Environmental Values

TL;DR: Environmental Values critiques the current state of environmental ethics and argues that it is not achieving its goals. The book emphasizes the need to focus on concrete problems and articulate environmental values in specific terms.

Abstract: Many academic monographs claim that they are suitable for classroom use while also presenting challenging new ideas for specialists. This claim is rarely true, but in the case of John O’Neill, Alan Holland, and Andrew Light’s Environmental Values it is. Their book is built around an extensive critique of the current state of environmental ethics. Many of their critical points are familiar but are directed here toward building a case that environmental ethics is not achieving its goals. Some of these critical points have been developed by the authors elsewhere; a few are fresh. First, the authors point to how a utilitarian approach to environmental evaluation fails to capture intuitions that certain things are of inestimable and incomparable value. They also examine the failure of Kantian environmental approaches to settle on an acceptable account of moral considerability. A third topic of frequent debate in environmental ethics concerns how to formulate a realist account of nature’s intrinsic value; this project, too, they demonstrate as a dead end. Having rejected exclusively consequentialist or deontological approaches to environmental ethics, the authors favor a virtue ethics approach to articulating environmental values because it is highly contextual and because it depends on our rich everyday normative language. The authors argue that environmental problems are concrete and geographically situated and that our evaluations can only be fully expressed in specific terms, such as ‘inspirational’ and ‘diverse’ rather than ‘good,’ and ‘hostile’ or ‘unstable’ rather than ‘bad’. By focusing philosophical study on concrete problems, the book is both optimistic and pragmatic. The authors argue that environmental philosophy does not need to develop a new, specifically environmental theory. What it needs instead is an articulation of the economic and political institutions that are suited for creating positive change and an analysis of how and why people value what they do. Thus, they reject the project of searching for a unique environmental ethic and argue that ‘the ethical perspective that we need to start from is not one that invokes radically new foundational postulates, but the human scale of values that we bring to our everyday encounters with human and non-human beings and environments with and in which we live’ (p. 93).