[1] Perhaps the most striking moral intuition reported by environmental ethicists is the belief that the value of natural entities must be seen as in some important way independent of human beings. 1 It seems to many that we have substantive moral obligations toward nonhuman animals, plants, and perhaps even inanimate parts of the natural world, and furthermore that these obligations cannot be completely explained in terms of any duties we may have toward living human beings or future generations of human beings. And so it seems that environmental ethicists are committed to the claim that at least some nonhuman natural entities have a kind of intrinsic or inherent value.
[2] Consequently, environmental ethicists are often accused of blurring or ignoring the distinction between facts and values, or, alternately, of fallaciously inferring "ought"s from "is"s, since many explicitly claim or implicitly suppose that values can exist in the world independently of human beings or of minds in general. But this runs contrary to one of the fundamental tenets of the modern world view, specifically, that while facts are objective in the sense of being independent of minds or consciousness, values are subjective in the sense of being metaphysically dependent upon the states or activities of minds or conscious entities. And so it seems that an entire contingent of the environmental ethics movement is based upon a fundamental metaphysical or logical confusion.
[3] Why, then, insist upon the claim that natural entities can have value apart from the values and interests of human beings? Undoubtedly, environmental ethicists have deepseated intuitions of their own that somehow displace or outweigh the countervailing intuitions just described. I think these intuitions can usefully be characterized as stemming from the belief that there is something arrogant about assuming that the natural world has no value other than the value we arbitrarily choose to place upon it, as well as the phenomenological recognition that we don't (at least don't always) experience natural objects as being inherently value-neutral. And so it seems that we have a conflict of deepseated intuitions: on the one hand, we have the feeling that there is a metaphysical or logical distinction between facts and values, and so that all values are somehow dependent upon consciousness or "value-projecting" beings, while on the other hand there is the phenomenological recognition that we don't actually experience the world in this fashion, but rather experience natural entities as having at least part of whatever value they have independently of any relations to human beings.
[4] In this paper I will attempt a partial reconciliation of these two sets of intuitions. My goal will not be to defend any of the specific claims made by environmental ethicists, but rather to help establish the very possibility of a certain branch of environmental ethics by providing an account of value that allows for the possibility of natural entities having values apart from their relations to human beings. My claim will be that there is a sense in which values are, and another, different sense in which they are not dependent upon human cognition. Taking my cue from Kant's transcendental idealism, I will argue that there are two very different senses in which values might be dependent upon us. Kant claimed that space and time were at once "transcendentally ideal" and "empirically real," meaning that each is transcendentally but not empirically dependent upon human consciousness. I will argue that the same is true with respect to values.
[5] In the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes the following claim:
The expression "outside us" is thus unavoidably ambiguous in meaning, sometimes signifying what as thing in itself exists apart from us, and sometimes what belongs solely to outer appearance. In order, therefore, to make this concept... quite unambiguous, we shall distinguish empirically external objects from those which may be said to be external in the transcendental sense, by explicitly entitling the former "things which are to be found in space." 2 [A373][6] What I am interested in here are the two different senses in which things can be said to be "outside us." Things are outside us in the transcendental sense if they exist "apart from us," while things which are outside us or "external" in the empirical sense are "things which are to be found in space." But note that the whole force of making this distinction is to emphasize that things can be outside us in the latter sense without being so in the former. So things can be outside us or external to us in two different ways: by being capable of existence "apart" from us, and by being experienced as occupying a region of space distinct from that region which our body is experienced as occupying.
[7] While the spatial metaphor of being "outside" or "external" applies most literally in the latter case, it is obvious that it is merely metaphorical in the former. Things in themselves, we know, are held not to exist in space, and so their "apartness" from us cannot be understood in spatial terms. Rather, what is external in the transcendental sense is that which exists independently of us. Things in themselves exist, and have whatever properties they do, independently of how or whether we experience them, and so independently of human minds or human cognition in general. Consequently, it is clear that what is at stake here is the sense in which things may or may not be independent of human minds or human cognition. What is transcendentally independent of us, then, is whatever is metaphysically independent of human experience.
[8] The case is somewhat more complicated with regard to what is empirically "outside" us. As noted above, the spatial locutions can be taken almost literally, and so need not be understood metaphorically. But these expressions cannot be taken quite literally here either: what is empirically outside us cannot actually be outside us if space and time are held not to be transcendentally real, but instead merely the forms of human intuition. So, since "empirical objects" are objects as experienced, let us say that what is empirically outside us is whatever is experienced as being spatially separate from us. Given this, we can now expand this notion of what is empirically external to a more general notion of empirical independence and say that a thing is empirically independent of us (or of human cognition) if it is experienced as existing apart from us (or of human cognition). So a thing is transcendentally independent of human experience if it exists, and has whatever properties it does, independently of how or whether it is experienced by human beings, and is empirically independent if it is necessarily experienced as existing independently. (Transcendental and empirical dependence can be defined in similar fashion.) Kant's claim, then, is that while we experience natural entities as existing apart from us (i.e., as empirically independent), the fact that we experience them as spatio-temporal is due to the nature of the subjective conditions of the possibility of experience, and not to the independent natures of the things themselves that we so experience.
[9] My claim is that the value of natural entities can be understood in parallel fashion: viz., as being at once transcendentally ideal and empirically real. What this means is that when we consider the world "transcendentally" with an eye toward the necessary conditions of the possibility of experience, we see that the value of things, like their spatiality and temporality, is not a feature that resides in them as they are independently of being experienced, but is due instead to the subjectively necessary conditions for our having any experience of them in the first place. On the other hand, when we consider the world "empirically," that is, as we necessarily experience it, we find that the value of things is as much an independent "part" of them as are their spatial and temporal properties, and so that just as things (as experienced) really are spatial and temporal, likewise things (again, as experienced) really have the values we experience them as having. In the remainder of this paper I will offer my reasons for thinking that this is the case, and then the implications this view has for environmental ethics.
[10] Let us, once again, look to Kant -- specifically, to what he says about the reality of space. (He makes similar remarks about time.):
Our exposition therefore establishes the reality , that is, the objective validity, of space in respect of whatever can be presented to us outwardly as object, but also at the same time the ideality of space in respect of things when they are considered in themselves through reason, that is, without regard to the constitution of our sensibility. We assert, then, the empirical reality of space, as regards all possible outer experience; and yet at the same time we assert its transcendentalideality -- in other words, that it is nothing at all, immediately we withdraw the... limitation to possible experience, and so look upon it as something that underlies things in themselves. [A28/B44]And later, once again from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason:
The transcendental idealist is, therefore, an empirical realist, and allows to matter, as appearance, a reality which does not permit of being inferred, but is immediately perceived. Transcendental realism, on the other hand, inevitably falls into difficulties, and finds itself obliged to give way to empirical idealism, in that it regards the objects of outer sense as... selfsubsistent beings, existing outside us. [A371][11] These passages make at least two points that are relevant to our discussion. The first passage clarifies what Kant means by saying that space and time are at once empirically real and transcendentally ideal. To say that space is empirically real is to say that it is "objectively valid," i.e., a necessary feature of "whatever can be presented to us outwardly as object." And so, spatial objects are empirically real because (outer) objects must necessarily appear to us as occupying space. On the other hand, space is transcendentally ideal since it is not a feature of things as they are apart from our experience of them, but instead simply the "form" of outer experience, that is, the "necessary condition of all the relations in which objects can be intuited as outside us...." [A27/B43]
[12] The second passage is perhaps more interesting. It makes explicit something that is only implied in the first passage, namely, that it is only because space is transcendentally ideal that we are in a position to recognize its empirical reality. More specifically, what this passage makes clear is that transcendental realism (i.e., the doctrine that we know things as they are apart from being experienced) directly forces empirical idealism (i.e., skepticism about or denial of the reality of things experienced as in space), while transcendental idealism is consistent with empirical realism. So if we assume that space is a feature of things as they are apart from being experienced, we will be forced into skepticism about the existence of objects in space, while if we recognize instead that space is but the necessary form of outer experience, we will be able to claim that (outer) objects are necessarily experienced as spatial, and so that spatial things "really exist" in the world as we experience it.
[13] My point here is not to defend Kant's account of space and time, but to suggest that we follow a similar path in trying to account for the intrinsic value of natural entities. Thus, if we are transcendental realists and assume that we experience the world as it is apart from being experienced, we will, like the transcendental realist about space, "inevitably fall into difficulties," and be forced to admit either that values are in no sense metaphysically dependent upon humans or other valuing subjects, or that they are but a mere subjective "projection" onto a value-free world. In the first case we give up the intuition, described at the beginning of this paper, that value is in some sense dependent upon cognition, and in the latter case we give up the other intuition, namely that we nevertheless experience natural entities as having at least part of their value apart from any relations to human beings. If, on the other hand, as transcendental idealists we allow that we only experience the world as it appears to us via the necessary contribution of our subjective experiential "faculties," we may find that we can be empirical realists about value, and thereby grant to the value of things "a reality which does not permit of being inferred, but is immediately perceived." We can say, that is, that while value resides only in the world as we experience it (consistent with the first intuition), nevertheless, in the world as we experience it, things really have value apart from their relations to human beings, just as much as they really are spatial and temporal apart from us (consistent with the second).
[14] I should also make clear that I am not attributing to Kant the view that the value of natural entities is empirically real. Kant, in fact, held some such view in his "pre-critical" writings, but felt required to give it up by the time of his Inauguraldissertation. 3 And so even though I refer to Kant extensively throughout this paper, let me emphasize that my concern here is to defend a position of my own, and not to attribute the details of this view to Kant.
[15] Nevertheless, I think there is something in what I am doing that is very Kantian in spirit, whether or not Kant would have fully approved of this precise move himself. Keep in mind what it means, after all, on Kant's critical position, to say that something is empirically real or "objectively valid." As the above citations about space make clear, to say that something is empirically real is to say only that it is a necessary feature of our experience of the world. As it is a condition of the possibility of experience of (outer) objects that we experience them as in space, we can say that, within the world as we necessarily experience it, space is in fact a real feature of things, and not merely some kind of subjective illusion. My tack will be to make a similar claim about value: I will claim that it is likewise a condition of the possibility of experience that we necessarily experience things as having values, and hence that, in the world as we necessarily experience it, value is a real property of things, and not merely some kind of subjective projection. This need not imply that we are thereby attributing to natural entities any kind of teleological properties (or "natural strivings"), but simply that we can only experience them as having some kind of value. So my claim, again, is that while being a transcendental realist with respect to the values of natural entities forces us to choose between the intuition that values are in some sense dependent upon consciousness and the intuition that we at least sometimes experience natural entities as having inherent or intrinsic value, being a transcendentalist idealist about them allows us to accept both of these intuitions, and so to grant as much reality to the value of natural entities as we do to their spatiality and temporality. Let me look at each of these claims in turn.
[15] Kant argued that transcendental realism leads to empirical idealism with respect to the existence of objects experienced as in space. What I will argue is that transcendental realism leads not directly to empirical idealism about values, but to a number of choices, from which the most attractive option may well be subjectivism about values. This view will claim that values are not metaphysically real, but instead simply "projected" onto to value-free objects by individual valuing subjects.
[16] Suppose then, that we are transcendental realists. Suppose, that is, that we hold that we experience things just as they are apart from our experiences of them. If we hold strictly to this view, we will then be committed to metaphysical realism with respect to values, unless we hold that all experiences of value are, as such, non-veridical. After all, we experience things as having values, and if things are, indeed, as we experience them, we must therefore allow that the values we experience them as having are as a much a part of them as are any of their other properties. And so if we hold that these objects exist, and have whatever properties they do, independently of our experience of them (as we must, qua transcendental realists), we must then hold that they likewise have value independently of human beings or other valuing subjects.
[17] It is not my intent to offer a full-scale critique of metaphysical realism with respect to values. It is, as noted at the beginning of this paper, viewed by many as either logically or metaphysically unacceptable. And of course, to adopt this view would be to give up entirely the intuition, described at the beginning of this paper, that values are at least in some sense dependent upon human beings. Consequently, let us simply assume that metaphysical realism with respect to values is not a viable position.
[18] What, then, are the alternatives? Let me mention two. One could be an "eliminativist" about values and bluntly claim that they are but the remnants of a scientifically out-dated "folk-psychology," and so must be given up along with witches and goblins. One could claim, that is, that experiences of value are in fact non-veridical. But eliminativism denies our experience of ourselves, and so is no more acceptable here than it is in the philosophy of mind. Let us eliminate it. Alternately, one could hold with Hume and others that values lie not in the objects, but "in our breasts," viz., that we simply "project" them onto objects that have no value in and of themselves. 4 Since such a view is endorsed by environmental ethicist J. Baird Callicott, let us examine his position more closely.
[19] Callicott offers his own version of the Humean view that values cannot exist apart from valuers, but are instead projected onto value-free objects by valuing subjects. While Callicott has respect for philosophers like Holmes Rolston who attempt to deny the necessary connection between the value of natural entities and the existence of valuing subjects such as human beings, he characterizes his own position as a kind of "rear-guard" action for those who are skeptical of (what he calls) such "post-modern" advances (see Callicott 1989a: 118), and sees himself amongst the ranks of the latter (see Callicott 1992a).
[20] Nonetheless, while Callicott is critical of value theories that are "nonanthropogenic," it does not follow that his own view is therefore "anthropocentric." In other words, while he admits that human beings are the source of all values, he does not infer from this that all values are thereby "human-centered." Thus, Callicott concedes that "from the point of view of scientific naturalism, the source of all value is human consciousness [or, more generally, animal consciousness]," and yet holds that "it by no means follows that the locus of all value is consciousness itself or a mode of consciousness like reason, pleasure, or knowledge." 5 Callicott claims instead that the way in which we value natural entities should be understood as akin to the non-instrumental manner in which works of art are sometimes valued, or in the way that parents typically value their children. So while Callicott holds that things can have value only because they are valued by something, he nevertheless holds that they can be valued for themselves, and not just because of their usefulness to humans or other "value-projecting" beings.
[21] I have no criticism of this aspect of Callicott's position, and think that he can indeed reject nonanthropogenic value theories without thereby reverting to anthropocentrism. My criticism is rather that such a view leads to unacceptable consequences regarding our moral judgments. While Callicott is aware of these sorts of criticisms, he thinks he can avoid them.
[22] The trouble with this kind of subjectivism, Callicott notes, is that it apparently leads to some kind of radical relativism about morality. He summarizes this criticism in the following fashion:
If value originates in subjects and is projected onto objects, then the same object may be differently valued by different subjects. Thus, while willful murder may appall and disgust you and me so that we color it evil, it may fascinate and delight an insane criminal who may thus color it good.... Hence, universal value judgments cannot be supported by subjectivism and the imposition of "our" moral values on so-called "criminals" appears to be altogether arbitrary and rationally indefensible" (Callicott 1989c: 163-64).[23] Callicott thinks he can avoid such results by appealing to the "biologization of ethics" found in the works of Charles Darwin and advocated more recently by E. O. Wilson. According to this view, even though there is no objective or intrinsic value in the world by which we can support our moral judgments against the relativist, there iS a "functional equivalent" (1989c: 164) available to us in an evolutionarily determined "consensus of feelings" (1989c: 164) among human beings. Callicott argues that altruistic sentiments can and have been selected by evolutionary tendencies, and so that now a universally distributed concern for others is just as natural and normal among human beings as is the possession of two eyes, two hands, and ten fingers. 6 Relativism is thus avoided by virtue of the fact that there is a nearly universal consensus among human beings with respect to our subjective emotional responses to certain kinds of practices and behaviors. There are, of course, normal variations in the amounts of such "social sentiments" we find in various individuals, just as there are variations in height, hair color, and other genetically determined traits, but this is of no real consequence. Those who are radically deficient in such sentiments are merely "abnormal" in the same fashion as are those born with missing limbs, and so are simply "the psychological equivalent of the physically freakish (1989b: 153). Consequently, "radically eccentric value judgments may be said to be abnormal or even incorrect in the same sense that we might say that someone's radically curved spine is abnormal or incorrect" (1989c: 164).
[24] If this appeal to the biologization of ethics allows Callicott's axiological subjectivism to avoid the charge of relativism, it still leads to unacceptable consequences regarding our understanding of our own moral judgments. First and foremost, this position gives us an inadequate account of the wrongness of immoral acts. On this view, we place positive or negative moral value on behaviors or practices as a result of the selection of certain kinds of feelings by evolutionary trends. Yet surely we can imagine different worlds in which different sentiments were selected than those that have been selected in the actual world. But if this is so, it follows that the wrongness, say, of wantonly torturing innocent children is merely contingent, and so that there could be worlds in which such behavior turns out to be either morally neutral, or perhaps even morally good. This strikes me as unacceptable. While we may be able to imagine worlds where such behavior has evolutionary advantage, we do not, I claim, thereby imagine worlds in which such behavior is morally good. And to respond that a world in which evolutionary trends have selected positive sentiments towards infanticide is "evolutionarily impossible," is of no real help, even if true. First, it seems implausible that we could make this case concerning all of things we take to be morally wrong, and secondly and more importantly, it still makes what is morally right or wrong dependent upon what is or is not evolutionarily possible. While such an account may explain why it is that we have certain sentiments, it cannot, I believe, explain why we ought to have them or ought to act in accordance with them. 7 So unless we are willing to concede that the entire concept of morality is derivative upon our understanding of the process of natural selection, Callicott's axiological subjectivism must be rejected as inadequate.
[25] Still, one may reply, perhaps this is the best we can do if we are to avoid metaphysical realism with respect to values. That is, one may sympathize with these criticisms of subjectivism, and yet feel that there simply is no "viable alternative." Callicott himself at least suggests as much (1992b). But, to return to my Kantian analysis, I believe this result follows, much like the Kantian Antinomies, only on the assumption of transcendental realism. My claim is that while transcendental realism inevitably leads to the choice between axiological realism, eliminativism, or subjectivism, transcendental idealism allows us to avoid such a choice. So let us now turn to the status of values for the transcendental idealist.
[26] In the first two sections I explained what it would mean to claim that the value of natural objects is at once transcendentally ideal and yet empirically real, and in the last two I argued that the claim that we experience things as they are in themselves leads either to metaphysical realism or what might be called empirical idealism about values, that is, to the claim that values are simply projected onto value-free objects by individual human beings. In this section I argue that if we are instead transcendental idealists, we can then be empirical realists about value, and so claim that in the world as we experience it, the value of things is (empirically) independent of human beings or of consciousness in general.
[27] In order to see how this follows, let us recall why Kant thinks he is justified in claiming that space and time are empirically real. This is the case, Kant thinks, because space and time are the very forms of experience, implying that everything we perceive will necessarily appear to us as existing in space and time. Since, on Kant's view, all objects whatsoever must appear to us as existing in time, and all outer objects must appear to us as existing in space, we can claim that in the world as we experience it, things really are spatio-temporal. The empirical reality of space and time thus stems from the fact that they are due to the subjective conditions of the possibility of experience. Nevertheless, from within our empirical perspective on the world, where we necessarily experience things in accordance with these subjective conditions on the possibility of any experience whatsoever, it remains the case that space and time are in every empirically meaningful sense perfectly real and objective, and are not in any manner illusory or subjective. Space and time can be known to be empirically real precisely because they are transcendentally ideal.
[28] My claim is that the value of natural entities is transcendentally ideal yet empirically real. To support this claim, I must therefore argue that the value of things likewise arises out of some subjectively contributed condition which underlies all possible experience. If I can establish this, I will then be able to conclude that in the world as we experience it, things necessarily have value, and so that the value of things is just as real and (empirically) independent of human beings as are their spatial and temporal properties.
[29] To do this, I must move beyond an interpretation of what Kant says about space and time in the first Critique, and on to my own understanding of transcendental idealism. What I need to show is how it follows from my "Kantian" account of what the subject contributes to experience that we must necessarily experience things as having values, and so that the value of things, like their spatiality and temporality, can be understood as being empirically (rather than transcendentally) real. And to do this, I need to say something further about my understanding of transcendental idealism.
[30] In a number of recent papers (1990, 1988, 1985), I have articulated an "adverbial" account of transcendental idealism. The crux of this view is that talk about appearances should be understood adverbially rather than nominally. What this means is that talk about appearances is to be understood as talk about how things (in themselves) necessarily appear to us, and not as talk about some mind-dependent class of entities, as "appearances" are often understood. One of the advantages of this view is that it does not posit a class of "intermediate" entities that stand between us and things in themselves, and thereby avoids the charge that transcendental idealism collapses into some variant of Berkeleian idealism. This reading, that is, does not divide reality into a "noumenal" and "phenomenal" world, but instead casts this as a distinction between two ways of considering the (one and only) world.
[31] But, I also argue, if we are to fully make sense of the claim that independently real things actually appear to us via these subjectively modified modes of experience, we must allow that there is some kind of systematic correspondence between how these things are and how we experience them. Thus I offer a kind of correspondence theory of veridical experience, but where the correspondence obtains not between some independent reality and "ideas" or "appearances," but between how things are and how we experience them.
[32] This last point is subject to criticism, and it is my response to that criticism that is relevant to my task here. The criticism stems from the fact that there are infinitely many ways of mapping any one complex structure onto another. And so, the criticism goes, to characterize veridical experience as any kind of map of a mind-independent reality is but an empty claim, as there is no way for us to determine which of the infinitely many possible "maps" is the appropriate one.
[33] But the criticism is misguided. In order to establish the intelligibility of transcendental idealism, it is not incumbent upon me to determine which map is the intended one, but only to establish that there is nothing incoherent in the claim that there is some such map. In fact, to suggest that we might know which map is the intended one would violate the entire spirit of this argument, as it would entail that we do indeed know how things are apart from our experiences of them. So in order to make sense of the claim that we know things in themselves, but only as they appear to us, I need not be able to specify precisely how our experience "maps" reality, but only intelligibly claim that it does so.
[34] Nonetheless, the criticism is important because it forces us to focus more clearly on this "mapping" relation I am arguing must hold between veridical experience and the world as it is apart from being experienced. Specifically, it helps us to remember that there can be many perfectly good maps of the same "terrain," and that the choice between maps is thus dependent upon our purposes for consulting one -- that is, upon some set of values. Let me illustrate this point with an example. Suppose that I have before me a map of the distributions of the average rainfall throughout the United States, and another that depicts the major highways. Which (if either) of these two maps is the "correct one" depends upon what my purposes are in consulting the map. Of course, given a particular purpose, there can be better and worse, correct and incorrect maps, but the choice of which sort of map to consult is contingent upon which values I bring to the situation. The crucial point to keep in mind here is that the entire concept of the "correctness" of a map is always relative to some set of values, and thus that the entire phenomena of using a map is already deeply value-laden.
[35] I think that something similar can be said with respect to the manner in which our experience "maps" the world. There are infinitely many ways in which our experience might correspond to one and the same world. But which of these methods of projection is the "intended" one is not really a matter of metaphysics, but instead of pragmatics. That is, there is nothing about the underlying structure of the world in itself that determines which of the infinitely many maps must be the correct one. Rather, the entire notion that there is some "correct" or "intended" method of projection already presupposes some underlying set of values to which these terms must be relative. Consequently, to the extent that this view is committed to the claim that there is some such intended method of projection, it is also committed to the claim that this mapping relation between the world and our experience of it is the embodiment or realization of some underlying set of values-values that thereby make themselves manifest in the world as we experience it.
[36] If this is correct, it implies that our entire experience of the world is of necessity deeply laden with values. 8 It does not, of course, imply which specific values we must bring to experience, but only that any experience of the world is, as such, a way of categorizing that world relative to some underlying set of values. And if this is correct it implies that what the facts are in the world as experienced is dependent upon the set of values that we bring to our experience of the world. That we experience the world as populated by persons and trees and tables and chairs is a result of the values that are embedded in the way in which we experience our surroundings. And so while we can continue to claim that the world as it is apart from our experience of it is value-neutral, we must grant that the objects we encounter in the world as we experience it as a result of this value-laden conceptualization have values just as independently and just as objectively as they have any of their other properties. And this, of course, is just what it means to say that the value of natural entities is transcendentally ideal and yet empirically real.
[37] Let me reiterate that I am not saying anything here about what specific values might in fact underlie our experience of the world. And neither am I saying anything about any individual values which we may bring to our own personal experiences. My point is not, for example, that because those of us in the so-called "Western world" so highly value material possessions, this thereby influences how we see things in our world, or that my individual love of nature makes me perhaps more sensitive than others to the intricacies and complexities I may find there. Rather, the issue at stake here is nothing less than the nature of intentional relations as such. What I am claiming is that our relation to the world is fundamentally one of involvement. To say that we know things as they appear to us is already to say that these things appear to as having values that are as much a "part" of them as are any of their other properties. Thus, the objects we experience in this world must be experienced as having value because what those objects are is already the result of our value-projecting relation to that world.
[38] With this, we can now see that the real source of my disagreement with the transcendental realist is in fact a phenomenological one. The transcendental realist takes for granted that we experience things as they are independently of our experiences of them, and so makes no distinction between how things are and how we necessarily experience them. But without this distinction, the claim that we project our subjective values onto a world devoid of any value can only mean that the world as we experience it must therefore be without value unless and until we bestow some value upon it. Because the transcendental realist understands the dependence of values upon human beings as something that occurs within the world as we experience it, she is apparently committed to the view that we first experience the world as value-neutral, and then, on the basis of our individual (though perhaps evolutionarily determined and nearly universal) subjective feelings, project values onto these objects. But this, I claim, is just bad phenomenology, and conflicts with the second intuition described at the outset of this paper, namely that we apparently experience natural entities as having a value that resides in them independently of any relations to human beings. While it is often the case that some of the value I see in a thing I recognize as depending upon some personal end or motivation, it seems phenomenologically false to claim that I never experience objects as having some kind of intrinsic or inherent value -- a value that I experience myself as discovering in the object rather than as projecting upon it.
[39] On the other hand, it may seem that the view I am propounding is phenomenologically excessive in just the respect in which the above view is phenomenologically inadequate. That is, while the transcendental realist seems committed to the claim that we never experience objects as having values that reside in them independently of their relations to humans or other valuing subjects, the view I am proposing apparently suggests instead that we always experience things as having such values, and thus that we never experience things as being value-neutral. My claim, after all, is that values are empirically real because experiencing things as having values is as much a condition of the possibility of experience as is experiencing them as standing in spatio-temporal relations. But, the criticism continues, while it may indeed be impossible for me to experience objects nonspatio-temporally, it seems that I can experience them as being value-neutral. As one critic has suggested, "Non-spatiality is beyond my cognitive equipment, axiological indifference is not." 9
[40] My response is to grant that this is a consequence of my position, but to deny that it constitutes a criticism. It seems to me that I can account for the existence of value-neutral experiences of objects or axiological indifference by a straightforward appeal to matters of focus and attention. Prior to this instant, I have not been focusing my attention on the tactile sensations of my fingers striking the keyboard. And even now that I have called these sensations to my attention, it is easy to continue ignoring them as I focus instead on the philosophical points I am trying to make. Yet none of this implies that prior to this moment, my experience was "sensation-neutral," but only that my attention was focused elsewhere. Likewise, the mere fact that I can ignore the value that something may have does not demonstrate that I am thereby experiencing it as having no value at all, but only that, once again, my attention is focused elsewhere. And so I am claiming that while we can be "indifferent" to the value of things in the sense that we can choose to ignore it, it is not the case that we thereby ever experience them as having no value at all. It is true, on my account, that our primary mode of experience is to experience things as having values -- values that we can subsequently choose to ignore, but I find this phenomenologically preferable to claiming that we initially experience things as being value-neutral, and only subsequently "color" them in terms of our own subjective sentiments.
[41] But with this, we can now accept both of the intuitions discussed at the beginning of this paper. We have claimed, that is, that the value of things is transcendentally, though not empirically, dependent upon the existence of experiencers. In other words, it is only because the nature of our relation to our environment is fundamentally one of involvement that anything we experience in that environment can (and in fact must) be experienced as having any kind of value at all. But by making the existence of value transcendentally dependent upon the existence of experience as such, we have thereby paved the way for establishing its empirical independence from any particular experiencer or group of experiencers. That is, just as space and time can be both transcendentally ideal and yet empirically real, the fact that we have granted that values are transcendentally dependent upon (human or other) consciousness does not thereby force us to admit that they are also empirically dependent. And so we can hold both to our belief that values are in some sense (i.e., transcendentally) dependent upon consciousness, and yet also that in the world as we find it, things are experienced as having values that reside in them (empirically) independently of any relations they may stand in to human beings.
[42] In this final section, I want to make explicit the consequences of the position I have outlined here with respect to the field of environmental ethics. If successful, what this view establishes is that the objects and phenomena we encounter in the world as we experience it have a value that resides in them independently of their relations to human beings or human cognition. While this view does not suggest exactly how we perceive that value, it claims that this value is experienced as residing in things objectively or intrinsically, and not as merely a subjective projection of personal, individual values onto value-free objects. Rather, the position I am advocating claims that, due to the conditions under which we can have any experience of objects at all, we must necessarily experience natural entities as having some intrinsic or inherent value that resides in them independently of any relations they may stand it to human beings.
[43] Nevertheless, the view endorsed here does not by itself entail that natural entities are (experienced as) good, but only that they must necessarily be experienced as having some value or other. My purpose has not been to argue that there is some unique value or set of values that all human beings must necessarily bring to the world, but rather that consciousness of objects is possible only if we experience those things as having values, and so that at least some of the value we experience things as having, we experience them as having independently of human beings. 10 Thus I have not here established, for example, that human beings ought to make sacrifices in order to stop the global destruction of rainforests, in order to prevent the extinction of elephants or tigers, or in order to "preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community." 11 That natural entities are good and that we ought to be concerned with rain-forests, with the extinction of species, and with the integrity of the biotic community, are things that I in fact believe, and I feel that we all owe much to Callicott and others for making this so apparent. Nonetheless, what I have attempted to do here is not to establish these things myself, but to understand the whole project of attempting to do so in terms of conceptual foundations other than the Humean ones that Callicott provides.
[44] Finally, I want to address the criticism that the view I have proposed really amounts to a kind of anthropocentrism, because it apparently admits that in some sense all values are human centered after all. If we are the ones who bring value to our experience of the world, doesn't this mean that ultimately all values are human values, and so that whatever value things have, they have only in virtue of what is important or non-important to human beings?
[45] I think this criticism is ill-founded for a number of reasons. First, even if true, this would show only that human beings are the source of the value of natural entities, but not that things can be valued only because of their utility to human beings. And so, as Callicott noted, this would show only that values are anthropogenic, but not that they are also anthropocentric. But more importantly for my discussion here, I think the criticism simply fails to take seriously the distinction I have been urging between transcendental and empirical dependence. Human beings, we should note, are themselves empirical objects -- they are things that exist in the world as we experience it. And so the claim I am making is not that natural entities have value because of their (empirical) relations to these (empirical) human beings, but rather that the entire world as we experience it is one that is laden with value, and that this is so because of the (transcendental) conditions of the possibility of experience. Consequently, the view that I offer here claims neither that values are human-centered, nor that they have a strictly human origin. They are, on the contrary, as much an objective feature of the world as we find it as are any of the "facts" that we discover to be the case.
[46] In sum, then, I argue that the value of natural entities is at once transcendentally ideal and empirically real. And so if we grant that we experience the world not as it is itself, but only as it appears to us via our subjective experiential "faculties," we can then allow that things in the natural world can have a value that resides in them independently of any empirical relations they may stand in to human beings, and we can do so without claiming that there is no necessary relation between the value of natural entities and human or other valuers.
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1 I wish to thank J. Baird Callicott, Martin Schonfeld, Michael Pritchard, and Ermanno Bencivenga for their comment on earlier drafts of this paper. Return.
2 All citations to the Critique are from the Norman Kemp Smith translation (1929). The emphases in this passage are in the original. Return.
3 I thank Martin Schonfeld for reminding me of this. Return.
4 I am ignoring here the view that moral qualities might "supervene" on non-moral qualities. This is the claim that there is some (necessary or contingent) law-like relation between moral qualities and non-moral qualities, such that differences in moral qualities would presuppose underlying differences in the respective "base" non-moral qualities. I omit this position not because I think it is unimportant, but because I think it is not a true alternative to the options discussed in the text. Thus, the view that moral qualities supervene on non-moral qualities implies neither that moral qualities are or are not metaphysically independent of human beings, nor that they are or are not projected by valuing subjects onto value-free objects. Hence the view I am proposing is simply silent on the question of supervenience. Return.
5 The citation is from (Callicott 1989b: 133). But note that in (Callicott 1992a) Callicott allows that the source of value is consciousness in general, and not merely human consciousness (see 132-33). Return.
6 In "The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic" (in In Defense of the Land Ethics), Callicott argues that the "others" referred to here are not just human beings, but all the individuals we perceive as being part of the same community of inter-dependent parts that we perceive ourselves to be parts of, and in addition the community itself (see Callicott 1989d: 77-82). I omit this point in the text as it is not relevant to the discussion there. Return.
7 Callicott attempts to address this sort of criticism in his recent "Can a Theory of Moral Sentiments Support a Genuinely Normative Environmental Ethic?" (1992b: 183-84), but I believe this attempt is unsuccessful. Callicott argues that given a certain set of moral sentiments, information can have normative force. (For example, given that one wants to be healthy, the information that smoking is harmful to one's health will lead rational individuals to believe that they ought to quit smoking.) Callicott has admitted however (in a private conversation) that this view cannot account for the intuition that people ought to have certain sentiments. And so if I have am fully knowledgeable of the fact, say, that other human beings have feelings just like my own, but simply do not care about this, Callicott can say only that my sentiments are abnormal or "freakish," but not that I ought to have different ones. Return.
8 Frithjof Bergmann reaches similar conclusions about the phenomenology of value in (Bergmann 1973). Return.
9 This criticism, and the quoted sentence, are due to Martin Schonfeld. I thank him for calling this point to my attention. Return.
10 That there is some such unique value or set of values is something that I hope to establish elsewhere. Return.
11 This is, of course, Aldo Leopold's famous maxim that has become the foundation for the sort of position advocated by Callicott (see Leopold 1987: 224-225). Return.