2015

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016

A cornerstone of environmental policy is the debate over protecting nature for humans’ sake (instrumental values) or for nature’s (intrinsic values) (1). We propose that focusing only on instrumental or intrinsic values may fail to resonate with views on personal and col- lective well-being, or “what is right,” with regard to nature and the environment. Without complementary attention to other ways that value is expressed and realized by people, such a focus may inadvertently promote worldviews at odds with fair and desirable futures. It is time to engage seriously with a third class of values, one with diverse roots and current expres- sions: relational values. By doing so, we reframe the discussion about environmental protection, and open the door to new, potentially more productive policy approaches.

In this paper, I argue that the natural world is replete with values and norms of many different sorts. Humans access these values and norms in experience, in much the same way that, for instance, we come to know the shapes and sizes of things through experience. Naturally occurring values and norms can, and often do, serve as grounds for our choices and evaluations. I illustrate the practical and moral implications of natural value by considering how a conservation-minded ornithologist might arrive at and defend the decision to protect nesting areas for an endangered species of bird.

Obiora Ike, Amélé Adamavi-Aho Ekué, Anja Andriamasy and Lucy Howe López (Eds.), Who Cares About Ethics? Selected Essays by Globethics.net Geneva, 2020

Ethics is a universal concern for all people around the world, and this chapter is part of a book which explores how and why ethics is still relevant today. Who Cares About Ethics? is made up of selected essays from participants in the Globethics.net Network, capitalising on their diverse knowledge and life experiences. The topic of this chapter is a reason-based ethics of the environment. It is argued that we should think twice before we say "we do respect the nature".

CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research - Zenodo, 2022

An institutional lens to the analysis of power was considered important given that the IPBES conceptual framework recognizes that institutions determine how power is exercised (Díaz et al., 2015). In turn, in Chapter 1, a theory of change is depicted highlighting how power relations, institutions, and contexts modulate the influence of values and valuation on decision-making, outcomes, drivers of change, and transformations. Chapter 2 focuses on the role of institutions on the values prioritized by actors and how institutions influence valuation and decision-making processes. The latter approach is explored in detail in Chapter 3 (valuation methods) and in Chapter 4 (decisionmaking) of the values assessment.

Colorado State University. Libraries eBooks, 2001

In both aesthetics and ethics something of value is at stake. What are the relations between these different normative modes? If beauty, then duty. If so, is the logic the same in art and in nature? If not beauty, then no duty? But not all duties are tied to beauties. Other premises might as well or better yield duties. Aesthetic imperatives are usually thought less urgent than moral imperatives. Nor is all aesthetic experience tied to beauty. Perhaps ethics is not always tied to duty either, but is logically and psychologically closer to caring. Already the analysis is proving challenging. Right or Wrong Place to Start? Aesthetic experience is among the most common starting points for an environmental ethic. Ask people, 'Why save the Grand Canyon or the Grand Tetons, and the ready answer will be, 'Because they are beautiful. So grand!' Eugene Hargrove claims that environmental ethics historically started this way, with scenic grandeur: 'The ultimate historical foundations of nature preservation are aesthetic.' 1 More recently, the U.S. Congress declared, in the Endangered Species Act, that such species have 'esthetic value ... to the Nation and its people' and urges 'adequate concern and conservation'. 2 In the presence of purple mountains' majesties or charismatic megafauna, there is an easy move from 'is' to 'ought'. One hardly needs commandments. More precisely, the move seems to be from fact of the matter: 'There are the Tetons', to aesthetic value: 'Wow, they are beautiful!' to moral duty: 'One ought to save the Tetons.' Prima facie, one ought not to destroy anything of value, including aesthetic value. That is an unarguable beginning, even if carelessness sometimes needs repair by legislation. Aesthetic values are often thought to be high level but low priority: jobs first, scenery second; one cannot tour the Tetons if one is broke. So this aesthetic ethic will need to be coupled with more persuasive power lest it be overridden when amenities are traded against basic needs. At this point, one can switch to resource and life support arguments. The forests turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, they supply water for drinking and irrigating; they 127 128 Environment and the Arts control erosion; they serve as a baseline for scientific studies. Biodiversity has agricultural, medical and industrial uses. Couple these lines of argument: healthy ecosystems, public welfare, resource benefits and aesthetic quality of life, and the combination of heavyweight and more 'spiritual' arguments will supply ample rationale for conservation. That is practical in everyday life: everyone needs bread and loves beauty. Further, for those interested in philosophical issues, this is the quickest way out of the postmodernist confusions. We do not need epistemological realism, which is so problematic, as every academic knows. Ordinary relativist scenic enjoyments will do, joining them to routine resource use: amenities coupled with commodities. These motivations are ready to hand. Take a drive to the mountains. Enjoy the view, look at the fields en route, and think how air, soil and water are basic human needs. Press these points environmental security and quality of life-and you will get no argument from the postmodernists, anti-foundationalists, deconstructionists, non-realists, pragmatists, pluralists or whatever is the latest fashionable critique. Easy though this transition from beauty to duty is, we need a closer analysis. It may turn out that the initial motivations are not the most profound. Epistemologically, yes, aesthetics is a good place to start. Metaphysically, no: the worry soon comes that this beauty is only in the mind of the beholder. The metaphysicians will ask their probing questions. Any ethic based on aesthetics is going to be quickly undermined epistemologically, and in just the ways that the postmodernists, anti-foundationalists, deconstructionists and all those other troublemakers worry about. Any aesthetic value is some kind of a construct, set up on human interaction with nature. More radical environmentalists will insist that this falls far short. One is not yet respecting what is really there. Now we have to backtrack and start again. Aesthetics is the wrong place to begin in environmental ethics, at least to begin in principle, though perhaps not always in practice. Aesthetics is also the wrong place to center environmental ethics, in principle and in practice. Nevertheless, one ought to celebrate-and conserve-beauty in nature. Aesthetic experience is indeed a capstone value when humans enjoy nature, but that does not make it the best model for all values carried by nature. The problem is that the aesthetic model keys value to the satisfaction of human interests; indeed, it leashes value to just one particular kind of interest. But there are many nonaesthetic human interests, and these may urge compromising, even sacrificing, aesthetic values. Starting off with an aesthetically oriented approach may disorient us and leave us with too weak a locus of value to protect all the values in jeopardy. Consider an analogy, I am asked, 'Why are you ethical toward your wife?' I reply, 'Because she is beautiful,' Certainly, beauty is a dimension of her life, but it is not the main focus of her value. 1 respect her integrity, rights, character, achievements, her intrinsic value, her own good. In some moods, I might say that all these features of her person are 'beautiful',

The discussion of environmental aesthetics as it relates to ethics has primarily been concerned with how to harmonize aesthetic judgments of nature’s beauty with ecological judgments of nature’s health. This discussion brings to our attention the need for new perceptual norms for the experience of nature. Hence, focusing exclusively on the question of whether a work of “environmental art” is good or bad for the ecological health of a system occludes the important role such works can play in formulating new perceptual norms and metaphors for nature. To illustrate this point, the work of sculptor Andy Goldsworthy presents us with a different perception of time that is ethically useful.

International Journal of Social Sustainability in Economics, Social and Cultural Context, 2016

Western admiration of nature in human-inhabited environments is historically different from admiration of nature in wilderness environments. This paper looks at the history of admiration and argues that the split is now a hindrance rather than help in moving forward into a unified conception of nature’s relationship to humanity. In its place I argue for human-impacted environments as ethical stakeholders using models of communication that suggest nature might have a systemic and active abilities to elicit human admiration