Abstract
The quest for enhanced environmental outcomes underlies the entirety of Bryan Norton’s prodigious scholarship. Throughout his illustrious career, the constant thread is one of nudging ethicists to grasp the promising insights of pragmatism. I follow his lead here by arguing that the popular appeal to intrinsic value among environmental ethicists is a mistake. Much of the discussion has tended to focus on the “intrinsic” part. It is better to start by focusing on the “value” part. The idea of value requires a valuer. Every valuer will, since every valuer is unique, find different value in perceived objects, events, or phenomena. Following Peirce, it is the effects on a valuer that matter. Those who wish to attach the adjective “intrinsic” would deny the relevance of the pragmatic maxim by ascribing desirable yet unavoidable perceptual qualities to the objects of our senses. This project fails because doing so universalizes very specific and idiosyncratic sentiments. Pragmatism offers escape from this trap by insisting that all choice is informed by reasons, and sapient adults are in need of reasonable reasons. Being told that an observed object is intrinsically valuable is not a reason. Its only purpose is to render the listener an instrument of the speaker’s desires. Environmental policy is most successful when skeptics can be brought around. They demand—and deserve—reasons, not moral authoritarianism.
I have benefitted from helpful comments by Bryan Norton, Larry Hickman, Ben Minteer, and Sahotra Sarkar.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I note that skepticism is not limited to pragmatists (Sober 1986).
- 2.
Personal correspondence with Ben Minteer.
- 3.
In fact, since New York state did not have any federal lands in the 1860s, Ezra Cornell’s 990,000 denuded Wisconsin acres became the land endowment for New York’s college of agriculture at Cornell University.
- 4.
There is a sense that specific names ought to be attached to each of the positions here under discussion. However, to do so requires a careful assessment of all of the writings of the various contributors to each category to make sure that there are no misattributions. The point here is not, after all, to tie specific individuals to specific labels that they may or may not readily accept. The point of this little homily is to highlight the multitude of elaborate peregrinations in the literature as a number of authors debate intrinsic value—and also seek to refine their relation to the concept, and to others. The labels are theirs, not mine. And they know who they are.
- 5.
Larry Hickman reminds me that for Dewey, intrinsic value simply implied something was both “unique and irreplaceable.”
- 6.
Personal communication.
- 7.
When Moore says “existed by themselves” we must wonder if Moore means a community of garter snakes in the absence of—isolated from—all possible valuers? He cannot have this in mind since valuers are necessary to undertake valuing. So this must be a world consisting of people (valuers), garter snakes, and not a single other object that might muddy up the relation between snakes, those other objects, and human valuers.
- 8.
See Sober (1986).
- 9.
I have underlined “implicit” to emphasize, as Bryan Norton reminds me, that Leopold was not making an explicit appeal to intrinsic value. He viewed the world through a lens of “good management” and was concerned of the consequences of particular land-use practices.
- 10.
Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273) was a Persian philosopher, theologian, poet, teacher, and founder of the Mevlevi (or Mawlawi) order of Sufism; also known as Mevlana (Our Guide). His aphorism has been taken up and modified to suit many purposes.
- 11.
Norton (in his many books and papers), and Minteer (2011), recognize the tension between an “ideological” environmental ethics and the democratic experimentalism central to Dewey.
References
Attfield, Robin. 2001. Postmodernism, value and objectivity. Environmental Values 10: 145–62.
Beardsley, Monroe. 1965. Intrinsic Value. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 26 (1965): 1–17.
Berleant, Arnold. 2010. Reconsidering Scenic Beauty. Environmental Values 19 (2010): 335–50.
Bromley, Daniel W. 2004. Reconsidering environmental policy: prescriptive consequentialism and volitional pragmatism. Environmental & Resource Economics 28 (1): 73–99.
Bromley, Daniel W. 2006. Sufficient reason: Volitional pragmatism and the meaning of economic institutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bromley, Daniel W. 2007. Environmental regulations and the problem of sustainability: Moving beyond ‘market failure’. Ecological Economics 63: 676–83.
Bromley, Daniel W. 2008. Volitional pragmatism. Ecological Economics 68: 1–13.
Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The feeling of what happens. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Hiedanpää, Juha, and Daniel W. Bromley. 2016. Environmental heresies: The quest for reasonable. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hickman, Larry. 2002. Pragmatic resources for biotechnology. In Pragmatist ethics for a technological culture, ed. Josef Keulartz, Michiel Korthals, Maartje Schermer, and Tsjalling Swierstra. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Leopold, Aldo. 1966. A sand county almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McShane, Katie. 2007. Why environmental ethics shouldn’t give up on intrinsic value. Environmental Ethics 29: 43–61.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After virtue. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.
Marx, Leo. 1964. The machine in the garden. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Minteer, Ben A. 2001. Intrinsic value for pragmatists? Environmental Ethics 22: 57–75.
Minteer, Ben A. 2011. Refounding environmental ethics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Moore, G.E. 1903. Principia ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Northrop, F.S.C. 1967. The logic of the sciences and the humanities. New York: Meridian Books.
Norton, Bryan. 2005. Sustainability. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Norton, Bryan. 2015. Sustainable values, sustainable change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
O’Neill, John. 1992. The varieties of intrinsic value. The Monist 75 (2): 119–37.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1934. Collected papers, vol. 5. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1957. Essays in the philosophy of science, ed. Vincent Tomas. New York: The Liberal Arts Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1997. Pragmatism, the essential peirce. Selected philosophical writings, vol. 2, ed. Nathan Houser. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sober, Elliott. 1986. Philosophical problems for environmentalism. In The preservation of species, ed. Bryan Norton. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
von Wright, Georg H. 1963. Norm and action: A logical enquiry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
von Wright, Georg H. 1971. Explanation and understanding. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
von Wright, Georg H. 1983. Practical reason. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bromley, D.W. (2018). The Problem of (with) Environmental Ethics. In: Sarkar, S., Minteer, B. (eds) A Sustainable Philosophy—The Work of Bryan Norton. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92597-4_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92597-4_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-92596-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-92597-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)