5 Beyond intrinsic value: undermining the justification of ecoterrorism

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

Because value experiences are intentional, they bring with them their own procedure for confirmation grounded in the temporal structure of anticipation and either satisfaction or frustration of such anticipation. This anticipatory projection within value experience provides or denies a justification for the sense of that lived experience. (10) If I experience friendship or marriage as good, it is not simply that I enjoy friendship or marriage; it is that I have a sense, even if unarticulated, of how and why each is good. Even if we cannot express it, we know that friendship or marriage extend our sphere of concern while comforting us in ways that help to provide our lives with meaning. To experience friendship or marriage as good is to interpret and impose the sense of good on these relations, but it is also to expect to continue to find goodness in these relations and to have such expectations fulfilled. The very experience of positive values like marriage and friendship is bound up with an implicit understanding of the meaning of marriage and friendship. Our experience of these as good is also subject to the possibility of breakdown, as the final test of value is the test of time.

Experiences of positive value that we call "good" involve knowing what to expect. It is this anticipatory structure that provides an ongoing validation of our experiences of the good. If we initially find friendship and marriage to be bad and fraud to be good, openness to further experience will almost always correct this. That we find value in friendship and disvalue in fraud is not arbitrary. Rarely do our considered judgments about these things disappoint us. Our experience continues to establish friendship and marriage as good in an ever-evolving process of being open to the good. By grounding our values and beliefs in the evolving wisdom of our collective experience, we can avoid the perils of absolutism and relativism. We can avoid dogmatic absolutism by understanding that our experiences and conceptions of the good are always open to revision, and we can avoid relativism by recognizing that our experiences of the good demand their own confirmation in future experiences.

The conditions for the possibility of moral experience are embedded in our animal nature and are greatly expanded by our ability to conceptualize our moral sentiments and intuitions within our linguistic and conceptual worldviews. Even though our moral categories and concepts, rooted in our historically constituted worldviews, allow us the power of abstract moral thinking and moral imagination, we are too often closed off from a genuinely emancipatory moral consciousness because our thinking is too often dominated by the metaphysical categories controlling our thinking. When the openness and temporality of moral experience is reduced to the ahistorical categories of God, humanity, or nature, the open-ended possibilities of experience are eliminated in favor of a finite set of rules governing what can be said or thought about moral experience. The anticipatory structure of value experience demands that our sentiments and evaluative responses to the world be understood as prima facie intuitions about the goodness or badness of the matters at hand. A first glance always requires a second look. Our various understandings of the good are subject to continual assessment in light of subsequent experience, just as we continually reassess our initial understandings of the real and the true. Over our lifetimes and through the centuries the world has unfolded in ways that have rendered our previous understandings of the good as imperfect and parochial.