Environmental Philosophy

INTRODUCTION Environmental Philosophy Anthropocentrism, Intrinsic Value, and Worldview Clash ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY HAS CHALLENGED THE DOMINANT WESTERN CULTURE’S CONCEPTION OF human nature through critiques of anthropocentrism (human chauvinism). It has annoyed the mainstream with critiques of instrumental rationality and its plea on behalf of the intrinsic value of nature. It has irritated nonenviron- mentalists and even some environmentalists with its criticism of mechanism or the reductionist scientific worldview and has argued in favor of some form of ecological worldview. The critique of anthropocentrism, the intrinsic value of nature, and the ecological worldview are central topics for environmental philosophers, appearing across a wide range of environmentalist writing, from environmental ethics and policy to political ecology, ecocriticism, and meta- physics. As I understand them, these topics have characterized environmental philosophy since its inception in the 1970s. In the widespread environmental imaginary of a few decades ago, perhaps the central term of engagement for environmental philosophers and ethicists was the concept of anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism—whose core mean- ing is human-centric evaluation—was also considered by many to be one of the central causes of the environmental crisis. Identifying its historical and conceptual sources and pulling them out by the roots formed a large part of 1 © 2020 State University of New York Press, Albany the environmentalist response.1 By the early 1990s, the Australian environmental philosopher Warwick Fox could write that “virtually every paper and book that ecophilosophers have written either implicitly or explicitly develops some kind of answer to [the] question ‘what’s wrong with being anthropocentric?’ ”2 It effectively encapsulates a number of issues that have attracted critical attention: the Modern western dualistic opposition between humans and nonhuman nature; the notion of human chauvinism or human-centric evaluation; and the concept of nature as mere resource passively awaiting instrumentalist exploitation. Current debates around the concept of the Anthropocene sug- gest that renewed attention to this topic is warranted. In addition to the critique of anthropocentrism, a “new ethics” was called for by many environmental philosophers. Are traditional ethical categories and theories so fundamentally anthropocentric that a completely new ethics is required? Adopting a nonanthropocentric perspective would mean accepting the propositions that nonhumans have moral worth, and that they must be taken seriously in human decisions about environmental issues. In a nonanthropocentric ethics, this also means that in cases of conflict their interests may often carry greater weight than those of humans. Environmental ethics might have to be “new” if traditional theories cannot accommodate these points.3 After briefly entertaining the possibility of using the existing concepts of “rights” or “standing” for nonhumans in the 1970s, environmental ethics came more and more to be identified with arguments for the intrinsic value of nature. A trickle of references to the intrinsic value of nature in the 1970s grad- ually became a steady stream in the late 1980s, and the high-water mark was reached in the debate in the 1990s.4 Finding the appropriate epistemological, ontological, and normative arguments to secure the concept became a major preoccupation. J. Baird Callicott explicitly declared that the distinctive fea- ture of environmental ethics would be its claim that nature possesses intrinsic value.5 He claimed that “the most important philosophical task for environmental ethics is the development of a non-anthropocentric value theory,” and he defined the difference between anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric ethics in terms of intrinsic value. An anthropocentric value theory (or axiology), by common consensus, confers intrinsic value on human beings and regards all other things, including other forms of life, as being only instrumentally valuable, i.e., valuable only to the extent that they are means or instruments which may 2 Introduction © 2020 State University of New York Press, Albany serve human beings. A non-anthropocentric value theory (or axiology), on the other hand, would confer intrinsic value on some non-human beings.6 Reflecting on the concept itself, some writers noted that this very specific quest for the establishment of the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature was motivat- ed by the need to identify some transcultural anchor of environmental value against the backdrop of value relativism. It is only if some value “independent of and overrid[ing] individual human judgment and . relative and evolv- ing cultural ideals” could be found that environmental value would be safe from provincial nature-exploitative interests.7 Although it was and remains a fundamental part of the discourse of environmental ethics, I will provide some reasons to doubt the efficacy of this approach to value theory in part two of the book. Finally, by the 1980s it became conventional among environmental philosophers to contrast an “ecological worldview” with “the Modern scientific worldview”—where the latter is taken to be an expression of Cartesian dual- ism, atomism, mechanism, and reductionist materialism—and to indict it as one of the central causes of the ecological crisis. The theoretical and techno- logical transformations characterizing the Scientific Revolution, along with its supporting Judeo-Christian tradition, were seen as chief contributors to the highly anthropocentric, exploitative relationship of humankind to nature in western culture. From Arne Naess’s contrast between thing- and field-ontology (1972), to Carolyn Merchant’s case against Modern science and her plea for a return to a holistic, organismic conception of nature (1980), to Charles Birch and John Cobb Jr.’s mechanistic and ecological models of the living (1981), to J. Baird Callicott’s “metaphysical implications of ecology” (1986), and, ultimate- ly, to the elaboration of these alternative conceptions by other writers during the 1990s, including Warwick Fox (1990, 1995), Bryan Norton (1991), Murray Bookchin (1996), and Arran Gare (1996), this contrast became a defining fea- ture of environmental philosophy. Since “worldview” talk is also central to the post-Kantian tradition, the Continentalists among environmentalists seam- lessly extended the general antipathy to the sciences in the dominant strains of Continental philosophy into environmentalism, and works like Neil Evernden’s (1985) and David Abram’s (1995) also traded on a series of oppositions central to the grand contrast between mechanist and ecological worldviews. Even today, there are calls for “worldview remediation” and proposals to explicitly use the worldview concept as a tool in sustainable development debates.8 Introduction 3 © 2020 State University of New York Press, Albany Although the figures and approaches listed are often conceived as antagonistic to one another (e.g., deep ecology is often not compatible with pragmatism, nor is ecophenomenology compatible with social ecology), they share the preoccupation with distinguishing a minority environmentalist “ecological worldview” from a hegemonic “mechanistic worldview.” I will call this the “worldview clash” model for thinking about science-environmentalism relations. This book is organized around these three major topics. Used in the sense of “central issues” or “places” (topoi) of contention and thought, topics are “clear enough and serious enough to engage a mind to whom they are new, and also abrasive enough to strike sparks off those who have been thinking about these things for years.”9 This book directly engages with the fundamental assumptions, categories, concepts, and value priorities that characterize large parts of environmentalist thinking, and considers the conditions under which environmentalists and others generally think about the nature of humankind (philosophical anthropology), how they think about the value of nonhuman nature (metaethics and value theory), and how they understand more-than- human nature generally (ontology and epistemology).10 The three parts of the book deal with these three broad topics. I have organized the book in terms of them not because I think they embody timeless philosophical questions, but because initially I found it helpful to organize the wide array of literature that falls under the heading of environmental philosophy in this way, and hopefully it will be for others. For introducing environmental philosophy to those unfamiliar with it, they also serve a heuristic function, like a ladder to be pulled up and carefully dismantled once one reaches the desired height. I consider environmental philosophy to be an informed examination of the concepts, categories, assumptions, and priorities in historically and cultural- ly diverse human interaction with the human and nonhuman natural world, along with the implications of their mostly tacit operation. Philosophers have long recognized that much human activity is caused and conditioned in large part—but never exclusively—by linguistic and conceptual categories, value priorities, and unspoken assumptions that remain mostly invisible to those who think and act with them. Philosophers are particularly good at thinking about such conditions, and if they have shown that these conditions motivate anti-environmental activity in significant ways, finding the flaws

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