attfield and A. Belsey. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Only where disruption has already taken place, as . . . is the case in most of the areas of Britain recognised as ‘ancient forest’, is restoration or rehabilitation possible; and what is sometimes possible is reversing the damage and returning an area to a condition closely resembling its erstwhile condition in which evolutionary processes proceed independent of further human agency . . . Although Elliot’s historical requirement for nature to have its full aesthetic value is not satisfied, and the area cannot be regarded as in all respects wild, there could in theory be the same blend of creatures each living in accordance with its own nature, and jointly forming a system just like the pristine one which preceded human intervention. Although the outcome is, broadly, what human agency intended, it is still equivalent to what unimpeded nature would have produced. (Attfield 1994, p. 49).

Exercise:

On what grounds is Attfield is more favourably disposed towards restoration?

Attfield has a different view from Elliot as to what it is that makes natural items valuable.

• Attfield has an end-state or outcome-based view of the value of the natural world. The natural world is valuable in virtue of certain features it exhibits. Roughly, he takes the view that the natural world is good to the extent that it contains creatures living fulfilled lives. How that state of affairs is brought into existence is irrelevant to its value. If the outcome of human agency is ‘equivalent to what unimpeded nature would have produced’ then there is no difference in their value. Hence, restoration can be justified, if a state of affairs with the same valued features is recreated after having been temporarily disrupted.
  
• Elliot assumes an historical or process-based view of the value of the natural world. It is something about the history of objects and the processes that go into their creation that is what makes natural objects valuable.

A central point to notice here is that naturalness is an historical concept. There is no such thing as a state or condition of something which constitutes its 'being natural', or an identifiable set of characteristics which makes any item or event 'natural'. Being natural is, and is only, determined by origin and by history: it is a spatio-temporal concept, not a descriptive one. The point is made thus by Goodin:

According to the distinctively [green theory of value] . . . what it is that makes natural resources valuable is their very naturalness. That is to say, what imparts value to them is not any physical attributes or properties that they might display. Rather, it is the history and process of their creation. What is crucial in making things valuable, on the green theory of value, is the fact they were created by natural processes rather than by artificial human ones. By focusing in this way on the history and process of its creation as the special feature of a naturally occurring property that imparts value, the green theory of value shows itself to be an instantiation of yet another pair of more general theories of value - a process based theory of value, on the one hand, and a history based theory of value, on the other . . . (Goodin, Green Political Theory, pp. 26-27).

3. Elliot marks the distinction between restoration and protection of nature in terms of the latter not destroying the 'causal continuity' that makes a wilderness, while the former does. But 'causal continuity' is not strong enough to capture the differences Elliot claims to exist. In its weakest sense any development has causal continuity with the past including those involved in restoration in the examples to which Elliot particularly objects: bulldozers that flatten the land and diggers replanting it are all part of causal processes linking the past state with the present. What Elliot is after in the term 'causal continuity' is a particular kind of causal history linking past and future, one that allows those involved in processes of protection but not those involved in restoration. The question of what determines these needs addressing. Does for example removing feral animals and invasions of non-indigenous plants count as 'protection' or 'restoration'?. How might the concept of causal history be developed further to capture some of the differences that Elliot is after?

One way into an answer to that last question is to mote the more general way that history matters to our evaluation of environments – both cultural and natural. We value environments - forests, lakes, mountains, wetlands and other habitats - specifically for the particular history they embody: the natural world, landscapes humanised by pastoral and agricultural environments, the built environment in part take their value from the specific histories they contain. For the very long term features, notably geological features, histories may have no human component. For most landscapes that history often includes interplay of human use and natural processes - flora and fauna that flourish in particular sites that are the result of a specific history of human pastoral and agricultural activity, not with sites that existed prior to human intervention. The past is evident also in the embodiments of the work of past generations that are a part of the landscapes of the old world: stone walls, terraces, thingmounts, old irrigation systems etc. The past also matters in the value we put upon place. The value of specific locations is often a consequence of the way that the life of a community is embodied within it. Historical ties of community have a material dimension in both human and natural landscapes within which a community dwells. History blocks the replication of place and the substitutability of one place for another as much for ‘cultural landscapes’ as it is does for ‘natural landscapes’. We want to preserve an ancient meadowland, not a modern reproduction of an ancient meadowland. What matters is the story of the place.

What appears to matter in these cases is the narrative of a site – the story of how it developed over time – rather than mere causal continuity. For a discussion of this aspect of environmental value see, 511 week 4.