Nature, Value, Duty: Life on Earth with Holmes Rolston, III
critical articles — Preston-Ouderkirk 2006
Anthology summary. Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/37723
Nature, Value, Duty: Life on Earth with Holmes Rolston, III
Springer 2007
Table of Contents
A Philosopher Gone Wild: Holmes Rolston, III -- Ouderkirk and Preston
1. Rolston’s Theory of Value -- Katie McShane
2. Biotic and Abiotic Nature: How Radical is Rolston's Environmental Philosophy? -- Keekok Lee
3. Refining Rolston: A Natural Ontological Attitude Towards Natural Values -- Christopher Preston
4. In Rolston's Footsteps: Human Emotions and Values in Nature -- Mark Wynn
5. Religion in Rolston's Environmental Ethics -- Ned Hettinger
6. "Writing Straight with Crooked Lines": Rolston's Ecological Theory and Theodicy -- Lisa Sideris
7. "We see beauty where we could not see it before": Rolston's Aesthetics of Nature -- Allen Carlson
8. Rolston on Objective and Subjectivee Beauty in Nature -- Eugene Hargrove
9. Words Gone Wild: Language in Rolston's Philosophy of Nature -- Brenda Hausauer
10. Caring for Nature: An Ecofeminist's View of Rolston on Eating, Hunting, and Genetics -- Victoria Davion
11. Rethinking Animal Ethics in Appropriate Context: How Rolston’ Work Can Help -- Clare Palmer
12. Nature Diminished or Nature Managed: Applying Rolston’s Environmental Ethics in National Parks:
How Practical is Rolston's Environmental Ethics? -- John Lemons
13. Rolston on Urban Environments -- James W. Shepard and Andrew Light
14. Living on Earth: Dialogue and Dialectic with my Critics – Holmes Rolston, III
Review by Eric Katz in: Environmental Ethics 30(2008):89-92
BOOK REVIEWS
Christopher J. Preston and Wayne Ouderkirk, eds. Nature, Value, Duty: Life on Earth with Holmes Rolston, III. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2007. xx, 280 pages.
This is a collection of thirteen original essays about the environmental philosophy of Holmes Rolston, III, with a fourteenth chapter by Rolston in response. Is a review of such a book really necessary? Rolston is arguably the most important environmental philosopher of the last quarter century, and any new work that discusses his philosophy will be of interest to anyone connected to the subject. The editors have chosen as contributors both well-established figures and relatively new voices in the field for a healthy mix of viewpoints, analyses, and arguments. Any student of environmental philosophy will find the book a pleasure to read—a delightful immersion into the thought of Rolston.
Although the book is not divided into clearly distinct and labeled sections, the essays do follow a logical progression if read straight through from chapter one. The first four essays, by Katie McShane, Keekok Lee, Christopher Preston, and Mark Wynn, all focus on aspects of Rolston’s theory of natural value, the element of his philosophy that clearly differentiates his view from other nonanthropocentric holistic versions of environmental ethics. The essay by Wynn discusses the importance of the emotional component of Rolston’s theory and ends with a discussion of the inherent spirituality and religiosity of his world view, thus serving as an effective bridge to two essays on the religious aspects of Rolston’s philosophy by Ned Hettinger and Lisa Sideris. The next two essays, by Allen Carlson and Eugene Hargrove, concern the role of aesthetics in Rolston’s philosophy.
Chapter nine, by Brenda Hausauer, is a detailed look at Rolston’s unique philosophical writing style—his use of word play, metaphor, and personal narrative—and a comparison with the work of Annie Dillard. The next two chapters focus primarily on Rolston’s view of the value of individual animals as compared to more standard positions in the “animal liberation” movement. Victoria Davion approaches the issues by using a feminist lens to reevaluate Rolston’s positions, and Clare Palmer offers a detailed contextual classification of domestic and wild animals and environments in order to provide a richer analysis of the human treatment of animals. The next essay, by John Lemons, examines the relevance of Rolston’s philosophy to the actual management policies of the National Park system. Finally, an essay co- authored by James Sheppard and Andrew Light considers the possibility of using Rolston’s philosophy in an analysis of urban environments, an area that the authors believe is neglected in the main body of Rolston’s work.
The volume closes with an idiosyncratic response by Rolston.
In their relationship to Rolston’s philosophy, the essays in the collection fall into three broad categories: those that support and expand Rolston’s ideas; those that attempt to use Rolston’s insights in new areas; and those that are critical of key aspects of Rolston’s positions. In a short review it would be impossible to summarize and to comment upon all the essays. All are worth reading, but I found the overtly critical essays to be most interesting. The first critical essay is Katie McShane’s “Rolston’s Theory of Value,” (pp. 1–16), an essay that calls into question some aspects of Rolston’s theory of “objective” value in nature. McShane has “doubts about using the teleological structure of organisms as a basis for ethical obligation” (p. 2). She raises two important questions: (1) why is the genetic direction of the behavior of organisms something that is appropriate to call “value?” and (2) if this behavior does represent value, is it the kind of value that generates ethical obligation? Answering the first question requires an analysis of all kinds of goal- directed behaviors: we need “to get a clearer picture of what valuing is and how it is different from mere systematic goal-directed behavior” (p. 4) To answer the second question requires a strong connection between the attainment of an organism’s genetic goals and its well-being: only then can ethical value be discerned and moral obligation be generated. But McShane considers the attainment of the genetic goals of an organism to be, at best, only contingently related to the well- being of the organism. Maladaptation and the process of natural selection suggest strongly that sometimes the achievement of genetically directed goals is harmful to the individual organism, and even to the species (pp. 7–10). McShane thus suggests that a theory of objective natural value might be based, not on Rolston’s teleological conception of good as derived from the genetic set of an organism but on a conception of well-being, what is actually good for an organism, species, or ecosystem (p. 13).
Christopher Preston’s “Refining Rolston: A Natural Ontological Attitude Towards Natural Values” (pp. 29–44) continues the critical evaluation of Rolston’s value theory, this time from the perspective of recent pragmatic thought. Preston considers the “post-modern” critique of Rolston’s critical realism and Rolston’s reply: “ [Rolston] wants to grant the epistemological limitations of our conceptual schemes and embodied situations, but deny that these limitations prevent us from being realists about the objects described and objectivist about our knowledge of them” (p. 35). The problem is even more acute, according to Preston, because Rolston is an objectivist not just about the existence of external reality but also about the value contained therein, while all the time admitting the relevance of many of the post-modernist epistemological issues (p. 37). Following suggestions in the work of Richard Rorty and Arthur Fine, Preston argues that Rolston should adopt “the natural ontological attitude”—a view that ignores the metaphysical implications (whether realist or anti-realist) of science and simply accepts the reports of science (for example, about unobservable entities) at face value. Preston believes that Rolston’s view of natural value is analogous to the metaphysical problem of unobservables in physical reality (pp. 40–41) and thus that Rolston’s view can be saved by this “dignified surrender” of realism (p. 37).
Once we move away from Rolston’s theory of value and into the realm of religion, we find Ned Hettinger’s “Religion in Rolston’s Environmental Ethics” (pp. 63–76), which offers a criticism of Rolston’s use of a transcendent deity in the development of his theory of environmental ethics. Hettinger argues that Rolston’s ethic requires only an “immanent nature spirituality” (p. 63). For Rolston, a transcendent God plays an explanatory role in the existence of nature’s boundless creativity, but for Hettinger, this need not mean that God plays a role in creating the value of nature (p. 66). Humans should treat the Earth as a sacred place, but the mystery, the spirituality, is here, on Earth, not in some transcendent deity. Indeed, if Rolston believes that a transcendent deity is needed for the foundation of natural value, then it actually distracts from the main focus of his philosophy: the value of an ongoing, spontaneous, natural process (p. 74).
Rolston’s specific ethical policies are questioned in Clare Palmer’s “Rethinking Animal Ethics in Appropriate Context: How Rolston’s Work Can Help” (pp. 183–201). Palmer sees that the distinction between “nature” and “culture,” which Rolston misuses to adopt an unethical view of the treatment of domesticated animals, can actually be used to provide a “more contextual approach to animal ethics” (p. 183). A contextual approach to the treatment of animals is necessary to bridge the gap between the philosophy of animal liberation and environmental ethics, for only by viewing the context of an animal’s life can we escape the problems of ethical individualism, e.g., why an individual of an endangered species is considered more ethically valuable than a roughly equivalent individual of a prolific species, or why we should be obligated to protect the prey of an attacking predator. The heart of Palmer’s essay is a brilliant taxonomy of the different kinds of animals and contexts which explodes the neat distinction of “wild” and “domesticated” animals, or “nature” and culture” (p. 196).
As mentioned above, Rolston’s closing chapter is highly idiosyncratic: he does not address each contributor with specific arguments but instead seems mostly to restate his favorite and essential positions. The best part of the chapter is a typical Rolston stylistic trick: he imagines he is setting out on a journey—a hike through a natural area in the mountains, an uphill “climb from nature to spirit” (p. 247)—and he invites his various interlocutors to come along with him and observe and experience the natural world. “I am setting out to value cybernetic nature, producing storied natural history, until it reaches an apex in Homo sapiens, cognitively empowered with reason and emotion, who can and ought value what has been going on (as well as to build cities)” (p. 247). It is along this climb that he engages the relevant points of each of the contributors.
Reading this volume was a rewarding exercise in the detailed study of the major environmental philosopher of our time. I suppose I have only one complaint: far too many of the contributors focus their attention on a concept of intrinsic value for individual entities, species, and ecosystems. My reading of Rolston is different. I find that Rolston uses the concept of intrinsic value as a tool to get us to the point where we see it is meaningless. In a natural system, especially the prolific natural system of the Earth, the real value is the systemic and projective value of the process. Thus, he writes in his book Environmental Ethics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988): “Things do not have their separate natures merely in and for themselves, but they face outward and co-fit into broader natures. Value-in-itself is smeared out to become value-in-togetherness. Value seeps out into the system . . . Intrinsic value
. . .becomes problematic in a holistic web” (pp. 216–17). If I had contributed an essay to this volume (I was asked, but was too pressed for time to submit a chapter), I would have focused on Rolston’s pragmatic transcendence of the intrinsic/instrumental value distinction. Such an essay will, unfortunately for me, have to wait for a second volume of Rolston-inspired essays For now, this volume is an excellent contribution to environmental philosophy, and should be read and discussed by everyone in the field.
* Department of Humanities, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102; email: katz@njit.edu.