Review: Jamieson, Ethics & the Environment

I reviewed the second edition of Dale Jamieson’s Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Here is the link to the review.

I love this book and have used its first edition to teach environmental ethics for years. The second edition is true to the original, but some parts have been thoroughly updated, including expanded chapters (previously sections) on animal agriculture and on wildlife conflicts in California. You can use the book as a textbook, but it’s also an excellent introduction to the topic in its own right and, frankly, just a very good piece of environmental philosophy, where Jamieson’s deep interest in conflicts and plurality shines through. My favorite aspect of the book is its nuanced and lucid engagement with metaethics, an infamous minefield for environmental ethicists willing to motivate intrinsic concern for nature.

An excerpt from my review:

Jamieson’s metaethical view is that “valuing is contextual, object-directed, and constrained by biology, psychology, and history” (58). The whole chapter is guided by a patient analysis of various statements such as “It is wrong to kill animals for food,” “Mountain gorillas are vegetarian” (vs. “Mountain gorillas are valuable”) and includes a sophisticated yet perfectly accessible discussion of realism, subjectivism, naturalism, and intrinsic value. Realism would have seemed the default position in the 1970s when a minority of philosophers were trying to establish that nature has value in its own right. Through a careful analysis of the practical functions of moral language, Jamieson eschews the default position and confronts “The fundamental challenge of metaethics”: “to provide an account that can explain [the] strange set of features that seems to characterize moral language”, features of both “fact-stating discourse” and “expressions of attitudes” (56). Jamieson’s solution lies in understanding valuing itself:

Valuing is a transaction between valuers and the world that implies both a subject and an object. . . .Once we see subjects and objects as essential to this valuing, then the fact that both subjects and objects constrain valuing comes into view. (56)

This deceptively simple view drives Jamieson’s approach to a wide range of issues and succeeds, in my view, in capturing the essential motivation of environmental concern without controversial metaphysical assumptions. Intrinsic value just is the result of a contextual process, constrained by reasons, of valuing certain things (people, animals, objects, places, and processes). Thus, we can “reconcile the object-relatedness of realism with the motivational insight of subjectivism.” (58) We end up with an attractive package. A non-realist moral pluralism that treats many kinds of nonhuman entities and processes as valuable non-instrumentally. The package is capacious enough to account for our duties to (or the intrinsic consideration of) rivers and desert ecosystems, goats and wildflowers, gorillas and chickens, while leaving enough wiggle room for tensions and conflicts to emerge, leaving the handling of those conflicts up to the very source of value and reasons: the imperfectly rational, meaning-seeking, cooperative creatures that we are.

This last part is important. Much of Jamieson’s recent work can be read as an attempt to salvage our ability to live meaningful lives in the Anthropocene, in light of the facts that most of us can hardly make any difference through our individual actions and that many of the things we care about are going to disappear or change radically due to factors that now sit largely outside of our control. It would be easy to derive a sense of futility, if not bleakness, from this realization. Despite his avowed pessimism—the title of one of his previous books is, after all, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle for Climate Change Failed —and What it Means for Our Future —Jamieson never succumbs to nihilism. Instead, he never ceases to inspire a deep appreciation for nature in all its plurality and complexity. The conflicts can be bleak, but we can derive a lot of meaning from them.