warrants conservation efforts even if those efforts don’t and won’t 

ever serve our purposes?

These types of questions are popular among environmental 

ethicists. This cluster of issues includes:

2.) On what basis do these “valuable” things have value?

3.) Does it matter to the practical environmentalist that we have definitive answers to the two previous questions? 

I’m not an environmental philosopher (though that’s one hat I aspire to wear eventually), nor am I adequately versed in environmental philosophy to give substantive answers to these questions. But I’m going to try to show the second question, concerning how things obtain value, is fascinating and important. 

We often talk of “value” in the way that wise conservative politicians like Sarah Palin do; a value is something we tie our commitments to, around which we can rally our beliefs, which uplifts us, that differentiates us from “the Other,” without which we wouldn’t recognize ourselves as ourselves. I mean something like this when I talk about “value,” though I mean to use the term in a far more inclusive, less lofty, manner. I mean to mean by “value” something like “that property of objects which:” “provides justification for our actions via reasons,” or “is worthy of consideration in practical deliberation,” or “makes the proper objects of our intentional acts proper.” Crudely put, something that has value is worth preserving, promoting, or acting in favor of, and everything worth preserving, states of affairs, or facts, generally, which makes them worth acting toward. Value is understood to be a property of things just as shape is a property of things, or mass is a property of things. Something’s shape or mass doesn’t depend on the observer; something that is round and weighs two pounds is round and weighs two pounds even if humans didn’t exist.3 This view, if I’ve represented it correctly, is known as value realism.

In philosophy, to be a realist about X means, generally, that you think that X is a part of the “furniture of the universe,” that X exists and exists independent of our customs, conventions, and psychological attitudes. Value realist theories sometimes include statements on our ability to know and speak of X and instances of X, but this discussion is tangential. Just know that value realists think that when we correctly value, say, so-called “charismatic megaflora and megafauna” like the Californian redwood and the Siberian tiger, we value them because they have value. It may seem like a truism, but bear with me and you’ll see why this last statement is contentious and imperative.

The challenge to value realism traces back to David Hume, the greatest philosopher ever to write in English.4 Hume thinks that we’re realists by habit, that we consider the process of value judgment to be akin to a type of sensory perception in which value properties reside in the exterior world for us to recognize

when a causal chain completes between the external property and our intuitive sense. On this “vulgar” view, to grasp that, say, willful murder of innocent persons is wrong is to perceive the property of wrongness in the form of the act, willful murder of innocents.

Hume writes, in contrast to this familiar view, that value is internally founded, that its robust reality is illusory. What we perceive as objective property that exists external to and independent of our minds is simply an impression held in our minds and projected upon the world. On this view, which is the only position of the two that’s tenable in the face of modern science, something has value secondarily to its being valued; the act of valuing5 is conceptually prior to the existence of value. Whatever value is, it isn’t subject-independent. In this picture, my life has value because I value my life; healthy foods have derivative

value because they benefit the life I and others value. Notice the contrast with value realism: we value life and that’s what makes it have value; it’s not the case that life has value and that’s why we value it, as realists would hold. To the question, “Do things have value because we (a historical, societal “we”) value them, or do we value things because they have value?” the Humean affirms the first disjunct and denies the second. 

At this point you might be wondering, why does this debate matter? 

Here’s why value realists care about establishing the reality of value. We are (or aspire to be) rational agents. We are agents because there is, as the Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard asserts, a rather large space of “reflective distance” between our desires and our actions. Namely, we can step back from our immediate impulses and select from the desires that pop into our heads, satisfying some and quelling others. This characteristic is constitutive of agency; if we acted on every desire that popped into our heads, we’d be wantons, no better than beasts (as Plato puts it, in The Republic, I think). So we’re agents because we are selective. And, we’re rational agents, meaning we want principled bases for selection. Ethical theories attempt to do this sort of work: they tell us what we have good reason to do, what we should act toward, which of our desires to put into action, how we ought to conduct ourselves. Here you have your utilitarian theories, your promoting, or acting in favor of has value.

Imagine value in this way: in one picture of the world, value is a property that inheres in objects, collections of objects, events, The value that resides independent of his acknowledgment of it, in natural objects and events and states of affairs. 

To assert that there is value in natural things and to argue with one’s neighbor that this is the case is to sound a clarion call. Imagine Earthlings to be a clan of meerkats whose burrows are built in close proximity. We’re all stationed in our burrowholes with our heads protruding, sniffing for food and predators. Imagine this sort of seeking-activity to be like the activity of our ethical senses, always searching for things of value and disvalue. For one of us to aver, “Nature has value!” is akin to one of the meerkats to suddenly squeak out, “Hyenas! Over there!” or “Hark! Pumbaa comes to save us!” and by so exclaiming, turn the heads of the whole colony to the relevant direction so that their energies may best be directed to their survival and choreographed song-and-dance. So we can say to our profligate and inconsiderate neighbor, “You’re really making a mistake!”

Imagine this neighbor not only fails to care about natural things; he also doesn’t care about anything that might commit him to care about the health of natural things. So it’s not like we can say to this person, “Aha! You have asthma, and you care deeply about not being asthmatic. Well, if you care about that (more than driving your Hummer and eating steak), you are committed to care about air quality, and if you care about air quality, you are bound by the rules of instrumental consistency to care about climate change legislation and stopping air pollution and deforestation.” Imagine there to be nothing about what the person cares about that would provide “internal” grounds for criticizing how he carries himself about. How do we legitimately recommend that he change his behavior?

Here’s where value realists have an easy time. The realist can criticize the profligate neighbor, can say he is making a mistake in his normative judgment, because to make a mistake about what one ought to do is just for one’s judgment as to what one ought to do to fail to correspond to what one really ought to do, where what one really ought to do is fixed by a brute value fact or value entity that subsists in-the-world. For the realist, criticism is virtually “free”: the realist can say to the neighbor, “You’re missing something in the world! Were you to see what I see, then you would not have bought that godawful Hummer.”

As I previously hinted, realism is in troubled waters. A scientific picture of the world has little room for entities like mind-independent values, and so, many philosophers have argued that normative facts, including moral ones, are merely functions of attitudinal states. In other words, values can do everything we

want them to do6 only if they depend upon, and are in some way constituted by, our evaluative attitudes. If people venerate benevolence, it is good only because of their positive perception of it. This understanding of normative and moral facts squares neatly with a scientific world-view because it explains them in the tractable language of psychological and sociological facts. So, enter value anti-realism.

This naturalistic anti-realism conflicts with our important practical desire to be able to advise your neighbor that he ought to value nature. Your neighbor doesn’t care about the earth, nor does he care about anything that would rationally commit him to care for the earth; try as you might, you just can’t tug his heartstrings with green recommendations. A strict anti-realist cannot criticize practices embedded in internally stable and coherent value systems because value only exists according to evaluative attitude. Are we forced, then, to say that he doesn’t have reason to care for the environment?

Anti-realists are still constructing a satisfactory answer. However it’s safe to say that we’re stuck on the horns of a dilemma: value realism seems ever-more untenable; value anti-realism has a currently unresolved unpleasant implication.

So, claims adjuster of the Universe, is species extinction, mourned or not, intrinsically bad? Should people care about the Devil’s Hole Pupfish, a tiny fish inhabiting small pools of water collected from geothermal vents in Death Valley, and other animals of zero consequence to humans? If the last man on Earth were to blow up the planet after his death, is there a loss?