Extending the Circle of Rights

This week we considered the question: should the circle of rights be extended to include animals and plants? That is, should animals and plants be granted certain unconditional moral or legal entitlements? There are a range of views in the literature:

(1) Feinberg (1974) argues that animals should have rights but plants should not.
(2) Stone (1972) argues that some plants and natural environments should have rights.
(3) Hayward (1998) argues that the circle of rights should not be extended, but that ecological values should be enshrined in our social constitutions, as a natural extension of the logic of human rights.
(4) Attfield (1981) argues that plants cannot be rights bearers but that they can nevertheless be said to have 'interests' and 'value of their own'.

All four articles were interesting, but for now I'll just consider the following proposal by Feinberg (1974):

Interest Principle
The beings who can have rights are precisely those who can have interests.

I think that 'interests' may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for moral standing. Here are two definitions of 'interest':

1. the advantage or benefit of a person or group
2. a stake, share, or involvement in an undertaking, esp. a financial one

We can talk of animal or even plant 'interest' in the sense of both (1) and (2). What about the 'interest' of a river? If a plant's interests include striving towards the sun, absorbing nutrients and reproducing, do a river's interests include flowing downhill and out to sea? The ascription of 'interests' seems to be a case merely of teleological interpretation, and not a description of metaphysical fact. We look at these entities and ascribe certain 'goals' to them on the basis of their behaviour. We should be hesitant about taking these characterisations to be literally or metaphysically true.

What would it be for an ascription of 'interests' to be literally true? For plants and rivers to really have goals? Well, I think we consider interest ascription to animals to be 'more' true, and interest ascription to humans even more so.The notion of goals - and thus 'interests' in the sense relevant to moral standing - is closely related to psychology, to the concepts of mental states and intentionality. We might therefore refer to these more general debates in the philosophy of mind (e.g.. Dennett's 'intentional stance') in the hope of clarifying the kinds of beings that can have 'interests'.

Traditionally, moral theories have considered the capacity for 'intentional' behaviour to be a necessary and sufficient condition for moral standing. It seems that Stone (1972) is trying to move away from the idea of intentionality as unique characteristic of the mental. It strikes me that if we take an anti-realist view on intentionality* then we can't possibly use it as the basis for moral consideration. And of course, if we take a spectral view then any moral theory which refers to intentionality will of course need to specify the order of interpretation at which story about 'interests' becomes morally relevant.

The worries about this approach have somewhat reinforced my inclination towards moral non-cognitivism, or at least the view that emotional ties to things provide the basis for giving them moral consideration.

Notes:
* Dennett (1989) rejects the label anti-realism, taking intentional idiom to pick out 'real patterns' in the natural world. But, I think that refusing to recognise intentionality at the ontological level counts as anti-realism in a certain sense. In any case, I think the intentional stance has to amount to a spectral view of intentionality - it's not an all or nothing concept, just a way of understanding complex objects (e.g. in particular, humans). So, his view is still likely to give traditional moral theorists a headache.

References:
Attfield, R. (1981) 'The Good of Trees', Journal of Value Inquiry 15, pp.35-54
Dennett, D. (1989) The Intentional Stance (Cambridge: MIT Press)
Feinberg, J. (1974) 'The Rights of Animals', in Philosophy and Environmental Crisis,  Blackstone, W. (ed.) (Athens: University of Georgia Press)
Stone, C. (1972) 'Should Trees Have Standing', in University of Southern California Law Review 45, pp. 450-501
Hayward, T. (1998) 'Political Theory for a Sustainable Polity' in Political Theory and Ecological Values (Polity Press)

Instrumental vs Relational Value

I just realised I've been using 'instrumental value' in two different ways pretty much ever since I started thinking philosophically. To bring this out I will attempt two definitions:

1. An entity or state of affairs has instrumental value iff it is valuable a means of achieving a certain desideratum, or a series of desiderata.
   
2. An entity or state of affairs has relational value iff its value depends on its relation to other entities or states of affairs.

Are these definitions co-extensive? Well, instrumental value is clearly a species of relational value, but we might think there relational values which aren't properly called instrumental. Let's consider two examples:

(a) a Van Gogh painting
(b) a letter from a friend

Both clearly have relational value: their importance is dependent upon their relation to a group of human beings. But do they have instrumental value? Well, the Van Gogh might do: if you have a gallery it might attract patrons, if you are its owner it might function as a status symbol. Nevertheless, even once these factors have been accounted for, I would suggest there is some extra kind of valuing left over.

To make this kind clearer let's turn to the letter from a friend and suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is something you keep privately; the only people who know about it are you and its author. You value the letter highly, and resolve to keep it on your person until you die. Isn't your attachment to it an end in itself, not a means to an end? If so, then the letter possesses relational but non-instrumental value.

How to describe the foil we've revealed here? I'm tempted to label it 'intrinsic value', but skim-re-reading Weatherson (2008) suggests I shouldn't: it connotes a strong sense of self-subsistence which would make it seem non-relational. I also thought about 'independent value', in the sense of not depending on another value, though still, of course, upon a valuer (if it's a species of relational value). Finally, I wonder about 'fundamental' or 'founding' or 'basic' value, in so far as such values are presupposed by the notion of instrumental value, for I take it that they play the role of defining our desiderata. That is to say, it is our non-instrumental values which animate our pursuit of instrumental value.

But aren't our desiderata themselves always, ultimately, instrumental? I think that there is a certain sense in which this is true but an important context in which this is false, namely that of motivation. To foreground the Darwinian flavour of this question, let's imagine a couple enjoying contraceptive sex. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, we can explain their attraction towards this activity in terms of the paradigmatic 'desideratum' of genetic evolution; the propogation of genes. ( I place 'desideratum' in inverted commas, because, of course, natural selection is a blind effect of physical forces, not a volitional agent; thus not a literal subject of 'desires'. ) An ultimate explanation* of the couple's sexual desires can be given in a way which makes them look instrumental: in the context of a theory of genetic evolution we can say that these desires were selected for because of their instrumental value. But, speaking proximately, that is, in terms of the motivations of the agents themselves, contraceptive sex is clearly enjoyed for its own sake, not as a means of achieveing a further desideratum.

To return to the two ways in which I've been using instrumental value, let me take another example. In a discussion of environmental ethics, we might ask, for example: why we should save a particular natural landscape from destruction by property developers? The tensions in such a debate will arise due to a complex set of competing values, and within this set there will be discerned different types of value. The developer will justify her proposal in terms of instrumental value: she wants to harness the economic potential of the land. Those who oppose her proposal may cite instrumental reasons of a similar kind, such as the economic benefits that such a landscape brings to the community. In such a case they engage with the developer on her own terms, and show that leaving the land as it is is the better option economically. But, more likely, they will suggest that the landscape possess other kinds of value, which should be respected, or at least considered as part of the trade off. These values might be labelled 'aesthetic' or 'spiritual'; they are those which we enjoy when we talk a walk in the country, for example. But, thought I, isn't this attempt to cite non-instrumental values ultimately self-defeating: though we are now in the domain of non-economic values, we nevertheless remain within that of instrumental values - we've now assumed desiderata such as human happiness or spiritual well-being, and given the land value as a means to achieving these.

Any approach which remains within the terms of instrumental value seems somewhat unsatisfactory: if some other means of achieving our ends were available, say, for example, a virtual experience machine, then according to this approach we would no longer have any reason to preserve the natural landscape in question. There's an obvious intuitive resistance here; something about this conclusion feels wrong. Should we just bite this bullet, or is there a problem with the argument? Well, I'd like to suggest a diagnosis: namely that we have moved away from the proximate question 'how** do we as individuals value the landscape?' to the broader question 'why do we as a society value the landscape'? In this shift, we loose the crucial context of an individual valuing human subject - with all its rational and emotional complexities - and instead gravitate towards the abstract conception of a 'rational' society, composed of institutions that act and are founded solely upon intelligible reasons, not in terms of affective attachments. On most substantive (i.e. non-procedural) conceptions, their goal is to abstract from the affective to find common, intelligible, 'objective' values - but if my non-cognitivism about 'basic' values is correct, this is a rather misdirected project, that may well encourage a sterile instrumentalist mindset which fails to consider ethical questions in a genuinely human context.***

Notes:
* I'm inspired by Pinker (2003)'s ultimate / proximate distinction in this context.
** I write 'how' rather than 'why' because I think that most of the relevant valuations (e.g. the non-instrumental ones) are not amenable to 'why' questions, which ask for justification in terms of reasons; I take them to be emotional, i.e. irrational.
*** Perhaps a partial antidote to the problem suggested here would be to rephrase the broader question posed to society - in terms of a more descriptive 'how' instead of an (overly-)explanation-seeking 'why'?

References:
Pinker, S. (2003) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, (London: Penguin Books Ltd)
Weatherson, B. (2008) "Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Properties", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/intrinsic-extrinsic/>.

Why might it be dangerous to hold a physicalist view of nature?

Revising for today's mid-term, I made a mental note to return to the question: Why may it be dangerous to view nature as a mechanical system?

To begin by clarifying the question, I take this to be referring to a view concerning the constitution of the mind-independent world, namely that it is mechanistic, or systematic, or at least somewhat conceptually constituted. With these inelegant formulations, I'm struggling to substantively characterise the view expressed by physicalism, namely that nature really is constituted by the fundamental entities which physics describes (or attempts to describe).

So, I'll reframe the question as follows:

Why might it be dangerous to hold a physicalist view of nature?
Well, I'd like to consider this from the perspective of Husserl Crisis (1954). In the wonderfully-titled first section, he writes of 'The Crisis of the Sciences as the Expression of the Radical Life-Crisis of European Humanity'. In brief, he describes the problem as follows: the scientific quest for objective knowledge has led to a forgetfulness, which concerns two closely related phenomena: subjectivity and the life-world.  The sciences, Husserl charges, have forgotten the everyday life-world upon which they are based, and have conseqently become groundless. At the same time, they have become the dominant discourse in European society, such that they strongly determine the way that 'European humanity' looks at the world. As a result, we find ourselves in a situation where science is incapable of addressing all questions 'ultimate and highest'; where it cannot address questions which concern us in our living existence; particularly, I think, questions concerning non-instrumental values. According to Husserl, the positivistic conception 'decaptitates philosophy', because it fails to recognise the proper concern of the discipline, which is to consider questions 'of a higher dignity than questions of fact'. Accordingly, the crisis of science is revealed in 'the loss of its meaning for life.'

How did this situation come about? In brief, Husserl takes the sciences to have emerged from the insight that there is a difference between the manifold appearances of an object to a subject and the single unified object which lies behind these appearances. From the outset, science has been concerned primarily with proceeding from the experience of former to knowledge of the latter. Galileo cemented the final foundation for the 20th century crisis: his seminal work effectively ushered in what Husserl calls the 'mathematisation of nature'. From Galileo onwards, the ideal shapes of geometry were taken to be constitutive of reality (herein I'll call this the constitution assumption); the geometrical and mathematical truths of physics were taken to be the fundamental truths. The widespread view, since then, is that the ideal shapes of geometry and their representations in mathematics somehow reflect the true nature of reality. I think this view underwrites what we would now call physicalism.

In Husserl's words, the mathematisation of nature amounts to the view that 'the infinite totality of what is in general is intrinsically a rational all-encompassing unity that can be mastered, without anything left over, by a corresponding universal science.' Clearly, physicalism is an intellectually optimistic view, though it does not assume that such a final state of totalising mastery is actually realisable. Nevertheless, I can imagine Michael Morris, with an eye to John McDowell, suggesting that the basic thrust of such a hypothesis sounds rather idealistic.

Anyway, having pointed all this out, Husserl reminds us that, of course, we never actually experience the ideal shapes of geometry. They are abstractions from the life-world, which, according to Husserl, always contains a degree of indeterminacy. Perceptual objects are asymptotic in their progression towards the ideal, exact, geometrical object. Given this, we have reason to wonder how the constitution assumption which underwrites the physicalist view might be justified. In what I've read so far, Husserl does not consider how this might be argued for. * [ I'd like to research arguments for this view, perhaps I should read more McDowell. ]

In the meantime, we can remark that on this topic Husserl does ask 'is there not in the appearances themselves a content we must ascribe to true nature?' In other words, if we want to give a complete account of the natural world, do we not need to include both subjectivity and the life-world? If the answer is yes, and this cannot be done in a physical vocabulary, then we have a prima facie reason for rejecting the constitution assumption, ergo, physicalism. Here we rejoin the contemporary debate regarding the problem of consciousness, which I'm inclined to consider pretty 'hard'. (c.f. Chalmers (1995))

Why might physicalism be dangerous? Well, problems potentially arise from its neglect of the life-world as mentioned earlier. If it neglects or surpresses its origin in the life-world, then it forgets its originating purpose, as a creation of, and instrument for, the subject. Unless it is seen as such, science may come to dominate the subject, and humanity more broadly, and consequently lead to the neglect of important non-factual, perhaps non-cognitive, discussions concerning 'higher' questions.** If a pragmatic scientific mindset comes to be unduly dominant, it could lead to a severe impoverishment of humanity, of which technologism would be a symptom.

In short, I think the moral of the Crisis is this: remember that it is the life-world which gives rise to science, that the pursuit of science presupposes the normative horizon of meaning found within the life-world. Without the animating normative context of the life-world, science could not exist. In our understandable enthusiasm for scientific progress we should not neglect other important questions which present themselves to us, in particular those fundamental ones concerning non-instrumental value. The danger, writes Husserl, is that 'merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.' And that, we might think, would be nothing less than the end of humanity.


Notes:
* Nietzsche (1885), discussing this topic, writes in Zarathustra 'What urges you on and arouses your ardour, you wisest of men, do you call it 'will to truth?' Will to the conceivability of all being: that is what I call your will! You first want to make all being conceivable: for, with a healthy mistrust, you doubt whether it is in fact conceivable. But it must bend and accommodate itself to you! [...] It must become smooth and subject to the mind as the mind's mirror and reflection.'

** It's not that physicalism precludes such discussions - many claim, for example, that the view is compatible with realism about other levels of description including moral discourse. I'm yet to see how this could work however, basically finding myself in agreement with Kim (1989) in my dissatisfaction with purportedly non-reductive 'supervenience' accounts.

References:
Chalmers, D. (1995) 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness', Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 200-19 [ available at URL = http://consc.net/papers/facing.html ]

Husserl, E. (1954) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970) [ extracts available at URL = http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/husserl.htm ]

Kim, J. (1989) ‘The Myth of Non-Reductive Materialism’, Proceedings and Addresses of the     American Philosophical Association, Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 31-47.

Nietzche, F. (1885) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Hollingdale, R. J. (trans.) (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1969), p. 136

Snow in Reykjavik

Well, despite a slightly pressed weekend of cramming, I feel like today's mid-term went well. Rather fittingly, I enjoyed a wonderful natural-aesthetic experience on leaving the exam hall - the first sprinkling of snow in Reykjavik.

From now on I'll be posting at weekly intervals, summarising and commenting upon each week's reading. At some point I'll also post the presentation Christopher, Bjork and I gave on Murray Bookchin's criticisms of Deep Ecology.

Yuriko Saito 'Appreciating Nature on its Own Terms'

 “Listening to nature as nature, must involve recognizing its own reality apart from us.(…) Appreciating nature on its own terms, therefore, must be based upon listening to a story nature tells of itself through all its perceptual features; that is, a story concerning its origin, make-up, function and working, independent of human presence or involvement” (Yuriko Saito)

Saito (2004) is arguing for an aesthetic appreciation of nature which goes beyond anthropic self-projection, to an appreciation of truly mind-independent nature. Like Carlson (2008), she is a realist who wants to ground the aesthetic appreciation of nature objectively, that is, in mind-independent nature itself. For them both, aeshetic appreciation involves more than just creating aesthetic values, it involves recognising them in the natural world as such. Like Carlson, Saito thinks that we can look to the natural sciences for advice on how to appreciate nature aesthetically; after all, on the typical realist conception, its founding aim is to consider nature on its own terms. Unlike Carlson, however, Saito also accepts the relevance of non-scientific discourses, such as those of folklore and tradition. She is also sympathetic to non-cognitive attempts to enage with nature on its own terms - I take 'all perceptual features' to be suggestive of this broadly permissive view. While Carlson holds a cognitive realist view, Saito is a non-cognitive realist.

Saito's environmental aesthetic seems to be underwritten by a sense of moral obligation to consider nature on its own terms. She writes:

“the appropriate appreciation of nature must include the moral capacity for acknowledging the reality of nature apart from humans and the sensitivity for listening to its own story”

Her view agrees with Leopold's insofar as she is endorsing an ethical relationship with nature 'apart from humans', which I take to mean an ethical relationship with nature as such, rather than a merely anthropocentric ethical relationship with nature (e.g. one in which nature is respected as a communal good for humans).

This makes me wonder about the relationship between an environmental ethic and an environmental aesthetic - might one serve as a ground for the other, or might they at least be mutually reinforcing?  Another second question: is it reasonable to assume that 'nature's story' has an aesthetic value? Nature red in tooth and claw can look rather bleak indeed, as can the cold indifferent material universe. Yet naturalists often talk of 'wonder' at the complexity and diversity of natural processes. I've not considered this topic much, but my immediate response is: 'well, it depends how you look at it.' But this indicates a subjectivism about aesthetic judgements which I do not think either Saito or Carlson would be happy with.

References:
Carlson, A. (2008) "Aesthetic Appreciation of the Natural Environment” in Nature, Aesthetics and Environmentalism. Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott (eds.) (New York: Columbia University Press)
Saito, Y. (2004) “Appreciating Nature on Its Own Terms” in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, Berleant & Carlson (eds.) (Broadview Press)

Aldo Leopold on an Ethical Relationship to Land

 “It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for it’s value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.“ (Aldo Leopold)

Leopold (1981) sees the development of an emotional relationship with land as a precondition for an ethical relationship with it. A cold blooded materialist might express scepticism about the idea of an emotional or an ethical relationship of the kind Leopold envisages. How, she might ask, could we develop an emotional attachment to indifferent, inanimate matter? Well, along with the insights of psychology, recent work in the phenomenology of space and place has further revealed just how deep our emotional relationships to our living environments can become. Last easter I read an article by a former tutor, Dylan Trigg, entitled 'Anonymous Materiality', in which he gave a phenomenological account of the return to a childhood home, which highlighted, among other things, the spectacle of the formerly intimate and friendly family home now appearing indifferent and anonymous, in its cold materiality. In short, human beings emphatically do create and maintain deep emotional relationships to space and place, though of course, these relationships are one-sided. We might remark further, that although these relationships may be emotionally negative, it is typically an affectionate relationship that develops towards the environments which reliably provide sustenance.

Granting the possibility of such emotional relationships, we can now ask why they would be a pre-condition for an ethical relationship. I think the answer is made fairly clear by analogy with ethical relationships between humans, which themselves seem to be largely based upon emotions such as compassion, empathy and love. It would almost seem like a commonplace to assert that ethical relationships are based on emotions rather than calculations.

So, we can now see why the instrumentalist view of nature, which is based on rational estimations of utility, is considered by Leopold, among others, to be fundamentally non-ethical. Perhaps such an attitude is also unethical (I take this latter to be a pejorative label, while 'non-ethical' is merely descriptive). The confirmation of this 'perhaps' will depend on the question of whether we 'ought' to hold an ethical relationship with nature - whether we should play up or play down our latent emotional relationships with it. Arguing for a Leopoldian response to this question could be done on the grounds of pragmatics - but to do this would be self-defeating, to remain within an instrumental perspective. The question is whether we should cultive a non-instrumental relationship with nature, and any answer of the form 'yes, so that...' fails to answer the question. I think the most promising approach, for a Leopoldian, may be that suggested by Thomas Hill (1983), which is to address the question somewhat indirectly, through the lens of virtue ethics. If virtues are characteristics we consider valuable in themselves, then we should not be surprised by our inability to supply satisfactory reasons for valuing them. In the present context, we might ask: would the kind of person we admire be someone who maintains an ethical relationship to the land?

References:
Hill, T. (1983) 'Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving Natural Environments', Environmental Ethics 5, pp.211-24
Leopold, A. (1981) 'The Land Ethic' in A Sand County Almanac, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp.237-65 

Henry David Thoreau on Simplicity

Thoreau (1854) says that people “try to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicted than the problem itself”. What does that mean?

The problem of a livelihood is simply the problem of how to satisfy one's physical needs, how to respond to the necessities of life. Thoreau argues that the problem of a livelihood is much more straightforward than is commonly thought. Really, he thinks, it is a simple problem which admits of a simple solution. Accordingly, Thoreau's 'poor' are those who 'try to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself,' that is those who supply an overcomplicated response to the problem of a livelihood.

Thoreau takes such overcomplication to be widespread. According to him, it is due to a number of factors including:

(1) moralism - a sense of guilt arises if we don't work hard
(2) lack of imagination - what else could we do?
(3) false needs - we mistake 'wants' for 'needs', and so become dominated by our own desires

I think an evolutionary psychologist would add 'striving for status' to this list.

According to Thoreau (1854) we commonly live as we do because we think we have no choice. Explain what he means by that.

Thoreau laments the predominance of so called 'false needs', which give rise to the impression that our existence is necessarily far more arduous than it in fact has to be. He takes people in general to work far too hard, far beyond the minimum effort required a modest and happy livelihood. Thoreau thinks that people suffer from an overinflated conception of what they need, coming to view many luxury or 'desired' items as outright necessities. As a result, they become locked into painful striving for these luxuries - for they feel obliged to possess them - and their lives are passed away in endless toil. People forget how relatively little effort is needed to live, and end up being dominated by their work. If they could see the error of their ways, they could choose to live much happier lives under the maxim of 'simplicity, simplicity, simplicity'.

References:
Thoreau, H. (1854) 'Economy' in Walden and Other Essays, [ URL = http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/thoreau/wa01_economy ]