5 Beyond intrinsic value: undermining the justification of ecoterrorism

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

This analysis of moral phenomena is an experiential and epistemic understanding of the inherent rationality of value experience rather than a metaphysical interpretation of value as a mysterious or mystical property of things. The goods we appreciate for ourselves and for others are never given as absolute but always are provisional and subject to the satisfaction or frustration of future experiences. Here we find the deepest flaw of biocentric approaches to environmental ethics such as the land ethic and deep ecology. To the extent that these and other ecophilosophies understand intrinsic value as an atemporal metaphysical property, biocentricism repeats the pattern of the other centricisms by making its experience and conception of intrinsic value into a metaphysical and moral absolute. Thus, to the extent that biocentric thinking interprets our moral experiences around a nonnegotiable ahistorical metaphysical and moral absolute, the door is still left open to the temptation of ecofascism and ecoterrorism. The logic of domination reenters the picture with the emergence of a moral absolute.

The radical ecological project of unmasking ecodestructive elements in our worldview does not end with the development of new, alternative, and ecofriendly worldviews, but rather with the more radical possibility of shifting power within our worldviews away from the controlling authority of fixed concepts and categories and toward an openness to how the world unfolds. To attempt to think without a radical questioning of the historical and contingent nature of the concepts and categories controlling thought is simply to articulate the combinatorial possibilities of fixed semantic regimes. Rather than give in to a prepackaged way of thinking, we must hold out for a kind of thinking that is open to the world, a kind of thinking that is able to take the world in, to be available to the revelation that the world may offer. Such thinking accepts what the world offers but always takes a second look. Such thinking is characterized by its intrinsic revisability in the face of an always open future. (11)

Moral experience is always a dialectic between our animal sentiments and our historically constructed worldviews. Neither our animal sentiments nor our historically constructed value systems are infallible. We live morally responsible lives only by playing one off against the other. Moral experience is always directed toward a future that is yet to come. The final categories of moral understanding are forever postponed. Without final categories there can be no final answers, and without final answers there can be no final solutions. Final solutions are always based on metaphysical absolutes. Ecological philosophy and environmental ethics will best be served by a notion of value that recognizes the temporality and interrelatedness of all things. By tracing our capacity for moral experience to the becoming of natural selection and the historicity of our worldviews, we can learn to interpret our various intuitions and experiences of value as a prima facie understanding of goodness to be born out in future experience. Such a prima facie understanding of goodness, worth, and value is never absolute and final; it is always provisional and subject to further, but never perfect, confirmation. As such, it would provide a poor means for the justification for fascist or terrorist solutions to environmental or animal rights issues.