John Dewey and Environmental Philosophy

Epilogue: Pragmatism and Environmental Ethics

The basic reason an environmental ethic is needed for our age is the threat to future human survival posed by the poisoning of the human environment itself by industrial and other processes. However, the massive destruction of habitats, whose root cause is human population growth, has evoked a radical response from environmentally minded philosophers. They have raised the question of the value of nonhuman life and whether treating animals and other living things as mere resources is justified. Just as slaves, women, and others were at one time given less moral consideration, so, they argue, nonhuman life has been treated merely instrumentally. An environmental ethic is needed to defend nonhuman life, the environment as a whole, and endangered species in particular. This ethic must be based on the intrinsic value of the nonhuman, since intrinsic value is the basis of moral obligation in ethics. Pragmatism was attacked by some of these figures for contributing to the problem with an instrumental theory of value, a subjective and anthropocentric approach to philosophy, and indifference to nature. I have tried to defend Dewey against such charges in chapters two through five. Dewey is, of course, only one pragmatist. Can pragmatism as a whole be defended against such charges? While defending all the pragmatists against these charges would be beyond the scope of this book, some general comments can be made about the other major pragmatists. First, there are differences among the pragmatists over some of the issues raised by environmental ethics.To take intrinsic value, Dewey was the only pragmatist who was critical of this notion as it was handed down to him. As I have tried to show, Epilogue PRAGMATISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS|143| he was more critical of the notion of grounding ethics in a fixed notion of intrinsic value than intrinsic value per se. But in any case, the more idealistic pragmatists defended intrinsic value. Second, the whole thrust of pragmatism was away from Cartesian subjectivity. Pragmatism does look to human consequences among others. But such consequences are in a context or environment that is not grounded in an isolated human subject. Pragmatism is not an anthropocentric view, since humans are placed back in a context that requires attention to the natural world. With the stress on action as an agency of knowledge and value, all the pragmatists shift attention from subjective perception of objects to interaction with the environment. Action is in an environment , not detached from it. I would argue that not only does pragmatism escape the above criticisms but provides several fertile grounds for an environmental ethic. These include both environmental ethics based on intrinsic value (the standard approach) and alternative approaches. I will first argue that there is a strong notion of intrinsic value in the more idealist wing of the pragmatists and that it could be used as the basis of an environmental ethics. Second, since the Cartesian standpoint is what pragmatism is moving away from, the elements of Cartesianism must be shown to be foreign to pragmatism.1 I will argue that pragmatism in general is primarily a critique of Cartesianism. Third, I will argue that certain elements of pragmatism could indeed be the basis of an environmental ethics. An environmental ethic can be extracted and defended based on the differing philosophies of the pragmatists other than Dewey. Finally, pragmatism even provides an example of an alternative framework for environmental ethics based on ethics itself. From such a framework ecological ethics could be extended such that it provides the basis for the subject, and not an extension from the subject. The problem of the intrinsic value of the elements of the environment arose as an issue for philosophy because nature was judged instrumentally valuable by the preponderance of the modern tradition. The distinction of intrinsic and instrumental value generally corresponded to the distinction of subject and object, in a devaluation of the external world and nature. Even where the nonhuman was seen as directly valuable, as in scenery or landscapes, it was regarded as valuable to or for a subject, upholding the distinction of subjective value as intrinsically good and objective value as merely instrumental. The value of the external world was limited to the aesthetic and instrumental, and did not include nonhuman life. Further, value in the subject was tied to the affective or to desire by many philosophers, especially empiricists, separating value itself from cognitive status. So extreme was the subjectivization of value that the ontological status of value became an issue...