5 Beyond intrinsic value: undermining the justification of ecoterrorism

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2007 by Charles S. Brown

ABSTRACT. Both Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" and Arne Naess's "deep ecology" have been criticized as providing intellectual justifications for both a misanthropic ecofascism and a policy of ecoterrorism for environmental activists. This chapter argues that each of these two approaches to providing a ground or framework for an environmental ethics is subject to the charges of ecofascism or ecoterrorism only to the extent that each is committed to the notion of "intrinsic value" as a nonnegotiable moral absolute or, as Kant puts it, "a value beyond all price." This chapter begins by describing shared value experience between humans and animals and then points the way to an alternative and pragmatic concept of value that can better guide environmental thinking on matters of law, policy, and activism. This concept of value emerges from an experiential and epistemic understanding of the inherent rationality of value experience. A description of value experience reveals that the lived significance of value experience exhibits a meaningful and referential structure in which anticipations of future experience are either satisfied or frustrated in future experience. This meaningful structure of value experience, in which value experiences point to their own confirmation or disconfirmation, constitutes a self-correcting tendency or a prima facie rationality inherent in value experience. The result is a pragmatic conception of value that takes all value intuition and attribution to be intrinsically revisable in light of future experience. As such, value experience is always subject to negotiation, dialogue, and the weight of future experience. This conception of value undercuts the intellectual, psychological, and moral justification for ecofascism or ecoterrorism.

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ACCORDING TO RECENT public declarations by the FBI, animal rights and environmental activists are emerging as a serious domestic terrorist threat in the United States. (1) The FBI estimates that two organizations, the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, have committed over 600 criminal acts in the United States since 1996, resulting in damages in excess of $43 million. Although no humans have been killed in any known case of environmental activism, the suspicion that environmental activists may be willing to kill innocent human beings to promote their pro-nature political agenda finds some support among environmental philosophers who have suggested that highly respected attempts to ground and articulate an environmental ethics, such as Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" and Arne Naess's "deep ecology," lead to an anti-human ecofascism. (2)

Leopold's moral maxim, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise," (3) would seem to support massive human depopulation by any means necessary. After all, if it is permissible to kill individual deer to preserve the underlying ecosystem, and if humans are plain members and citizens of the ecological community, then it should be permissible to kill individual humans for the good of the whole. According to Tom Regan and others, the requirement that individuals be sacrificed for the good of the whole makes the land ethic into a form of ecofascism. (4) A similar charge may be made against an environmental ethics rooted in deep ecology. In their list of deep ecology's basic principles, Bill Devall and George Sessions state that all life on Earth has intrinsic value, that humans have no right to reduce the richness and diversity of life except to satisfy vital needs, and that the flourishing of nonhuman life requires a decrease in human population. (5) Murray Bookchin, in particular, has drawn the connection between this kind of thinking and that of John Foreman, Earth First! founder, who has welcomed famine as a means of limiting the population, and others who have declared humans to be a plague or a cancer on the planet. (6)

Whatever the merits may be of the charge that deep ecology and the land ethic lead to ecofascism, the connection between ideology and terrorism is more worrisome simply because terrorism does not require the kind of top-down totalitarian governmental structure that any form of fascism does. The possibility of ecofascism is only a dim and distant threat, while ecoterrorism is not only an ever-present possibility but also a steadily emerging temptation to some activists. It is not simply the holism per se of deep ecology and the land ethic that drive these forms of thinking toward Draconian and violent solutions to environmental problems. The problem lies rather in the underlying notion of "intrinsic value." Ethical holism becomes pernicious only when two conditions are met: (1) when the good of the whole is thought to override or trump the intrinsic value of the individual, and (2) when the intrinsic value of the whole is judged to be intrinsic in the strong metaphysical sense of being an atemporal fixed property inherent in the whole--a nonnegotiable moral absolute or, as Kant puts it, "a value beyond all price." As long as value is judged to be a nonnegotiable moral absolute, the possibility and temptation of ecofascism and ecoterrorism exists.