5 Beyond intrinsic value: undermining the justification of ecoterrorism

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

Environmental philosophy needs a pragmatic and nonmetaphysical concept of value that can guide environmental thinking on law, policy, and activism while resisting the temptation of ecofascism and ecoterrorism. In the following pages I hope to develop a notion of value to serve this need, that is, a notion of value not based on a metaphysical interpretation of value as a property of things--God, humans, or nature--but rather as an experiential and epistemic understanding of the inherent rationality of our value experience. This pragmatic understanding of value takes all value intuition and attribution to be intrinsically revisable in the light of future experience. As intrinsically revisable, value experience is always subject to negotiation, dialogue, and the weight of future experience. In this way, value experiences point toward their own confirmation or disconfirmation. This self-correcting tendency of value experience constitutes a prima facie rationality inherent in intentional experience in general and value experience in particular.

The account of value defended here is rooted in a philosophical anthropology that unites a Darwinian conception of moral instincts and a phenomenological conception of moral experience. I offer a phenomenological analysis, that is, a description and interpretation of value experience, to show that value experiences exhibit an intentional structure through which value experience anticipates its own confirmation in future experience and thus contains a measure of rationality. (7) What explicitly renders value experience rational is its revisability in the face of new experience. This will be brought out by describing the inherent intentionality in value experience.

The idea of an evolutionary account of moral sentiments was first developed by Charles Darwin in his The Descent of Man, where he gives an account of the naturalistic origin of what he calls humanity's "moral sense." (8) The implications of Darwin's attempt to sketch an evolutionary origin of morality have been developed by natural scientists such as E. O. Wilson. Richard Alexander, and Frans de Waal and philosophers such as J. Baird Callicott. Common to these thinkers is the idea that our so-called moral sentiments of empathy, affection, and sympathy are evolutionarily shaped responses that are selected because they make social groups more efficient, more stable, and more permanent. The claim that morality is made possible by the linguistic conceptualization of inherited social feelings is on the right track but overlooks an important phenomenological fact about moral experience. Moral experience or moral phenomena display an intentional structure not captured by the view of morality as instinct plus language. What is missing from the received view concerning a Darwinian account of morality is a theory of intentionality. Our basic dispositional ways of behaving as humans, our basic possibilities, are, no doubt, prefigured in our genes and in our kinship with other animals. The fundamentals of our moral psychology may start out as gut instinct, but these basic proto-moral sentiments are not just reactions to outside stimuli. They have the quality of being directed to something or are about something. Empathy is not only a feeling with someone or something, but a feeling that has the phenomenal quality of being directed toward some object or state of affairs. Altruism is aimed toward the other. These moral sentiments are experienced by humans not as raw, unstructured feelings but as referring to the other in an attitude of compassion and solidarity. These are psychological/ somatological moments directed to an empathetic other and exhibit, as we shall see, a prediscursive intelligibility and a prima facie rationality.