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.
146 Katie McShane
century. G. E. Moore distinguished the central questions of each in Principia Ethica and made the distinction central to his work (Moore, 1993). Ethical theorists who followed Moore accepted this distinction, and by midcentury it was largely taken for granted within Anglo- American analytic philosophy that metaethics is normatively neutral; its claims are logically distinct from any substantive normative position. Furthermore, the general view seemed to be that this was a good thing, as it made metaethics a proper subject for philoso- phy. The view, to quote L. W. Sumner, was “that the proper office of the ethical philosopher is metaethics, normative concerns being better left to such as journalists, politicians, and preachers” (1967: 95). Of course, this was in an era where appeals to ordinary language and conceptual analysis were the main focus of philosophy. That has since changed. Views about the independence of metaethics from normative ethics, for the most part, have not. So what should we think about this matter today?
One way in which metaethics might be thought normatively nonneutral is in defining the realm of “the moral,” which it seeks to explain. Any metaethical theory will have to say some- thing about what domain it is trying to explain— what the boundaries of that domain are and what distinguishes it from other domains. So, for example, one might define moral claims as claims about harm and benefit, or beliefs about moral wrongness as beliefs about the cir- cumstances in which guilt and shame are warranted (Railton, 1986; Gibbard, 1990). How one carries out this circumscription clearly has an impact on which claims and practices can be considered part of the domain of ethics, which in turn can affect our thinking about which behaviors are subject to ethical scrutiny. For example, if one thinks that the domain of the moral includes only those actions that produce harm or benefit, then the destruction of things that have no well- being (and thus cannot be harmed or benefitted) will not in itself be a moral matter at all. On this view, an environmental ethicist who wanted to argue that species, ecosystems, or rock formations ought to be given direct moral consideration would have to show that such things have a well- being. More broadly, whether we think of environ- mental preservation as an ethical matter or (merely) as an aesthetic matter will turn on how we distinguish between the moral and aesthetic domains.
Another way that metaethics might be thought normatively nonneutral is if, contrary to what was claimed previously, metaethical theories themselves always imply the truth or fal- sity of certain normative claims. If all metaethical positions did come with substantive nor- mative commitments of this kind, then one might think that environmental ethicists would be justified in choosing metaethical theories in part on the basis of whether the theories imply the superiority of environmentalist normative claims to anti- environmentalist norma- tive claims. In fact, efforts have been made over the last century to show that all metaethical views do have normative implications. These arguments tend to proceed by showing that a particular seemingly neutral metaethical position has some normative implication or other.
Defenders of the normative neutrality of metaethics typically respond to these criticisms by proposing a different metaethical position that does not have normative implications— thus showing that metaethical views can avoid normative implications, even if not all of them do (Dworkin, 1996; Dreier, 2002; Olafson, 1956; Taylor, 1958; Sumner, 1967). My own view is that the latter group has won the day. While some metaethical positions might have hidden nor- mative implications, it is not a necessary truth that they must.
If some metaethical positions can avoid normative implications, then we face the question of whether we should prefer those that do to those that guarantee the truth of our norma- tive positions. That is to say, is there any reason for preferring a more normatively neutral
Truth and Goodness: Metaethics in Environmental Ethics 147 metaethics to a more normatively committed metaethics? The early twentieth century view that ethical theorizing is only a properly philosophical endeavor once it insulates itself from the dirty business of taking a stand on ethical matters is clearly silly. There are many differ- ent ways to do philosophy, from the detached to the evangelical, and while we might find the approach that is not our own irritating, there is no reason not to call it philosophy. But there are other reasons for wanting a metaethical story about what value is that is as inclu- sive as possible. A truism in contemporary metaethics is that it is the mark of a good meta- ethical view that it doesn’t rule out substantive normative positions by fiat. That is to say, its story about what value is should not, as far as possible, prejudge the question of which things are valuable. This, one might think, is a good thing. If we’re going to have a theory about what value is, let it be one that can allow as many substantive value claims as possible to be articulated, and then let conflicts among them be adjudicated on substantive grounds.
Surely it is the way things are in the world, not the way we’ve chosen to define “value,” that ought to determine which evaluations we deem acceptable. More neutral (or at least more ecumenical) metaethical views will not settle normative matters for us simply through their definition of “value.” Indeed, we should not want matters settled that way, even if we can sometimes find ways to make it work in favor of our own normative positions. Instead of rigging the definitions in our favor, environmental ethicists should be talking about what the world is like, why it is so good, and why we ought to be working hard to nurture and respect that goodness. While neutrality obviously isn’t the only consideration that should guide theory choice within metaethics, there is some reason to prefer metaethical views that don’t guarantee the truth of one’s own normative commitments to those that do.
In practical ethics, then, we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that our metaeth- ics can do the work of substantive normative arguments (nor, in fact, that our substantive normative arguments can do the work of political negotiating and democratic deliberat- ing). But this is not to say that environmental ethicists should have no interest in metaethics.
Metaethics is an important part of our story about the place of human beings and human practices in the larger world, and environmental ethicists are right to be concerned about how that story goes. Contemporary metaethics has many thoughtful, sophisticated ways for that story to go, and environmental ethics would benefit from a more fruitful engagement with contemporary metaethics on these issues.
Notes
1. Among the moral claims that metaethics analyzes, environmental ethicists have been par- ticularly interested in claims about goodness, i.e., value. For this reason, I will focus on claims about goodness here, though readers should note that the same claims are made about other moral concepts, such as rightness.
2. For early articulations of this view, see Ayer (1936) and Stevenson (1937). For a more recent discussion, see Dreier (2002), and in environmental ethics, O’Neill (2001) and Jamieson (2002).
3. For less compressed overviews of metaethics, see Miller (2013), Darwall, Gibbard and Railton (1997), and Part I of Copp (2006).
4. The concern to explain morality in a way that is consistent with a broadly naturalistic worldview has been a driving force in metaethics for a long time now and has inspired
148 Katie McShane
debates about what should be counted as a “natural fact” (McDowell, 1998b) and what kind of consistency with a broadly naturalistic worldview is required of metaethics (Railton, 1989, 1993).
5. While these two questions are logically independent of one another (at least in principle, both mind- dependent and mind- independent facts could be either natural or not), mind- dependent moral facts are typically taken to be natural facts, while mind- independent facts can be natural or nonnatural.
6. The terms “subjectivism” and “objectivism” have acquired a wide range of uses within philosophy, and for this reason (a) one often finds these terms used to designate views other than those described here; and (b) one sometimes finds claims about the mind- dependence or mind- independence of value designated with other terminology.
7. Technically, antirealists claim that moral claims cannot be true because there are no facts in the world that would make them true. Error theory and fictionalism would be views of this kind. Irrealists claim that they cannot be true because nonfactualism about moral discourse is correct: moral claims are not claims about facts, and so cannot be true or false. Noncognitivism would be a theory of this kind. Antirealism and irrealism are often lumped together and both referred to as “antirealism.” For a discussion of the distinction, see Wright (1988) and Dreier (2004).
8. It is worth noting that other developments in metaethics have put pressure on the distinc- tion between cognitivism and noncognitivism as well, leading some theorists to wonder how much difference is left between the two. See Dreier (2004).
9. Callicott is a Humean about value, and Hume’s metaethic is notoriously difficult to catego- rize using contemporary category schemes. I classify it here as subjectivist, since it rejects the mind- independence of value, but Callicott himself seems to reject the subject/ object distinction. It might also be a kind of noncognitivism, though neither Callicott nor Hume takes an explicit stand on the question of which mental states our value claims express.
10. Of course, what metaphysical position is implied by intrinsic value claims is difficult to sort out. Presumably the claim cannot be that value is an intrinsic property, for then value couldn’t be a normative property. The position could be that value supervenes only on an object’s intrinsic properties. For different ways of understanding what is meant by intrin- sic value claims, see O’Neill (1992), McShane (2007a), and Jamieson (2008).
11. See O’Neill (2001) and Jamieson (2002) for arguments along these lines.
12. There are, however, discussions of a similar question in the philosophy of science: whether coherence with value judgments is a legitimate reason for accepting/ rejecting a scientific theory. See, e.g., Lacey (1999).
13. See, for example, Keller (1983, 1985) and Nisbett (2003).
14. See, for example, Callicott (1989).
15. See Attfield (1995) for arguments to this effect.
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Chapter 13
Practical Reasons and Environmental
Commitment
Alan Holland
This discussion of practical reasons has two main aims. The first is to distil the findings of some recent work on the topic and to draw attention to some important distinctions, especially the distinction between reasons that are internal and reasons that are external (Williams, 1981). The second is to use those findings in order to ascertain what kinds of rea- sons might be the most effective in promoting an “environmentalist” stance— the stance of one who, as Aldo Leopold succinctly puts it, “cannot live without wild things” (1949: vii).