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Awe and Humility: Intrinsic Value in Nature. Beyond an Earthbound Environmental Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2010

Keekok Lee
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Extract

This paper will argue for a conception of intrinsic value which, it is hoped, will do justice to the following issues:

(1) that Nature need not and should not be understood to refer only to what exists on this planet, Earth;

(2) that an environmental ethics informed by features unique to Earth may be misleading and prove inadequate as technology increasingly threatens to invade and colonize other planets in the solar system;

(3) that a comprehensive environmental ethics must encompass not only our attitude to Earth, but to other planets as well—in other words, it must not simply be an Earthbound but virtually an astronomically bounded ethics.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 36 , March 1994 , pp. 89 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1994

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References

1 One notable exception is Rolston. Although he does not touch on the matter in Rolston, 1988, he has addressed it in Rolston, 1986b. Indeed, all the issues related to environmental ethics and the solar system are given an airing in Hargrove, 1986. (I wish to thank Professor Rolston for kindly drawing my attention to this.)

2 See Callicott, 1986, for the distinction between the source and locus of values.

3 Other life forms also create artefacts—bees build hives, birds nests, beavers dams, etc. But they make them to fulfil a very specific and limited need. When they have outgrown their creations, they simply leave them to disintegrate on their own.

4 For Rolston's own arguments, see Rolston, 1986b.

5 Someone could object that Callicott's distinction cannot be deployed in the context of the Last Person Argument on the grounds that a world without human consciousness is a world without values. But this would not be correct. The last human in contemplating the annihilation of Nature after his or her own demise would be morally prevented from doing so because such a person would recognise that Nature is a locus of intrinsic value.