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C o n c l u s i o n ................................... nature’s norms Ultimately, a durable relationship between we humans and our planetary partners must be built on the kind of perceptual, epistemic and emotional sensitivities which are best founded on respect, care and love. ——Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture It would be a rather unsatisfying conclusion to this book if, as the end of the preceding chapter suggests, the conception of nature we have taken such pains to develop necessarily led to quietism with respect to what constitutes a good common world. After all, the foundation for an environmental ethic should be able to provide some form of guidance with regard to how to behave within that world. The kind of guidance I envision, however, will not be of the moral variety, by which I mean that I do not intend to supply a rule or decision procedure that we could follow somewhat automatically and without reflection, or even specific obligations regarding our interactions within nature. On the contrary, what emerges from our discussion of Latour and Heidegger is a particular ethical vision of agency that, when combined with the conception of nature that emerged from our engagement with MerleauPonty ’s ontology of flesh, opens the possibility for us to experience certain kinds of feelings toward various human behaviors. Here, at the conclusion of this line of thought, it proves necessary to show how the preceding has led us to a point where the ideal of mastery might be challenged by embracing nature’s mystery. The first step in revealing how the conception of nature as the flesh of the common world can serve as a foundation for an environmental ethic is to analyze the manner in which it is or is not able to resolve the inherent tension between the two seemingly competing commitments of an ecological ethic. Steven Vogel introduced us to the idea that specific aspects of 154 from mastery to mystery environmentalism were in conflict with one another. On the one hand, there is the commitment to antihumanism in the sense that the motive for improving the human relationship with the rest of nature should not merely be that it is in the general human interest to do so. On the other hand is the commitment to the independence of nature, the idea that nature should be preserved free from human intervention. At the time, I had promised to develop a conception of nature that would support each of these intuitions without falling prey to the antinomies that Vogel describes emerging from holding them simultaneously, but at this point it should be apparent that this is possible only by transforming the sense of each of the commitments. Let us examine each in turn. As I just suggested, it may appear that I have failed to develop the soughtafter normative foundation, since the last chapter seems to have arrived at a rather anthropocentric position regarding why Western consumerist attitudes and industrial practices should change. After all, if the ultimate consequence of the view is that nature will go on with or without humanity because every being participates in the constitution of nature, what reason is there to change our behaviors other than a desire to preserve our own continued existence? This objection may be convincing given a dualistic mind-set because it bifurcates human interests from the well-being of nature. As Plumwood has convincingly argued, however, removing ourselves from the context of a dualistic metaphysics also allows us to eliminate the false dichotomy between human interests and the interests of other species.1 In her own words: Considering your own interests does not imply that you cannot also consider others’ interests as well as, or as related to, your own. Prudence does not consist in counting only one’s own interests as reasons for acting or not acting, . . . but in taking one’s own interests into account in a consistent way, and counting injury to them as among your reasons for avoiding an action. The idea of prudence says nothing about consulting your own interests to the exclusion of others. That is not prudence any more than it is rationality—it is selfishness, or egocentrism.2 This passage is reminiscent of John Stuart Mill’s claims in Utilitarianism regarding the sympathetic feelings of humankind: we are simply the kind of creature for whom our own interests and the interests of others are hopelessly intertwined, such that our happiness and well-being necessarily involve the [18.217...

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