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6 Methodological Pragmatism, Animal Welfare, and Hunting Andrew Light In 1996 Eric Katz and I published an edited book titled Environmental Pragmatism . We had two aims in mind: ¤rst, to bring together a representative sampling of the growing contributions by pragmatists to the ¤eld of environmental ethics , and second, to try to push environmental ethicists away from the various meta-ethical debates in which they had become stuck toward a more pluralist methodology which could improve their ability to contribute to the formulation of better environmental policies. The second of our aims in Environmental Pragmatism was to my mind the more important of the two because, as a ¤eld of applied philosophy, environmental ethics ought to be able to make some kind of contribution to resolving environmental problems at the level of law or policy. If it can’t, I’m not sure why we would do this kind of philosophy in the ¤rst place. Many, however, do not share this view. J. Baird Callicott argues that environmental ethics ful¤lls its promise as a ¤eld of philosophy and environmental activity if it concentrates on the project either of offering an alternative human worldview toward the environment or of re¤ning theories of why nature (either ecosystems, species, or nature writ large) has some kind of noninstrumental or intrinsic value that warrants moral recognition or obligation (see “Environmental Philosophy”). But while ¤gures like Callicott can point to examples of how environmental ethicists have used such work to in®uence activist environmental organizations or the public policy process, there are ample reasons to believe either that this approach to environmental ethics is too limited or that the results are largely inconsequential for the work of environmental advocates (see Light and deShalit ). For the fact remains that most work in environmental ethics focuses on intramural debates between and among environmental ethicists over issues such as the moral foundations for a nonanthropocentric intrinsic value of nature . Precious little in this literature is of any direct use to those who are actually trying to form laws or policies, given that the social realm of law and policy must of necessity make appeals to human, anthropocentric interests, which are usually not considered in such debates. The success of Environmental Pragmatism in achieving this second aim is at best mixed, because its message is still largely resisted by in®uential ¤gures in the ¤eld. Callicott continues his attack on the relevance of policy to the work of environmental ethicists (“Pragmatic Power”), and the editor of the principal journal in the ¤eld, Environmental Ethics , has recently argued against the importance of environmental ethicists being able to communicate anything to those outside of the ¤eld (Hargrove). I cannot complain too much about such results, though. More dire in academic circles is to have one’s ideas not discussed at all rather than continually challenged. More important, the number of scholars in the ¤eld calling themselves “pragmatists” has grown sharply, and the reception of ¤gures like Bryan Norton, one of the most distinguished senior ¤gures writing in this circle, continues to expand. Several new introductory textbooks in the ¤eld now include sections on environmental pragmatism as one important minority view. We seem to be doing at least as well in this respect as ecofeminists and are attracting more critical attention in philosophical circles these days than are deep ecologists . But my concerns about the successes of Environmental Pragmatism are more acutely raised by another issue—namely, that perhaps the two original aims of that volume were incompatible to begin with.If,as I believe,the more important goal was to push environmental ethics away from its intramural ¤xations, then does it actually do any good to add another dimension to the meta-ethical debates in the ¤eld by championing a voice which appears to be founded in classical American philosophy? In other words,by collecting the work of those committed to the pantheon of American philosophy—John Dewey, William James, C. S. Peirce, and so on—as they have applied the developed insights of those¤gures to environmental problems and the ongoing debates in environmental ethics, and giving it the proper name “environmental pragmatism,” did I in essence not help to open a new front in the theoretical battles among environmental ethicists? Now, instead of simply ¤lling the pages of Environmental Ethics with arguments between those in®uenced by Callicott, Holmes Rolston, and the like, to those same debates we can add, and indeed have added, even more pages...

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