6 Does Kant have anything to teach us about environmental ethics?

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2007 by Marc Lucht

As I shall suggest in the next section, Kant thinks that aesthetic consciousness is a felt awareness of the intelligibility and significance of natural forms, a kind of awareness closed to reason and science. Here, I am suggesting that Kant gives us reason to think that environmental ethicists should attend to how aesthetic experiences and pure aesthetic judgments put us in touch with nature in a way that our more typical instrumental attitudes cannot. He also gives us reason to believe that it is important to think about how to relate aesthetic experiences of natural beauty to the aims of conservation and to reflection about the moral dimension of nature. I do not claim that Kant's account of the disinterestedness of taste is anything like the disclosure of an ecological imperative requiting us to respect the nonhuman world. For Kant, a judgment of taste is grounded in feeling, and only reason in its practical employment has the capacity to project authoritative moral prescriptions. Nor am I claiming that Kant himself would endorse the view of a thinker such as Jonas that nonhuman beings might possess intrinsic worth. My claim is more modest but also more foundational. What Kant offers--perhaps against his own intention--is a way of thinking about how to cultivate the very attitude that would dispose one to consider seriously the possibility that natural beings could in fact deserve respect. The disinterestedness of taste is an attunement in which something like an ecological imperative might first speak to us, an attunement that could render us initially receptive to the claim that nonhuman beings may well make upon us. I am suggesting that Kant's inchoate gesture at a noninstrumental attitude toward nature offers resources for thinking about how to encourage an openness that could enable us to suspend routine instrumental attitudes and to hear, for the first time, the call to care about, and respect, beings other than human beings.

III

Aesthetic Consciousness and Subjectivity

MANY PHILOSOPHERS find themselves troubled by the ways in which the Western tradition of dualistic thinking has represented human subjectivity and its relation to the world. Philosophy often distinguishes between human being and world, both metaphysically and morally. The human subject typically is thought of as most importantly a rational being and, as such, different in essence from the natural world, from which it stands apart as a kind of detached, contemplative knower. Many critics, notably romantic thinkers and those working in existentialism, have suggested that such dualistic categories contribute to human alienation and a sense of homelessness, making it difficult for us to consider ourselves a part of nature, and giving us the sense that we have been thrown or abandoned into an indifferent world of which we are not really a part. As we have already seen, this metaphysical disjunction also makes possible a moral distinction: things sharing the kind of essence that human beings possess are dignified and make moral claims upon us, whereas nonrational or at least nonsentient beings possess only relative value as means to some rational being's ends. Dualism sanctions anthropocentrism.