Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Value in Nature and the Nature of Value
- Ecology and the Ethics of Environmental Restoration
- Rehabilitating Nature and Making Nature Habitable
- Personalistic Organicism: Paradox or Paradigm?
- Values, Reasons and the Environment
- Awe and Humility: Intrinsic Value in Nature. Beyond an Earthbound Environmental Ethics
- The End of Anthropocentrism?
- Global Religion
- Kant and the Moral Considerability of Non-Rational Beings
- The Idea of the Environment
- Chaos and Order, Environment and Anarchy
- Natural Capital
- Some Philosophical Assessments of Environmental Disobedience
- Global Environmental Justice
- Environmental and Medical Bioethics in Late Modernity: Anthony Giddens, Genetic Engineering and the Post-Modern State
- Highlights and Connections
- Bibliography
- Index
Value in Nature and the Nature of Value
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Value in Nature and the Nature of Value
- Ecology and the Ethics of Environmental Restoration
- Rehabilitating Nature and Making Nature Habitable
- Personalistic Organicism: Paradox or Paradigm?
- Values, Reasons and the Environment
- Awe and Humility: Intrinsic Value in Nature. Beyond an Earthbound Environmental Ethics
- The End of Anthropocentrism?
- Global Religion
- Kant and the Moral Considerability of Non-Rational Beings
- The Idea of the Environment
- Chaos and Order, Environment and Anarchy
- Natural Capital
- Some Philosophical Assessments of Environmental Disobedience
- Global Environmental Justice
- Environmental and Medical Bioethics in Late Modernity: Anthony Giddens, Genetic Engineering and the Post-Modern State
- Highlights and Connections
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I offer myself as a nature guide, exploring for values. Many before us have got lost and we must look the world over. The unexamined life is not worth living; life in an unexamined world is not worth living either. We miss too much of value.
Valuable Humans
Let us start from well-mapped ground: humans are able to value. Descartes's cogito is as well an indubitable valeo. I cannot doubt that I value. Humans are able to value nature instrumentally, to value their own experiential states both intrinsically and instrumentally. Objective natural things and events may contribute to these subjective interest satisfactions, a tree supplies firewood, a sunny day makes a picnic possible.
Taking the first step on our journey into non-human nature, some travellers notice that we must take along this indubitable valuing self; afterwards, along the way, finding these selves always present, they deny any value outside our own minds. Wilhelm Windelband insists: ‘Value … is never found in the object itself as a property. It consists in a relation to an appreciating mind …. Take away will and feeling and there is no such thing as value’ (Windelband, 1921, p. 215).
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- Chapter
- Information
- Philosophy and the Natural Environment , pp. 13 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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