Abstract
We can construe the ‘value-space’ constituted by humans and their environments in a variety of ways. In mainstream environmental philosophy a preferred way of construing this space is as a collection of intrinsically valuable items, both human and non-human. On this view, environmental decision-making should be concerned with the maintaining and fostering of intrinsic value. After rehearsing a number of objections to this view, an alternative construal of the value-space is offered, which centres on the concept of ‘meaningful relations’. An account of this concept is given, along with a sketch of the value system that forms its backdrop. ‘Meaningful relations’, it is argued, is a unifying concept that characterises evolutionary and ecological relations as well as cultural ones. On this alternative view, environmental decision-making should be concerned with the continuation of meaning rather than the preservation of value.
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Notes
- 1.
It is possible to imagine someone mounting the counter-argument that ‘meaning talk’ can in principle be reduced to, or translated into ‘value talk’. But aside from noting the point, no attempt will be made to do justice to such a rejoinder within the scope of the present paper.
- 2.
I assume throughout a ‘secular’ worldview, along lines indicated in Holland (2009).
- 3.
See O’Neill (1992) for a classic account of the various senses that may attach to the term ‘intrinsic value’.
- 4.
Partisans of intrinsic value are not insensitive to this point: ‘value seeps out into the system’, as Rolston (2001: 145) has it.
- 5.
In what follows, it will be argued that such heroic but un-demonstrable claims about the overall value of the natural world are unnecessary.
- 6.
More recently, it is perhaps David Cooper (2003) who has done most to rescue the concept of meaning from the prison of language to which many philosophers would confine it.
- 7.
Interestingly, he identifies fanaticism – surrender of the self to something trans-individual – as a flawed response to these anxieties.
- 8.
By contrast, to discover that there is after all ‘a meaning’ to life, or that there is such a thing as ‘the meaning of life’, could be regarded as an extremely depressing prospect indeed.
- 9.
It should be stressed that normative judgements are here understood to be fully fallible and open to challenge. It is only some subjectivist readings of moral judgement that misguidedly render them immune to challenge – and in the process deprive them of any normative force.
- 10.
To say all this is to do little more than rehearse arguments to be found in Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. Plato’s stress on ‘thumos’ has already been noted, while it is Aristotle who draws attention to the key role played by the intellectual virtues of wisdom and understanding. The Stoics, for their part, laid stress on the ‘intelligibility’ of the cosmos. In order to ‘follow nature’ – their key maxim – one had to grasp its meaning (‘logos’).
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Holland, A. (2012). The Value Space of Meaningful Relations. In: Brady, E., Phemister, P. (eds) Human-Environment Relations. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2825-7_1
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