Environmental ethicists have looked to metaethics as part of their project of formulating a philosophical approach capable of articulating the causes of and solutions to environ- mental problems. In general they have looked to metaethics to vindicate, or at least allow, three claims: (1) that human beings are not the source of all goodness in the world— that at least some parts or aspects of nonhuman nature are good independently of their value to us; (2) that human beings and human morality must be understood as continuous with rather than independent from the natural world; (3) that humans’ moral beliefs can be fool- ish, ignorant, selfish, solipsistic, short- sighted, and otherwise stupid, not just individually but collectively as well— that is, that we can (and sometimes do) get morality quite wrong.
Let us first consider the claim that human beings are not the source of all value. Some envi- ronmental ethicists have interpreted this claim purely normatively as the view that humans (and/ or human interests, human ends, and human experiences) aren’t the only things that
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have value in their own right, that at least some nonhuman parts of the world have intrinsic value. Understood normatively, as a claim about how we ought to value the natural world, this claim is compatible with almost every metaethical position I have described. A sub- jectivist will say that by making this claim, we are expressing beliefs about certain mind- dependent facts about nature; a nonnaturalist will say that we are claiming that nature has the nonnatural property of goodness; an emotivist will say that we are expressing an intrinsi- cally valuing attitude toward nature, and so on. Indeed, many environmental ethicists accept the compatibility of strong intrinsic value claims about nonhuman nature with these meta- ethical positions and on that basis have accepted subjectivist metaethical frameworks, for example, as fully compatible with normative claims about the intrinsic value of the natural world (Elliot, 1997; Callicott, 19999; Jamieson, 2002; O’Neill, 1992).
Other environmental ethicists, however, have interpreted intrinsic value claims as at least partly metaphysical. Holmes Rolston, III, for example, claims that on a subjectivist account of intrinsic value, “Despite the language that humans are the source of value which [sub- jectivists] locate in the natural object, no value is really located there at all” (1988: 115). On Rolston’s view, if the facts that vindicate our claims about an object’s intrinsic value are really just facts about a perceiving subject’s mental states, then the value isn’t properly intrinsic to the valued object. The value isn’t “in” the object at all; it is in the perceiver or perhaps in the relation between the perceiver and the object. This kind of claim only makes sense if we think that claims about intrinsic value are (or imply) claims about the metaphysics of value (O’Neill, 1992; McShane, 2007a; and Jamieson, 2008).10 Nonetheless, some environmental ethicists have taken the view that in order for us to regard some entities in the nonhuman natural world as having intrinsic value (i.e., value independently of their relationship with us, the valuing subjects), we must be objectivists about value (i.e., we must think of value as a mind- independent property that really exists in the natural world and to which we really have a duty to be responsive). Thus we shouldn’t be subjectivists of any kind— or error theo- rists, fictionalists, or noncognitivists.
Whether this is a position that makes any sense will take some sorting out. In one respect, it looks to be a simple mistake. Metaethics is in the business of explaining what we’re doing when we’re making claims such as, “Trees are intrinsically valuable.” It is not in the business of assessing the content of these claims. Metaethics doesn’t tell us which things are right or good; rather, it tells us what we would be saying in claiming that they are so. In this respect, any metaethical view ought to be compatible with any claim about the value of the nonhu- man natural world, even intrinsic value claims. It won’t evaluate these claims, of course, but that’s not its job. Its job is just to explain what we mean in asserting them and what vindicat- ing them would require (O’Neill, 2001; Jamieson, 2002).11
On the other hand, certain metaethical theories clearly can imply the truth or falsity of cer- tain intrinsic value claims. A simple reductive naturalism that identifies intrinsic value with pleasure will have to deem the claim “Trees are intrinsically valuable” false, since according to this view nothing but pleasure can be intrinsically valuable. Such a view could still claim that trees tend to produce something of intrinsic value in us, and perhaps even that they do so in virtue of their own properties rather than in virtue of their relations to us, but it must technically deny the claim that trees can possess intrinsic value. Certain simple naturalistic reductions, then, might rule out particular normative views. Whether they do so in a way that seems like a “mere technicality” or whether we ought to be worried about the normative claims that would be thereby undermined depends on how metaphysically robust we think
Truth and Goodness: Metaethics in Environmental Ethics 143 our normative claims should be. By the same mechanism, certain naturalistic reductions might guarantee the truth of our normative claims. If we identify intrinsic value with “being an organism,” then we guarantee that trees will turn out to be intrinsically valuable (Rolston, 1988; McShane, 2007b). It is worth pointing out, however, that simple naturalistic reductions have very few proponents in contemporary metaethics.
The preceding analysis assumes that what intrinsic value theorists want out of a metaethi- cal theory is for their intrinsic value claims to turn out to be true. What we have seen is that most versions of cognitivism allow for them to be true— though (a) different versions of cog- nitivism will interpret these claims somewhat differently, and (b) simple reductive natural- isms could have difficulty with more metaphysically robust interpretations of intrinsic value claims. On any standard version of noncognitivism, these intrinsic value claims can be at least as true as any other moral claim. (More precisely, they will be as eligible for whatever the analogue of truth is on the particular version of noncognitivism at issue— e.g., second- order endorsement, the rationality of intrinsically valuing attitudes, etc.) Because of these facts— that is, because most metaethical theories don’t entail that claims about the intrinsic value of nature are false, or in any case, more false than any other value claim— some envi- ronmental ethicists have rejected the view that metaethics has any significant relationship to the normative claims that are, or at least should be, the central focus of environmental ethics (Jamieson, 2002; O’Neill, 2001).
However, one might be able to tell a more sympathetic story about why an environmental ethicist concerned to make intrinsic value claims would have preferences regarding meta- ethical theories. Consider a view common in environmental circles: that environmental destruction has been a result of human arrogance. The idea is that we can see this arrogance expressed in many domains, in many mutually reinforcing narratives about the world: that we are at the “top of the food chain”; that we are a unique and awesome achievement of evo- lution; that we alone create art, civilization, morality, and science; that we alone possess rea- son, and perhaps souls; that our science and technology have freed us from our biological and ecological limits; that the rest of the world is a resource for us. Many environmentalists want to challenge this arrogance by telling a different kind of story— one that views people as only a small part of what matters in the universe. This might include making claims about history (how old and large the universe is compared to human beings, how recently humans have arrived on the evolutionary scene), biology (how impressive the traits of other spe- cies are), religion (how our religious duties include care and respect for the natural world), and so on. The aim is to tell stories that decenter humanity, that don’t portray human beings as the entirety or pinnacle of everything worth caring about. In the realm of morality, this might involve challenging the assumption that people are the center of the moral universe, that all of morality is ultimately about us and our interests, that all goodness in the universe must somehow have a connection to our species.
There are three points worth noting here. One is that this would explain why environ- mental ethicists might have worries about the human- centeredness of our metaethical theories that aren’t just worries about the normative implications of metaethical views.
Environmental ethicists might be concerned about the human- centeredness of metaethics in its own right, in much the same way that they are concerned about human- centered his- torical or scientific stories. Of course, a metaethicist might object that the fact that a story is human- centered doesn’t necessarily make the story an incorrect one. (It might, for example, be a better narrative for political purposes to say that the world is made of pudding; it doesn’t
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follow from this that we should abandon quantum mechanics in favor of pudding mechan- ics.) If we have a clearly true view, the metaethicist might argue, the fact that it tells an unde- sirable kind of story shouldn’t deter us from accepting it. Likewise, if we have a clearly false view, the fact that it tells a desirable kind of story shouldn’t deter us from rejecting it.
And yet our choice among theories in contemporary metaethics isn’t between clearly true theories and clearly false theories. What we have instead are a range of plausible theories, each of which does a better job of explaining some phenomena and a worse job of explain- ing other phenomena. All of them are trying to explain our practices in the moral domain in a way that is coherent with our explanations of other aspects of the world, and there is disagreement among theorists about which kinds of coherence it is most important for a theory to establish. Some naturalists think we must make metaethical theories consistent with the belief that the only facts in the world are natural facts, some noncognitivists think it more important to explain how normative claims get their motivational grip on us; some cognitivists think we most need to explain moral disagreement or the logical functionality of moral language. Environmental intrinsic- value theorists are insisting on coherence with a different set of background beliefs: that the best explanation of the most important features of the world cannot be parochially focused on human beings. Of course, it might turn out that coherence with this kind of belief does not constitute an acceptable standard by which to assess our metaethical theories. But an argument for that claim would need to be given.12
The second point worth noting is that there might be relationships other than logical implicature between our metaethical positions and our normative positions that an environ- mental ethicist would be right to care about. Claims in one domain can make claims in other domains more probable; they can have stronger coherence relations than others; they can make claims in other domains less surprising. The aforementioned intrinsic value theorists aren’t just concerned about whether the truth of a value proposition is logically possible;
they care about how plausible it will look within the overall story about humans and their place in the world. In this regard, a theory that makes our subjective attitudes the truth- makers for all claims about goodness might make claims about the value of a natural world that we largely don’t know about or care about seem less plausible, even if it is still logically possible for those claims to be true.
The third point is that even in cases where there aren’t any probabilistic or coherence rela- tionships between two domains when background beliefs are taken into account, claims in one domain still might have powerful framing effects on the way that we view claims in another domain. Social theorists have long noticed how assumptions about the way political or economic institutions must be organized affect the explanations that people find plausible in biology and ecology: nonhierarchical explanations seem less plausible to people accus- tomed to living in hierarchical social institutions; individualist explanations seem more plausible to those who understand other matters individualistically.13 Likewise, one might think, a story about what goodness consists in that makes our attitudes toward things central might make us more inclined to see human satisfaction as the only good and less inclined to think that the natural world can have goodness in it outside of the ways that it serves our interests.
The second claim that environmental ethicists have looked to metaethics to vindicate is the claim that human beings and human morality must be understood as continuous with rather than independent from the natural world. This claim is important to some envi- ronmental ethicists because they view our belief in human exceptionalism (the view that
Truth and Goodness: Metaethics in Environmental Ethics 145 humans are qualitatively different from and superior to the rest of nature) as part of the expla- nation of how we could have allowed ourselves to treat nonhuman nature so badly. Thus a metaethical position that rejects this hubris can be seen as an important corrective to human self- congratulation. To accept human beings and human morality as part of the natural world suggests that we’re not as special as we might like to think. This thought has motivated some environmental ethicists to prefer naturalism to nonnaturalism and supernaturalism. If moral facts either are or are reducible to natural facts, then we can see human moral systems as just another mode of social organization that social animals have developed.14
And yet far from recommending any particular metaethical perspective, this concern seems to be only a mark against nonnaturalism and supernaturalism. Rejecting nonnatural- ism and supernaturalism does seem to rule out at least one reason for thinking that humans are exceptional: that our moral agency connects us to a special realm of facts that differs in kind from those accessible to nonhumans, who (some claim) aren’t moral agents. But meta- ethical naturalism is not the only alternative to nonnaturalism or supernaturalism. Error theory/ fictionalism and all of noncognitivism are also fully compatible with viewing human behavior as just another kind of animal behavior.
The third claim, that humans can get morality quite wrong, has seemed an important fact about morality to those who think that on matters of our relationship to the nonhuman natural environment, we humans have in fact gotten morality quite wrong. Thus many envi- ronmental ethicists have wanted a theory that preserves the possibility of widespread— even universal— mistakenness. This has moved some theorists away from mind- dependent views of moral facts (response- dependence, conventionalism, subjectivism, etc.), since they feel the need to articulate a notion of moral truth in which what is true is independent of, and often opposed to, people’s opinions. This concern has also moved some theorists away from noncognitivism and toward cognitivism, since cognitivist views have a more straightfor- ward explanation of what it is for a moral claim to be mistaken (Attfield, 1995).
And yet, almost every metathical position these days tries to account for the way in which we talk as if people can be mistaken in their moral claims. Proponents of mind- dependent views of moral facts try to account for the fact that our disagreements about moral claims seem to presuppose that their truth is independent of our belief in them. Proponents of non- cognitivism try to account for the fact that we seem to talk as if our moral claims are claims that can be true or false in the first place. These are old problems in metaethics, and every contemporary theory has something to say about them. This is not to say that all of the solu- tions are equally good, of course.15 But it is important to notice the many different ways that metaethical theories have of capturing environmental ethicists’ intuitions about the way that goodness exists in the world.