Jason Dockstader’s ‘Mandatory Non-Anthropocentrism: The Political Unrealism Of Making Metaethical Demands In Environmental Ethics’ has a title which seemed to neatly tie together a number of my interests, so I was very keen to read it. And as far as reflecting my interests, I wasn’t disappointed, though I was surprised by some of the emphases, which I suppose is even better because it’s disappointing to not be surprised. I am not sure that I am entirely convinced by the arguments, and I will explain why, but I hope this does not give the impression that I didn’t like the paper. In tying normative theory (broadly construed) to moral psychology, rejecting too-easy victories that appeal to metaphysics, and citing Raymond Geuss on politics, it ticks a lot of the right boxes, and so is a rare aid in one of the tasks I have set myself (and which I hope that I share with Dockstader): the task of saving the environment by first saving ‘environmental ethics’ from itself.
As I see it, Dockstader has three main points: First, that the moral-realist ‘intrinsic value’ so popular in environmental ethics (EE) is a dead-end, implicitly because the competing and equally intuition-based accounts seem to all be as unhelpful as each other, and explicitly because there is always some glimmer of anthropocentrism in any of these which gives away its real genesis and purpose. Second, there is no reason to think that a belief in (or knowledge of?) metaphysical intrinsic value will motivate the desired sorts of behaviour anyway. And third, that if it is hard to move from ethical theory to its rational instantiation in our free choices, it is harder still to instantiate it in the full range of our behaviours given that we (most of us) must live our lives in a socio-political framework of some sort or another, and this framework cannot be a product of pure moral theory. Politics is not just applied morality, and indeed morality is more political than the disciplines of normative and applied ethics tend to acknowledge. I take these to be all good points.
So far, so good. But at a few points the chapter is probably a bit unfair to EE, and it is worth examining these. At one point, after making a few pragmatic suggestions, Dockstader writes:
“I do not think any environmental or any other kind of applied or normative ethicist would accept any of these options because they are all metaethical moral realists, that is, they believe there are moral facts about the world, like intrinsic value, that can be known and which can and must guide our behavior.” (pp165-6, see also 172)
This is surely a mistake, and I was not sure how seriously to take this claim, but reading on (e.g. pp169-70) I do feel that it is doing some work – Dockstader does seem to assume that a survey of ethicists by Schwitzgebel and Rust is a survey of not just moral realists but (perhaps) believers in metaphysical intrinsic moral value a la G.E. Moore or Richard Sylvan. So there is a double or even triple conflation here: I can’t accept that one needs to believe in Moorean intrinsic value to be a moral realist (e.g. non-consequentialist realists), nor that one must actually be a moral realist to discuss ethics in moral-realist shorthand terminology when giving ethics advice (e.g. Simon Blackburn), nor that one must use moral-realist shorthand in order to get a job as an ethicist and so qualify for the Schwitzgebel and Rust study (though likely it helps).
The chapter is probably also a bit quick to downplay the usefulness of EE, even if it is quite correct in its major criticisms. The purpose attributed to intrinsic value in EE is quite bland and perhaps a bit straw-mannish:
“Keep in mind that the environmental ethicist’s assumption is that people who believe in intrinsic value will tend to be the kind of people who behave, one would think consistently, in accordance with their belief.” (167)
There is some case made for this, as the reader is referred to the numerous theories of error that the environmental ethicists have come up with. The appeal of these (Plumwood on patriarchy, Naess on atomistic individualism), I take it, is that they can tell us in one fell swoop why most people are unable to fully see the intrinsic value in nature, and also why they continue to have a bad relationship with the natural world.
Dockstader does not seem to have much faith in these theories of error, and I sympathise with him. But the chapter often reads as if this is the purpose of EE, and that might be going too far.
“As we saw, the psycho-behavioral thesis [i.e. belief leads to action] is the key implicit assumption of all environmental ethics. The assumption is that by viewing the world non-anthropocentrically one tends to behave in more environmentally helpful ways.” (166)
I agree in rejecting this (‘the’?) assumption, though I am not so sure that the psychology literature cited here has stood the test of time (no less an authority than Daniel Kahneman has backtracked somewhat in his support for much of it). I suppose that the replication crisis in psychology was just getting started when the chapter was published. Still, there is plenty of new material in psychology and behavioural economics and indeed philosophy which is currently being tested and synthesised into a hopefully better paradigm, and it suggests much the same thing: that ‘intrinsic value’ is not on its own a real answer to the questions of how or why we do the right thing.
But is it ‘the’ assumption? What comes first, belief in metaphysical intrinsic value, or a belief that such belief is helpful? There is a risk here in accusing the EE writers of not just wishful thinking but active deceit. Now I confess to having had this sort of worry at times – there does seem to be too much appeal to authority in EE (worse: appeal to the EE paradigm’s own authority!) – but I think this is an uncharitable interpretation, and might lead us to reject the whole project as having propaganda value only, and very little even of that.
I’ll try to briefly outline a different stance:
Of course there is such a thing as intrinsic value – just not the sort of thing environmental ethicists tend to mean by the term. We could not function without non-instrumental values (there would be no end for our instrumental thinking/behaviour to be a means to – we would just stay in bed until we died). The mistake of EE is to overgeneralise from our own experience of valuing to the way the universe actually is. EE goes too far in this direction, but there could be instructive lessons here still. Indeed, in moral philosophy a deliberate attempt to experiment with ‘universalising our values’ is often a good practice. (As is, needless to say, recognising that our values are not really universally shared.) Moral theory cannot bridge the gap between belief and behaviour, but it can give us a better sense of what bridging the gap might look like, and this notion is a prerequisite for even figuring out that we have not bridged it, and how much work is required. In many cases it can also show us that the work required is too great, or the consequences too ridiculous. These latter conclusions are likely to be particularly visible when we try to bring in a more nuanced or scientific account of moral and political behaviour, as Dockstader has done. But this is no more a defeater (I think?) to the idea of intrinsically valuing nature than to any other sort of intrinsic valuing. It is just an important concern which needs to be addressed, if the thought of the environmental ethicists is to be put to practical use.
The ArachneanMetaxion Point 