The Who of Environmental Ethics: Phenomenology and the Moral Self

Abstract

This chapter offers a defense of those forms of environmental ethics and ecopsychology that appeal to direct first-person emotive experiences of the natural world. Inspired by the work of Aldo Leopold, Arne Naess, and Val Plumwood, I will show that a phenomenology of moral experience and personal identity makes possible an understanding of an ecologically informed self-identity adequate to serve as a point of departure for a non-anthropocentric ethic of care and connectedness to others. I shall argue that the ecological self, as a form of personal identity, is able to integrate three layers of selfhood, the body self, the narrative self, and the reflective self, into a form of moral subjectivity that gives voice and respect to the complexity and varieties of moral experience. The ecological self, understood in this way, supports an ethical and healing relation to the natural world by recovering and integrating into its identity qualities which have been systematically denied by the modern separation of self and other, culture and nature, human and animal, and reason and emotion. This chapter argues that moral experience is structured by a prima facie form of rationality inherent in the intentional structure of experience. Consequently, the first-person moral experience that naturally flows from an ecological self cannot be easily dismissed as “mere subjectivity” as the dominant forms of modern moral theory are quick to do. Furthermore, the resulting understanding of moral subjectivity and the intentional structure of moral experience leads to a perspectival and pragmatic, rather than a metaphysical, understanding of value, thereby undercutting the worry of eco-fascism that has plagued eco-philosophies such as Leopold’s land ethic and Naess’s deep ecology. In turn, this understanding of moral experience and an ecologically informed personal identity opens up a new way of understanding the task of moral philosophy.