Intrinsic Value, Environmental Ethics, and Adam Smith

            For better or worse, intrinsic value is a central concept in contemporary environmental ethics.  J. Baird Callicott claims that “How to discover intrinsic value in nature is the defining problem for environmental ethics” (Callicott 1999: 241).   In Environmental Ethics, Holmes Rolston III claims that “Environmental ethics asks: What is an appropriate attitude toward [Nature]? Has it any value?” (Rolston 1988: 197).  Within environmental ethics, there are two central debates about intrinsic value.  First, environmental pragmatists such as Lori Gruen, Bryan Norton, and Andrew Light call into question the importance of concepts like intrinsic value, suggesting a pragmatic turn towards an environmental ethics that avoids tricky meta-ethical issues – the “albatross” or “morass” of intrinsic value (Morito 2003; Turner 1996: 88) – in favor of more important normative discussions about actions and attitudes. Against this trend, philosophers such as Callicott and Rolston defend the importance of intrinsic value.  Second, among those who agree that intrinsic value is important, there is disagreement about whether intrinsic value should be understood to be an objective property of the world independent of human valuings (Rolston’s view) or a property that entities in the world have by virtue of some relationship to human attitudes (the view of Robert Elliot, and, arguably, of Callicott).  This paper offers a theory of intrinsic value that will be new within environmental ethics, one that straddles the divides between pragmatists, objectivists, and subjectivists.

            The account of intrinsic value that I defend in this paper is a proper attitude of intrinsic value.  Like pragmatists, I argue that determining proper attitudes towards nature is a more important and more fundamental project for environmental ethics than determining what entities have intrinsic value.  Unlike pragmatists, however (and thus like Callicott and Rolston), I still ascribe importance to the concept of intrinsic value.  Because ascriptions of intrinsic value are justified by appeal to proper attitudes, however, my account provides a way to bridge the divide between pragmatists and intrinsic value theorists.  Moreover, the account of intrinsic value I defend in this paper is neither objectivist in the sense defended by Rolston, nor subjectivist in the sense defended by Elliot.  By tying ascriptions of intrinsic value to human attitudes, my account has all of the advantages of the subjectivist account.  But because intrinsic value is justified only by proper attitudes, the account avoids most of the problems with subjectivist accounts.  The result is a theory of intrinsic value that avoids the meta-ethical entanglements of objectivist theories and the relativism of subjectivist theories, all the while bridging the divide between pragmatists and intrinsic value theorists.

            After a short section introducing the role of intrinsic value in recent environmental ethics, this paper turns (in sections two and three) to developing a general structure for proper attitude accounts of intrinsic value.  There are really a cluster of such accounts, all sharing in common features that distinguish them from objectivism and subjectivism about values, but differing in both the range of normatively evaluable attitudes and the bases for determining whether an attitude is proper.  In section four, I shift from my general proper attitude structure to a specific theory of intrinsic value.  Drawing on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, I show how one can develop a Smithian account of intrinsic value, highlighting some of the features of this account that make it particularly important for environmental ethics.

 

1.  Intrinsic Value in Ethics and Environmental Ethics.

            The term “intrinsic value” in philosophical ethics goes back to the turn of the 20th century, when two different but related theories of intrinsic value were developed in Britain and Germany.  In Germany, Franz Brentano developed a theory of intrinsic value as dependent upon the propriety of love simpliciter, such that “we call a thing good when the love relating to it is correct” (Brentano 1889/1969: 18, cf. Brentano 1952/1973, Bernstein 2001, Broad 1930, and Chisholm 1981 and 1986).  In Britain, G. E. Moore articulated a theory of intrinsic value as part of his intuitionist program in ethics.  Moore described intrinsic value as an “indefinable” or “simple” property, a “unique simple object of thought” (Moore 1902: xiii), but one that gives rise to duties to maximize intrinsic value (Moore 1902 and 1912).  These approaches shared a common commitment to the centrality of the notion of “intrinsic value” in ethics.  But Brentano’s approach allows the normativity of attitudes (love, hate, and preference) to be conceptually prior to ascriptions of intrinsic value, while Moore put claims about intrinsic value made on the basis of intuition conceptually prior to normative evaluation of actions and attitudes relating to those values.[1]  Throughout the 20th century, beginning with W. D. Ross (Ross 1930) and continuing through more recent accounts such as those of Noah Lemos (Lemos 1994), Michael Zimmerman (Zimmerman 2001), and Robert Audi (Audi 2004), Moore’s approach to intrinsic value has dominated discussions of intrinsic value in Anglo-American meta-ethics.[2]

            For G. E. Moore and his early 20th century followers such as Ross, the notion of intrinsic value was part of a more general meta-ethical program that had several important components.  Most importantly for the purposes of this paper, Moore advocated a form of moral realism or moral objectivism that prioritized the good over the right.  For Moore, the claim that something has intrinsic value or intrinsic goodness is a basic claim, one established on the basis of intuition.  Moore has a “realist, objectivist and nonnaturalist” conception of this intrinsic value, such that “to say to something that is has intrinsic value is to attribute to it a simple, unanalyzable, nonnatural property” (Elliot 1992: 138).  Moore’s realism and objectivism have found an important place within environmental ethics, most notably in the work of Holmes Rolston III.  At least as important for the purposes of this paper, however, is the priority that Moore gives judgments about intrinsic value or goodness.  Such value judgments, for Moore, are the proper bases of judgments about right actions and attitudes, not the other way around.  As Moore explains, “‘right’ does and can mean nothing but ‘cause of a good result’ . . . whence it follows that the end always justifies the means” (Moore 1902/1988: 147).  Similarly, W.D. Ross explains that “what makes actions right is that they are productive of more good than could have been produced by any other action open to the agent” (Ross 1930: 16, but cf. 9-11).  For Moore and Ross, the priority of the good is inseparable from realism: because the notion of intrinsic value or goodness is unanalyzable in terms of rightness (but rather vice versa), it is a simple, objective (but non-natural) property.

 

Within environmental ethics, the notion of intrinsic value is primarily used to articulate a distinction between “anthropocentric” and “non-anthropocentric” ethical theories.  Environmentalists such as Holmes Rolston III or J. Baird Callicott argue that environmental ethics must be non-anthropocentric in the sense that non-human entities (and even non-sentient entities) must be taken to have intrinsic value.

For if no intrinsic value can be attributed to nature, then environmental ethics is nothing distinct. If nature, that is, lacks intrinsic value, then environmental ethics is but a particular application of human-to-human ethics.  (Callicott 1999: 241, my emphasis)

Prominent defenders of this use of intrinsic value in environmental ethics include J. Baird Callicott, Holmes Rolston III, Arne Naess (in some work), and Nicolas Agar.[3]  For the purpose of articulating this distinctively environmental (non-anthropocentric) conception of intrinsic value, environmental ethicists typically look back further than G. E. Moore, to philosophers who do not use the term “intrinsic value,” but who used various concepts (of the good, or of dignity) that environmental philosophers describe using Moore’s terminology.  The two philosophers most important in this respect are Aristotle and Kant.[4] 

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between instrumental ends which are “pursued as a means to something else,” and the “supreme good” or “final end,” which is properly “an end in itself” (1097a).  Environmental ethicists often make use of the notion of “intrinsic value” to refer to non-instrumental ends in this sense.  In the context of discussing the role of intrinsic value in debates surrounding the Endangered Species Act, for example, J. Baird Callicott articulates this Aristotelian conception of intrinsic value: “The value of something as a means to an end other than itself is instrumental.  The value of something for itself, for its own sake, as an end in itself, is intrinsic” (Callicott 2005: 280).[5]

            Environmental ethicists also often appeal to Kant as an important early proponent of the concept of “intrinsic value,” though this is a term that Kant never uses.[6]  Instead, Kant speaks of “dignity,” or that which “is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent” (4:434).  Kant discusses the distinction between dignity and price as part of arguing for the unique dignity of rational agency (and thus humanity), a unique dignity that gives rise to unconditional obligations to respect other human beings.  While rejecting the limitation of dignity to human beings, many environmental philosophers seek to show that nature itself (or aspects of nature) have a similar sort of dignity – intrinsic value – that warrants some level of moral regard for nature akin to Kant’s unconditional respect.  J. Baird Callicott goes so far as to call Kant’s philosophy the “locus classicus of the concept of intrinsic value” (Callicott 2005: 284) and he rightly says, “although the early twentieth-century philosopher G.E. Moore (1903) wrote much about intrinsic value, Immanuel Kant’s modern classical concept of intrinsic value and the way it functioned in his ethics most influenced the thinking of environmental philosophers” (Callicott 2002: 5).

For environmental ethicists, the Kantian sense of intrinsic value helps highlight connections between intrinsic value for nature and the conception of “fundamental human rights” that grew out of Kant’s emphasis on human dignity.  J. Baird Callicott (following W. Fox) argues,

The concept of intrinsic value in nature functions politically much like the concept of human rights.  Human rights . . . may be overridden by considerations of public or aggregate utility.[7]  But in all such cases, the burden of proof for doing so rests not with the rights holder, but with those who would override human rights.  (Callicott 2002: 14, see too Callicott 1999: 245-6)

Unlike Aristotelian ends in themselves, Kantian intrinsic value implies a certain trumping value over other ends.  The burden of justification lies on anyone who wishes to destroy or violate value. With the assumption that forests lack intrinsic value, the onus is on conservationists to take loggers to court and establish that this particular area has instrumental value. If intrinsic value for forests were established, then the onus would be on the logging company to justify their destruction of a particular forest.  The Endangered Species Act in the United States has had something like this effect (see Callicott 2005).  The difference is “comparable to the difference for humans between a legal system that operates on a presumption of guilt until innocence is proved beyond reasonable doubt and one that operates on a presumption of innocence” (Callicott 1999: 246).

            Although they did not explicitly write in terms of “intrinsic value,” Kant and Aristotle are the primary sources for environmental ethicists’ reflections on the intrinsic value of nature.  Still, some environmental philosophers also emphasize Moorean conceptions of intrinsic value, in particular to draw attention to the importance of natural values being non-extrinsic or non-relational (cf. Elliot 1992, Rolston 1988).  John O’Neill, for example, in a survey of the notion of intrinsic value in contemporary environmental ethics, highlights as one of three main uses of intrinsic value the idea of “the value an object has solely in virtue of its intrinsic properties” (O’Neill 2001: 165).  Although most environmental ethicists (and activists) rightly focus on the non-instrumental and trumping value of nature, it is also important to recognize that nature has value that is not only not instrumental, but not dependent in any way upon its relationship to human beings.  Holmes Rolston III has emphasized this particularly forcefully: “Ecological values . . . seem to be there apart from humans being there” (Rolston 1988: 3).  Showing that nature has non-instrumental, trumping value is arguably more important from the standpoint of action than showing that is has non-relational value, but something deep is missing in humans’ understanding of their relationship to nature if we think that the value of nature is derived from its relationships to human beings.  Ascribing value to the Grand Canyon, the Brazilian rainforest, and the mouse lemur (cf. Rolston 1988: 129) purely because of their relationship to humans might be able to free itself from that crude anthropocentrism that treats nature as a mere resource, and it would be sufficient for most of the policy prescriptions sought by environmentalists.  But such an ascription of value maintains a level of anthropocentric hubris that sees the value of everything as due, in some way, to its connection to human life.  And this hubris, for at least some environmentalists (e.g. Rolston), must be avoided in a truly environmental ethic.  The concept of value that precludes such anthropocentric hubris might be called non-relational value.  Because non-relationality is an important feature of Moore’s conception of intrinsic value, this Moorean conception also plays a role in some uses of intrinsic value in environmental ethics.[8] 

 

            There are, in other words, three important senses of intrinsic value within environmental ethics.[9]  In all cases, intrinsic value is taken to imply moral considerability, and moral considerability for nature is really the fundamental reason for making intrinsic value a part of environmental ethics at all.  First (drawing from Aristotle and Kant), intrinsic value can mean non-instrumental moral considerability.  That is, if nature has intrinsic value, then nature must be taken into account within moral deliberation, and taken into account not merely as a means to further ends, but in its own right.[10]  I call this sort of intrinsic value “non-instrumental value.”  Second, intrinsic value can involve non-instrumental moral considerability of a stronger sort, what Kant calls moral dignity.  This requires not merely being taken into account in one’s own right, but some degree of moral trumpingness.  That is, if nature has intrinsic value, then respect for nature ought to trump other concerns, if not unconditionally (as in Kant), then at least prima facie.  This would, as Callicott suggests (Callicott 2002 and 2005), shift the burden of proof from environmental preservers to environmental destroyers, and would accord to nature something akin to human rights.  I call this sort of intrinsic value “trumping value.”  Finally, intrinsic value can mean non-relational moral considerability, or even non-relational value more broadly speaking.  This Moorean conception of intrinsic value applied to nature would imply not only that nature has value independent of its use as a means to further ends, but that it has value independent of any relationship to anything else.  In particular, this Moorean conception of intrinsic value implies that nature is not valuable merely because human beings value it, even if we value it “in itself.”[11]  This sort of intrinsic value will be called “non-relational value.”

            For the purposes of this paper, it is important to note the disconnect between the purposes for which environmental ethicists appeal to the concept of “intrinsic value” and the reasons that Moore first proposed the concept.  In particular, the meta-ethical program that Moore advocated has no necessary connection with the purposes for which environmental ethicists use the concept of intrinsic value.  One need neither be a moral realist/objectivist nor advocate the primacy of the good over the right in order to insist that nature or its parts have intrinsic value in the three senses specified above.  Neither Kant nor Aristotle was a moral realist in the way that Moore was, and both arguably prioritized the role of the right – proper attitudes – over the value of the objects of those attitudes.[12]  Even non-relational intrinsic value, which has the greatest debt to Moore, can be disentangled from his meta-ethical claims.  Specifically, there is no reason that the claim that something has non-relational value cannot depend upon conceptually prior claims about what is right to promote.  In section three, I will make this claim clearer in the context of my proper attitude account of value; my purpose here is simply to highlight the gap that exists, at least in principle, between the normative roles that intrinsic value plays in environmental ethics and the meta-ethical purpose to which Moore put it.

            The disconnect between Moore’s use of intrinsic value and that of contemporary environmental philosophy is important because this paper proposes a conception of intrinsic value that is closer to Brentano’s[13] than to Moore’s or even those of Kant and Aristotle.  This conception does not depend upon (and in its most natural form, rejects) moral realism, and it prioritizes notions of propriety – akin to the Moorean concept of the right – over ascriptions of intrinsic value.  The specific source for my conception of intrinsic value is Adam Smith, whose moral theory supports a theory of intrinsic value that avoids many of the meta-ethical commitments of Moore, Rolston, and others, while still capturing what is most important about “intrinsic value” for environmental ethicists, in all three of the above senses.  At the same time, because it prioritizes the propriety of attitudes over claims about intrinsic value, the Smithian approach to intrinsic value proposed here should appeal to those such as Gary Norton, Andrew Light,[14] and (especially) Lori Gruen (Gruen 2002), who seek to get away from intrinsic value as a fundamental moral notion in environmental ethics. The result, I hope, is a conception of intrinsic value that can heal some of the divides between certain pragmatists and intrinsic value proponents,[15] while at the same time putting both attitude-based approaches to environmental ethics and intrinsic-value-based approaches on a more secure footing, by grounding both in Adam Smith’s moral theory.[16]

 

            The structure of the rest of the paper is as follows.  In the next section (section two), I lay out a proper attitude account of value in general, according to which a thing has value just in case it is the object of a proper valuing attitude.  In section three, I focus this account more narrowly into an account of intrinsic value, a transformation that is fairly straightforward: a thing has intrinsic value just in case it is the object of a proper intrinsically valuing attitude.  The primary burden of this section is to show that the account of value articulated in section two can makes sense of non-instrumental value, trumping value, and non-relational value, the three sorts of intrinsic value that dominate environmental ethics. In section four, I show how Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments provides a way to determine the propriety of attitudes and thus grounds a proper attitude account of value.  Finally, in my conclusion, I sketch some implications of this account of intrinsic value for environmental ethics.  (In a brief appendix, I respond to criticisms that Holmes Rolston III has raised against accounts of value similar to this one.)

 

2.  Beyond Subjectivism and Objectivism: A Proper Attitude Account of Value

            Within recent environmental philosophy, debates about the nature of value have often focused on a distinction between subjectivist accounts of value and objectivist accounts.  Objectivists such as Holmes Rolston III argue that intrinsic value is an objective property of entities in the world; he asks (rhetorically), “Do not humans value the earth because it is valuable, and not the other way round?” (Rolston 1988: 4).  Subjectivists like Robert Elliot argue instead that “a thing has intrinsic value if it is approved of by a valuer in virtue of its properties” (Elliot 1992: 140).[17]  In this section, my goal is to lay out, briefly and in general terms, an account of value that is neither strictly subjectivist, in the sense attacked by intrinsic value theorists such as Moore, Ross, and Rolston and defended by environmental ethicists such as Robert Elliot and (at times) J. Baird Callicott, nor objectivist, in the sense attacked by Elliot and Callicott and defended by Rolston, Moore, and others.  Brentano articulated such an account, as have several recent moral philosophers (e.g. Korsgaard 1996; Darwall 2003; Lemos 1994).  And Adam Smith, although he never explicitly laid out his ethics as an account of intrinsic value, nonetheless provided one of the most well worked out moral foundations for such an account.  Ultimately, this paper articulates and defends a Smithian version of what I will call a “proper attitude” account of intrinsic value.  But the general framework of proper attitude accounts, as well as my arguments for the superiority of these accounts to subjectivist and objectivist theories of value, applies more broadly.  Because Smith did not explicitly use the terminology of intrinsic value, moreover, it will be helpful to begin with a more recent, and quite different, proper attitude account of intrinsic value, that of Christine Korsgaard.

 

            Christine Korsgaard’s defense of what she calls a “rationalist” account of value (Korsgaard 1996: 225f.) is particularly helpful in the present context because Korsgaard explicitly contrasts this rationalist account of value with, on the one hand, a subjectivist account that “identifies good ends with or by reference to some psychological state” and, on the other hand, an objectivist account according to which “to say that something is good is to attribute . . . to it . . . an objective, nonrelational property . . ., a value a thing has independently of anyone’s desires, interests, or pleasures” (Korsgaard 1996: 225).[18]  Korsgaard rightly points out that subjectivism has the advantage that it “acknowledge[s] the connection of the good to human interests and desires” (255), while objectivism has the advantage that it can explain how “people sometimes fail to care about what is good and sometimes have desires or interests for things that are not good” (226).  Korsgaard suggests,

The rationalist theory may be seen as an attempt to combine these advantages.  According to this view, an object or state of affairs is good if there is sufficient practical reason to realizing it or bringing it about.  (226)

This captures the connection to human interests and desires, in that something is good if it can or should be an object of human interest and desire.  But it also covers cases in which people fail to actually care about it, since one can fail to desire what one should desire.

            The key point here is that unlike subjectivist accounts, Korsgaard’s rationalism does not link value to any contingent interests of actual human agents.  By defining value in terms of what human beings ought to bring about, Korsgaard remains free of the normative arbitrariness of subjectivism.  But because rationalism links value to what human beings ought to bring about, it does not suffer the same risk of being motivationally inert as objectivist accounts of intrinsic value.  Stephen Darwall has made this latter point in an even stronger way, arguing that Moore’s realist conception of intrinsic value is incoherent, or at least that it depends upon a prior and more fundamental proper attitude account: “intrinsic value’s normativity must be constituted by its relation to the norms of valuing attitudes and action” (Darwall 2003: 482).[19]

            Korsgaard’s careful navigation between subjectivism and objectivism highlights two key features that any such intermediate account must have.  First, to preserve what is good about subjectivism, such an account must maintain a necessary normative connection to human beings.  Korsgaard puts this in terms of a connection to “realizing or bringing about” something, but all that is necessary is a relation to whatever actions or attitudes in human beings can be governed by ethical norms.  Alan Gibbard (Gibbard 1990), Robert Solomon (Solomon 1976), Martha Nussbaum (1990, 2001), and others have argued that the range of normativity can be broader than action or bringing about good states of affairs.  Stephen Darwall summarizes this point:

There is much that we judge normatively and regulate by norms other than action, for example, reasoning, beliefs, choices, emotions, responses, feelings, intentions, and attitudes[20]….[And] there are many ways of valuing something intrinsically, that is just on account of its intrinsic properties, that don’t amount to valuing any state….  Respect, veneration, love, cherishing, and sympathy or benevolent concern are all ways of valuing something intrinsically which to not reduce to valuing the state of that thing’s existence. (Darwall 2003: 478, 482)[21]

Within environmental ethics, this normative relation to human beings is, in fact, one of the key advantages that proponents on both sides of the debate about intrinsic value in nature highlight.  Rolston, an objectivist, argues that “If I did not believe . . . that tigers have intrinsic value . . ., I would not be making such efforts to protect them” (Rolston 1998: 350), while Lori Gruen has raised a “problem of motivation” for intrinsic value based accounts: “if intrinsic value is a . . . property of the thing valued, how does this property hook up with the wills of those who perceive it so as to motivate action?  There appears to be a motivational gap” (Gruen 2002: 159).  What is needed is some conception of intrinsic value that connects the concept of intrinsic value with human motivation in a normative way, and this is just what an account like Korsgaard’s is well situated to do.

            Second, however, in order to preserve what is good about objectivism, one must appeal to ethical norms that are superior to contingent actions and attitudes of actual particular persons.  This appeal to something supra-individual is important to preserve the coherence of an account of value as a truly normative account, as objectivists such as Rolston (and rationalists such as Korsgaard) have emphasized.  As Rolston insists with respect to protecting tigers, there must be something like intrinsic value that transcends contingent preferences and desires, to motivate what might be disagreeable action, and what is in any case normatively required rather than simply preferred.  In other words, any intermediate account of value must connect to human attitudes to provide the advantages of the subjectivist and connect to a non-subjectivist account of the propriety of those attitudes, to provide the advantages of the objectivist.  In general, then, a thing has value just in case it is the object of a proper valuing attitude.

           

            At this level of generality, of course, proper attitude accounts of intrinsic value are incomplete.  Simply saying that a thing has value just in case it is the object of a proper valuing attitude calls for an explanation of what sorts of attitudes count as “valuing attitudes” and, more importantly, for what makes at least some of these attitudes proper.  One could even transform this account into subjectivism – by claiming that all actual attitudes are proper – or objectivism – by claiming that a valuing attitude is proper only if it is responsive to objective values in the world.  What is distinctive about proper attitude accounts of value, however, is the shift from facts about the subjective states of agents or objective facts about the world to normative theories about proper attitudes. Korsgaard’s rationalist conception of value is a possible proper attitude account, one that narrows the range of valuing attitudes to those that involve “realizing or bringing about” an object or state of affairs and that specifies rationality as the basis for propriety.  As I will show in the section four, Smith develops an alternative account of proper attitudes in which sympathy, rather than rationality, provides the basis for determining the propriety of attitudes, and in which the range of normatively governed valuing attitudes is much wider than in Korsgaard.

            The intrinsic incompleteness of a proper attitude account of value gives such an account a special place within recent debates about intrinsic value in environmental ethics.  In particular, a proper attitude account of value will straddle the divide between pragmatists and intrinsic value proponents.  Like the views of environmental philosophers such as Callicott and Rolston who emphasize intrinsic value, a proper attitudes account is an account of intrinsic value, and it thus provides a way for environmentalists to defend philosophically the notion that nature has intrinsic value.  It recognizes the legitimacy and importance of the concept within environmental philosophy and debate.  But like pragmatists such as Norton (Norton 1991), Light (Light 1996, cf. too essays in Light, ed. 1996), and Gruen (Gruen 2002), proponents of a proper attitude account of intrinsic value see the issue of what has intrinsic value as both secondary and (from a purely philosophical standpoint) dispensable.  What is essential to environmental ethics is establishing the propriety of various (intrinsically) valuing attitudes towards nature.  One may then, if one chooses, extend one’s normative vocabulary to describe the objects of those attitudes as having “intrinsic value.” But the ascription of intrinsic value will derive from prior normative claims about attitudes, and the move to intrinsic value will not provide further philosophical support for the moral importance of those attitudes, though it may help rhetorically, motivationally, and even philosophically (for clarifying what exactly the attitudes involve).

 

3.  From Value to Intrinsic Value. 

            So far, we have seen how a proper attitude account of value provides an alternative to both subjectivist and objectivist accounts.  This does not yet show how a proper attitude account can make sense of the notion of intrinsic value, in any of the senses described in section one.  In this section, I argue that a proper attitude account can make sense of all three sorts of intrinsic value: non-instrumental, trumping, and non-relational value.  I close this section with a comment about an even more diverse and nuanced approach to “intrinsic value” that proper attitude accounts like Smith’s make possible.

 

a. Non-instrumental Value

The potential for a proper attitude account of value to make sense of non-instrumental value has been clear at least since the birth of philosophical ethics in ancient Greece, it received renewed attention in the early 18th century when Smith was living, and it continues to be vigorously defended today. Bishop Butler’s discussion of self-love in his Sermons (Butler 1726) was particularly important for both Smith and contemporary accounts in that Butler articulates the distinction between “self-love” and the “particular passions” in the satisfaction of which consists human happiness.  Self-love is a reflective passions that takes one’s own happiness as its end, but self-love does not in itself make one happy.  On the contrary,

if self-love wholly engrosses us, and leaves no room for any other principle, there can be absolutely no such thing at all as happiness or enjoyment of any kind whatever; since happiness consists in the gratification of particular passions, which supposes the having of them (Butler 1726: Sermon XI, ¶9)

For Butler, the primary purpose of this discussion of the nature of self-love is to show that benevolence and self-love are not contradictory.  In an argument later picked up by Hume (Hume 1751: Appendix II), Butler argues that since self-love can only be satisfied through satisfying other particular passions, there is no reason that those other passions cannot be benevolent ones (and, in fact, many reasons why they should be).  Comparing benevolence to love of honor, Butler asks, “Is desire of and delight in the happiness of another any more a diminution of self-love than desire of and delight in the esteem of another?“ (XI. ¶10).  In both cases, one pursues something in another, and in both cases, the presence of that in the other brings pleasure to oneself.  Neither benevolence nor love of honor is the same as self-love, but either can be a means of satisfying self-love, insofar as one’s love of honor or of another is satisfied.[22]

Although originally intended as a defense of benevolence, this Butlerian distinction also helps make sense of intrinsic value.[23]  Butler’s central point is that one ought not confuse the pleasure that results from realizing a “particular desire” with the object of that desire.  Now some objects of “particular” desires – such as money or tenure – are merely instrumental goods, but others – such as the well-being of others, the suffering of those against whom one seeks revenge, or even honor – are “intrinsic” goods in the sense that one seeks those goods as ends in themselves and not mere means.[24]  Adam Smith recognized just this point with respect to the human desire for punishment (and for food and sex), pointing out that

With regard to all those ends [such as the preservation of society, of oneself, and of the species] which, upon account of their peculiar importance, may be regarded . . . as the favourite ends of nature, she has constantly . . . not only endowed mankind with an appetite for the end which she proposes, but likewise with an appetite for the means [such as punishment, food, or sex] by which alone this end can be brought about, for their own sakes, and independent of their tendency to produce it. (II.i.5.9n, p. 77)

The appetite for various goods “for their own sakes” includes those goods that are essential for the thriving of society and of individuals, but also any goods that are conducive to “the favorite ends of nature,” whatever those might be, and even other goods (since Smith is not being exhaustive here). 

            Moreover, there is no reason to limit intrinsically valuing attitudes to desire or appetite.  Martha Nussbaum provides an excellent example of non-instrumental valuing in her account of grief over the death of her mother (cf. Nussbaum 2001:19-88):

My mother has died.  It strikes me, it appears to me, that a person of enormous value, who was central in my life, is there no longer.  It seemed to me as if a nail from the world had entered my insides; it also felt as if life had suddenly a large rip or tear in it, a gaping hole.  (Nussbaum 2001: 39). 

As Nussbaum rightly insists, her mother strikes her as having enormous value, and a value that is inconsistent with seeing her mother “simply as [a] tool… of [her] own satisfaction,” a value that Nussbaum elsewhere calls “intrinsic worth or value” (Nussbaum 2001: 31).[25]  Even without Butler’s philosophical analysis, it is obvious that the value conferred upon an object of grief is not, in general, instrumental, but his analysis helps show that the presence of such intrinsically valuing attitudes is an indispensable part of any coherent human life.  And there is no reason to think that grief – or other non-instrumentally valuing emotions – must be limited to grief at human beings.  Aldo Leopold poignantly describes grief in his “Monument to the Pigeon,” where he explains how “We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species.  It symbolizes our sorrow” (116).[26]

Of course, there are lesser emotional responses, such as missing a thing or being upset at its loss, that one might feel towards objects that have merely instrumental value.  After my bicycle was stolen in graduate school, I missed it (and felt some resentment towards its thief), but I did not feel grief over it.  Were I to have felt anything resembling grief, this would have been a sign that the bike had some of what we generally call “sentimental value,” but which is really a sort of non-instrumental value.  Grief is an emotion that takes its object to have intrinsic (non-instrumental) value.

            Grief is not unique in this respect.  One generally feels grief for those that one loves, and love too is an emotion that values its objects non-instrumentally.  Awe, delight, and cherishing, too, are generally attitudes that value their objects non-instrumentally.  One might delight in or cherish something for its instrumental value, but this would be an exceptional case.  Awe, even when felt towards something that has instrumental value – say, the Hoover Dam – is an attitude that transcends and even abstracts from that instrumental value.  To focus on the instrumental value of something is, from the perspective of one in awe, to demean it.  Negative attitudes, too, can take a non-instrumental attitude towards their objects.  Hatred and resentment do not generally view their objects instrumentally.  One who seeks revenge or seeks to harm an object of hatred does not generally do so for the sake of some further end; resentment and hatred precisely consist in one’s seeking the harm of another for its own sake.  Of course, there are attitudes that one can take towards objects that do value them instrumentally.  One might desire wealth for the sake of pleasure.  One might feel sadness over the loss of something because that thing was particularly useful.  One might have hope or fear directed towards objects of merely instrumental value.  But there are a wide variety of attitudes, from grief, love, and awe to hatred and resentment, that generally ascribe non-instrumental value to their objects.

To have a proper attitude based account of intrinsic (non-instrumental) value, it is not enough, of course, to show only that certain attitudes ascribe non-instrumental value to their objects.  This would be sufficient for a subjectivist account, but it is all too clear that people sometimes ascribe non-instrumental value to things improperly.  Adam Smith describes, for example, those who “ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility . . . . [and] walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, . . . some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden” (IV.i.6).[27]  One could multiply such examples.  A child who throws a tantrum when denied the toy she wanted, even when she is given an otherwise equal toy, improperly ascribes intrinsic value to a particular toy.  An adult who ascribes intrinsic value to money is even further from propriety, since, as Aristotle pointed out already in his Nicomachean Ethics (1195b), money’s value is essentially instrumental.  One who feels awe towards an ordinary pebble or grief at the pruning of a tree has improper valuing attitudes.  And one who fails to feel awe at the Grand Canyon or fails to feel grief at the loss of a beloved parent, has an improper deficiency of attitudes.  The mere fact that one has or fails to have particular attitudes towards something is insufficient for determining its intrinsic value.  What matters is the propriety of attitudes with respect to an object.

 Still, given that there are attitudes that value their objects non-instrumentally, one need only explain when those attitudes can be proper to have a complete account of this kind of intrinsic value.  Although I still need to lay out Smith’s account of propriety in the next section, I have just given some intuitive suggestions about attitudes that ascribe intrinsic value.  And there should at least be a strong presumption in favor of at least some non-instrumentally valuing attitudes being proper.  The love of parents for children and the grief of children over the death of parents, for example, are prime candidates for proper attitudes that properly ascribe non-instrumental value to their objects.

 

b. Trumping Value

            Non-instrumental value is a sort of value that something can have regardless of its use in promoting other valuable ends.  But even things with non-instrumental value need not have trumping value.  Trumping value implies that something has value that should override other values, either unconditionally or at least prima facie.  To have trumping value is to have something akin to fundamental rights.  Human beings have trumping value in that one must respect them, even if respecting them has effects that are bad overall.  For example, most moral philosophers will see torture as at least prima facie impermissible, and for many (e.g. Kant), torture is unconditionally impermissible.[28]  In either case, however, admitting trumping value requires sacrificing a brute act-utilitarianism.  Even if torturing someone would increase overall happiness (or some other relevant goods), it is simply impermissible.  But it is important to see that merely having non-instrumental value does not imply that something has trumping value.  I may value a particular painting non-instrumentally; I appreciate it independent of its use for anything.  But this does not imply that I give it any particular rights.  I may, for instance, be perfectly willing to sell the painting, if I need money for something else.  The fact that my appreciation (a valuing attitude) of the painting is not instrumental does not imply that it trumps other values (including even instrumental values such as the desire for money).

            The primary way that a proper attitude account of intrinsic value accounts for trumping value is straightforward.  Certain attitudes ascribe trumping value to their objects, and when such attitudes are proper, then their objects can be said to have trumping value.  The sort of appreciation that one has for a painting does not, generally, imply that it has trumping value, but the distinctive sort of appreciation – approaching reverence – that one has for historically, culturally, or artistically unique and important paintings does imply trumping value.  One can properly appreciate a fine painting and still sell it, but one’s appreciation of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna would be insufficient, and hence improper, if it did not imply some prima facie trumping value of that painting over other concerns.  More obviously, proper respect[29] for other people, as well as proper love for parents, children, and lovers, ought to be not only non-instrumental, but trumping.[30]  Thus anything that is a proper object of these kinds of reverence, respect, or love would have trumping value.

 

c. Non-relational Value

            Finally, however, even if something has non-instrumental value (and even trumping value), it might lack non-relational value.  Nussbaum’s example of grief over her mother is a clear example of non-instrumental but nonetheless relational value.  As she explains,

What inspires grief is the death of someone beloved, someone who has been an important part of one’s own life.  This does not mean that the emotions view these objects simply as tools or instruments of the agent’s own satisfaction; they may be invested with intrinsic worth or value, as indeed my mother surely was.  They may be loved for their own sake, and their good sought for its own sake.  But what makes the emotion center around this particular mother . . . is that she is my mother, a part of my life.  The emotions are in this sense localized: they take their stand in my own life.  (Nussbaum 2001: 31)

Nussbaum’s example could not be a clearer case of the distinction between instrumental and relative goodness.  Many valuing attitudes – filial love, gratitude, and grief at loss – are appropriate with respect to one’s parents to a degree that would not be appropriate with respect to others.  These attitudes do not ascribe instrumental value to one’s parents.  To love or feel gratitude towards one’s parents only for what they can do for one would be deeply improper.  At the same time these valuing attitudes are proper because of a specific relationship between their object and oneself.  They are deeply relational valuings, and the value of one’s parents is, in that sense, a relational value.

            Grief and love are very good examples of these sorts of attitudes, but gratitude is the paradigm case of non-instrumental, relational valuing.  Hobbes famously defended the importance of gratitude for instrumental reasons (cf. Hobbes 1651/1996: 105), but this account misses the true emotional force of gratitude.  Smith is much closer to the mark, seeing gratitude as a “sentiment, which . . . immediately and directly prompts us to reward, or to do good to another” who has done good to oneself (II.i.2.1).  Gratitude comes not from any calculation of long term self-interest, but is an immediate sentiment of response to benevolence.  Gratitude involves an immediate concern for the well-being of another and takes this other and her well-being as an end in itself.  One does not seek the well-being of the other for any further end; it is not instrumental.  But gratitude is nonetheless deeply relational.  One properly feels gratitude towards only those from whom one is “assisted, protected, relieved” or benefited in some other way (II.i.2.4).[31]  The relationship of the object of gratitude to the person who feels it causes and justifies gratitude.

            Many attitudes, then, including grief and love and especially gratitude, can ascribe non-instrumental value to their objects without ascribing non-relational value to them.  But, as noted in section one, non-relational value is important in environmental ethics to avoid anthropocentric hubris.  And unfortunately, both Korsgaard and Nussbaum use the distinction between non-instrumental and non-relational value to limit the force of their proper attitude accounts of value to non-instrumental value. This is clearest in Nussbaum, who uses her description of the relational nature of her grief for her mother as an entrée into an account according to which all emotions are “eudaimonistic” (Nussbaum 2001: 31) in the sense that although “they insist on the real importance of their object,” “they also . . . have to do with me and my own, my plans and goals, what is important in my own conception . . . of what it is for me to live well” (Nussbaum 2001: 33).  In support of this claim, Nussbaum again turns to her mother:

Let us now return to my central example.  My mother has died.  It strikes me, it appears to me, that a person of enormous value, who was central in my life, is there no longer.  . . . [This emotion] is evaluative and eudaimonistic; it does not just assert “Betty Craven is dead.”  Central to the [grief] is my mother’s enormous importance, both in herself and as an element in my life.  (Nussbaum 2001: 39). 

Nussbaum’s self-analysis here is (I suspect) both accurate and insightful.  The emotional force of “my mother is dead” is completely different than the emotional force of “Betty Craven is dead.”  The grief wrapped up with former ascribes importance to its object both in itself and in relation to oneself.  It is, as Nussbaum aptly puts it, eudaimonistic, in that it is a grief that ties the value of its object to one’s own life in a non-instrumental way.

            But Nussbaum goes too far in using this analysis as an analysis of emotion in general, or even of grief in general, as the case of death makes particularly vivid.  Images of victims of war or disease, especially when these victims are children, inspire grief.  News reports of such tragedy, and even cold statistics, can inspire grief in one sufficiently attentive, one who has not grown callous and who is willing to take the time to really consider the news.  To some extent, these feelings of grief may be due to a sense of distant community, that we are all in this world together.  To some extent, these feelings may be due to associations with those closer to one’s own life, stirring up fear or sadness at the future dangers or past misfortune.  To some extent, one might connect these concern with oneself through a sort of self-oriented sympathy with others, where one grieves over the pain that one feels in contemplating those situations.  But it is also proper to feel grief at the tragedies of others, even when those others have no special importance in one’s own life.  The innocent lives lost provoke grief, and in one’s grief one ascribes to those lives an “enormous importance,” even if this importance is simply importance “in itself” and not at all important “as an element in my life.”

            Of course, the attitudes that ascribe value non-relationally will be different – at least in degree and often in kind – from those that ascribe value relationally.  Grief at the death of a parent is quite different, and properly so,[32] from grief at the death of a stranger.  Similarly, the love that one has for one’s children will differ from the love that one has for parents, lovers, and strangers in need.  But love is proper in all of these cases, and love for strangers in need will at most be very weakly relational, and it will not – or at least need not – involve any appeal to the role of those strangers in one’s own life.  In that sense at least, attitudes can properly ascribe value non-relationally, and thus a proper attitude account of value can make sense of the non-relational value of objects.  From a more environmental standpoint, one might distinguish between, say, the relational love – what he calls his “a priori bias” – that Aldo Leopold has for pines and his non-relational “love for all trees” (Leopold 1949: 73-4).  One might similarly distinguish between one’s (relational) affection for the parks in which one played as a youth –the fire trails behind my childhood home in California or the urban green zone in which my own children will play in Seattle – and the awe that is a proper response to the Grand Canyon or to any rich, diverse, and stable ecosystem.

In the most general sense, something has objective or non-relational value if the value of the object does not depend upon its relationship to any other (existing) objects.  The dependence of value on other objects could be instrumental, as when the value of gold depends upon its capacity to purchase food and other goods, or when the value of a sunset is seen as depending upon its capacity to produce a certain kind of pleasure in viewers.  But the value might depend upon relationships in a non-instrumental way, as when the special value of children for their parents depends upon the relationship of those children to their parents, or when one values a benefactor for past benefits.  In these cases, the value is not instrumental, but it is still relational.  And in these cases, a thing’s relationship to something else that has value might be the cause of the value of that thing, as in the case, described by Smith, where one feels gratitude towards “the plank upon which he had just escaped from a shipwreck” (II.iii.1.2, p. 94).  Here the relational value of the plank is due, in large part, to the value that one ascribes to oneself.  But the relational value of something might also not depend upon the value of that to which it is related, as in the case of a parent’s love for her children.  Although parents see their relationship with their children as central to the value of these children for them, they do not (or at least should not) see their own value as the source of the children’s relational value.[33]

 

In applying this general definition of non-relational value, it is important to distinguish between value is that is normatively non-relational in the way that I have defined here, and value that is non-relational in a meta-ethical sense. By normatively non-relational value, I mean that value that an object has by virtue of being the proper object of a valuing attitude, where the attitude that one ought to take towards the object ought to be taken without regard to any relations between that object and anything else.  Describing value as non-relational in a meta-ethical sense, unlike this normative sense, does not pick out a particular sort of value.  Rather, it offers a distinctive philosophical account of value, one that posits that things have value independent of any relations, including normative ones, to human beings.  While Smith could support some forms of meta-ethical non-relationalism about value (in particular, the idea that the value of a thing need not depend upon its actual relation to any other actual beings), proper attitude accounts of value are designed precisely to offer an alternative to meta-ethically non-relational – i.e. objectivist or realist – treatments of value.  The point of this section is to show that this meta-ethical stance does not preclude holding a very strong ethical stance towards the non-relational value of nature.

 

d. Thick Intrinsic Value

            My strategy in this section, which defends different sorts of intrinsic value, suggests an even more radical strategy for rethinking the nature of value on a proper attitude account.  Within normative ethics more broadly, especially among those seeking to revise a virtue-based approach in ethics, the notion of “thick” ethical concepts (introduced by Bernard Williams in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy) has increasingly gained traction.  Without committing myself to all of the implications of “thick” ethical concepts in Williams’s use of them, the general idea is that concepts such as cruelty, disloyalty, humility, patriotism, generosity, and trustworthiness are ethical concepts that are less abstract, and hence more descriptive, than more “reflective” ethical concepts such as “the good” or “the right.”  Thick ethical concepts are more likely candidates for ethical “convergence” (Williams 1985: 140f.); because they have more contentful connection to the world, there is greater possibility for linguistic communities to form standards of use that allow for agreement about such concepts. Thus, for example, one can get wide agreement that the torture of a small animal is “cruel,” without prior agreement (and perhaps even without eventual agreement) about whether such action is “wrong.”  The word “cruel” both describes the action and ascribes a normative weight to it, a reason not to do it, but it assigns this normative weight in a particular, “thick,” way. [34]

Without giving a detailed analysis of the nature of thick and thin ethical concepts, I here simply sketch the way that proper attitude accounts of intrinsic value can extend the notion of “thick” concepts into discussions of value, while avoiding Williams’s relativism about thick conceptual schemes.[35]  In that context, it is worth noting that the terms “value” and even “intrinsic value” – both in G.E. Moore and in contemporary environmental ethics – are paradigm thin concepts both in that they are abstract and in that they lack “natural” descriptive sense.  (Even if one thinks that ascribing value to something is a matter of “description,” it is not a description of natural facts about the world.)  But a proper attitude account of intrinsic value suggests a way to thicken our value concepts.  In particular, if ascriptions of value are tied to the propriety of various attitudes, value concepts that reflect specific attitudes will be both thick and normative.  Terms like “awesome,” “pitiable,” “loveable,” “fearsome” and “worthy of gratitude” are all (relatively) “thick” value concepts.  Calling the Grand Canyon “awesome” is at the same time more descriptive, less controversial, and more clearly connected to normative claims on human attitudes, than saying that it has “intrinsic value.”  Moreover, although knowing that the Grand Canyon is awesome does not give rise to any immediate action-plan – it does not tell us what to do with the Grand Canyon – it provides substantially more guidance than simply saying that it has intrinsic value.[36]

            Proper attitude accounts of these thick value terms also provide a way of connecting thick and thin value concepts.  On a proper attitude account, value concepts are thick and might even (depending upon the account) be irreducibly thick, and these thick concepts are connected to thin concepts.  Value concepts are thick in the sense that any ascription of value is based on a particular valuing attitude.  They can be irreducibly thick if, as in the case of Smith, there is no fixed rule for deciding which descriptive accounts will warrant particular emotive responses.  For Smith, one can form various “general rules” capturing normal responses to standard situations, but every context is unique, and ultimately one can only decide which emotive response is called for by imagining oneself vividly in the particular context and responding to it. 

At the same time, the thick value judgments made within the context of a proper attitude account of value connect to thin concepts in at least three important ways.  First, any proper attitude account of value must emphasize some concept of propriety, a thin ethical concept that describes ethical approval for a given attitudinal response.  Second, as I have shown in this section, notions of “intrinsic value” can be abstracted from more specific judgments of proper attitudes.  Thus thin ethical concepts can play a role in capturing in the abstract the moral force of concrete ethical judgments.  Finally, and equally importantly, many proper attitude accounts of value, including Smith’s, posit (contra Williams) a universal way of arbitrating disputes about thick value concepts on the basis of something like thin ones.  In the case of Smith, one can arbitrate between disputes about thick values because human beings, when free from partiality and when sufficiently well-informed and attentive, have the same emotional reactions to the same imagined situations.  There is a sort of “thin” concept of an impartial spectator that lies at the core of refined Smithian value judgments (as we will see in the next section), and this provides a way for Smith to avoid some of the relativistic implications with which Williams’s account has been saddled.[37]

 

            Because of its connection with thick, attitude-based value judgments, a proper attitude approach to intrinsic value has the important advantages of allowing for a range of different sorts of intrinsic value, an advantage that is particularly important in the context of environmental ethics.[38]  Even if (human) children, dogs, sand dollars, trees, forests, marshes, the Snake River, the Mona Lisa, the Brazilian rainforest, the species Zoonosaurus hazofotsi (cf. Rolston 1988: 129), and the experience of the sun setting over the Pacific all have intrinsic value, it is hard to see in what sense they can have the same sort of intrinsic value.  The intrinsic value of a child seems to warrant providing food, education, and affection to the child.  It is hard to see how any of these are appropriate for the Mona Lisa or the Snake River.  Children deserve our love, respect, fear (for their safety), and, when they suffer, sympathy and grief.  The Mona Lisa may deserve fear for its safety (though this will mean something quite different than safety for a child), and the Snake River may warrant grief, but it is hard to see either deserving sympathy[39] or respect, at least in the sense in which these are appropriate for another human being.

In other words, it makes sense to think of pluralism even with respect to intrinsic value.  The different sorts of intrinsic value described here – trumping, non-instrumental, non-relational – begin to highlight that pluralism.  But the full range of thick intrinsic values – awesomeness, fearsomeness, and worthiness of respect, love, grief, or gratitude – begin to paint a more accurate picture of the sorts of intrinsic value in the world in which we live.  Some of these thick concepts, such as the worthiness of respect or grief apply to human beings; others, such as fearsomeness, worthiness of reverence, and even cherishing (insofar as this implies superiority of the one cherishing), generally do not apply to other humans.  Likewise some – awesomeness, worthiness of reverence – apply to the Grand Canyon, others – worthiness of cherishing – to animals or even ecosystems.  And there will be thick value concepts, such as awesomeness or worthiness to be grieved, about which there will be debate whether they apply to human beings, non-human animals, natural wholes such as species, or all or none of these.

            Disagreement about what is “awesome” or “worthy of cherishing” is, I think, likely to be rarer that disagreement about “intrinsic value.”  But the point of shifting to thick value concepts is not to end all debate about what has intrinsic value and what does not, but rather to make those debates more productive.  Because thick concepts have more content, debates about whether something falls under a thick concept have more to work with, and are thus more likely to reach resolution.  And because these concepts have more content, they are, at least in principle, action-guiding in a more specific way than the “thin” notion of intrinsic value.  Moreover, the appeal to thick concepts allows for compromise when compromise is due.

 

4.  A distinctively Smithian Account of Value

In the last two sections, I laid out a general “proper attitude” account of value and showed that this account can make sense of all the sorts of intrinsic value of which environmental philosophers make use.  From this general proper attitude framework, however, one can specify several different, more specific, theories of value by identifying which attitudes are normatively evaluable and what one takes as a standard of propriety for those attitudes.  Korsgaard’s proper attitude theory, for example, takes rationality to be the basis of propriety and choice as the only (or primary) value-conferring attitude (Korsgaard 1996).  In the rest of this paper, I focus on Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments provides an ethical theory focused on the propriety of attitudes that was and remains one of the most compelling in the history of ethics.[40]  Given the overall structure of proper attitude accounts from the previous section, all that is needed to develop a Smithian account is to describe the range of value-conferring attitudes that Smith considers normatively evaluable, and then to present his account of how to evaluate those.  Although Smith did not explicitly derive a theory of “value” from this theory of proper attitudes, his Theory of Moral Sentiments provides all the resources necessary for such a derivation.[41]

 

a. The range of morally evaluable attitudes

            For Smith, any possible human attitude is a morally evaluable attitude.  Smith includes attitudes such as love, hate, gratitude, anger, hunger, esteem, and even “small vexations” (I.ii.5.3).  Smith discusses passions “which take their origin from the body” (I.ii.1), such as hunger, and those which “take their origin from a particular turn or habit of the imagination” (II.ii.2) such as infatuation or one’s interest in “our own studies” (II.ii.2.6, p. 33).  He distinguishes between “unsocial passions” such as anger, hatred, or resentment (I.ii.3), “social passions” such as love, benevolence, and esteem (I.ii.4), and “selfish passions” such as grief, joy, uneasiness, and satisfaction, “when conceived upon account of our own private good or bad fortune” (I.ii.5.1, p. 40).  Smith’s range of morally evaluable attitudes is very wide; there is no human attitude that cannot evaluate morally.

Two features of Smith’s account help highlight the broad range of attitudes in a way that is particularly important for environmental ethics.  First, unlike his contemporary and former professor Francis Hutcheson, Smith insists that there is a proper pitch of all passions.  Hutcheson had contrasted benevolence and self-love, insisting that “virtue consist[s] in benevolence” (VII.ii.3.title, p. 300) and that “self-love was a principle which could never be virtuous in any degree or in any direction” (VII.ii.3.12, p. 303, cf. Hutcheson 1726/2004 II.ii.9 (p. 112), II.iii.1f. (p. 116f.) and Hutcheson 1728/2002: 136f.).  By contrast, Smith explicitly discusses the importance of evaluating “selfish passions,” such as grief and joy, for propriety.  For environmental ethics, this aspect of Smith’s account is particularly important.  Although benevolence and other “social passions” can easily be extended to animals (as Smith does at VI.ii.3.1, p. 235), it is more difficult to extend such passions to non-sentient creatures.  An ethic limited to virtues of benevolence cannot account for the range of virtues and vices that are important in environmental ethics.  By allowing for the moral evaluation of selfish passions, one can develop a Smithian account of when attitudes such as cherishing, awe, grief, and delight are called for with respect to non-sentient nature.  In this way, one can ascribe morally relevant intrinsic value to objects even when those objects are not the proper objects of benevolence.[42]

            Second, Smith’s theory not only includes, but even focuses on, attitudes that are primarily responsive.  For Smith, the person who is evaluated morally is not necessary an agent, as in Kantian accounts such as Korsgaard’s.  Rather, Smith’s moral scrutiny falls on the “person [or persons] principally concerned” (I.i.3.1, p. 13) in a situation.  This person can be an agent, but the “person principally concerned” is often one to whom something happens, and the attitudes that are judged proper or improper are often the responses – sometimes even purely passive responses – of that person.  Smith explains that grief and sorrow (primarily passive) as well as animosity and generosity (primarily active) are capable of moral evaluation (see I.i.3.3), and even mentions the admiration of a poem or finding amusement in a joke as examples of attitudes that can be proper or improper (I.i.3.3).  Smith does, of course, think that attitudes often give rise to action, and actions are an important measure of one’s attitudes in many circumstances.[43]  But because attitudes are the primary locus of moral evaluation, Smith can include purely passive responses to situations within the purview of ethics.

           Both of these expansions in the scope of moral evaluation have important implications for environmental ethics.  With respect to the first, by including selfish passions within the scope of moral evaluation, Smith has the basis for ascribing intrinsic value to something even when that thing does not merit properly “social” passions.  For Smith, as for many classical and contemporary authors, social passions such as benevolence or love depend upon some capacity, if not for sympathy with their objects, then at least for considering the “interests” of their objects.  By allowing for morally proper (and even required) “selfish” attitudes, Smith opens room for ascriptions of intrinsic value on the basis of proper attitudes such as grief, joy, awe, or cherishing, where these attitudes need not ascribe interests to their objects.  And this can allow environmental ethicists to point out the intrinsic value of natural wholes such as ecosystems, species, or nature as a whole, without entering into complicated meta-ethical arguments about whether such wholes have “interests.”[44]

            Smith’s second point, that passive attitudes fall within the realm of morality, allows for a similarly important move.  Intrinsic value can be conferred upon objects by human responses to those objects, rather than merely by proposed actions directed towards those objects.  This not only broadens the scope of intrinsic value to include natural objects that merit passive attitudes such as awe, but it also allows for a healthy way of thinking about the implications of intrinsic value for environmental ethics.  Action-oriented ethical systems often miss some of the most important obligations to the natural world, such as the obligation simply to appreciate nature, or to be in awe of the complexity of an ecosystem, or to cherish an animal, a species, or the natural world as a whole.  These attitudes might have implications for action.  Awe is generally action-inhibiting, and it is incompatible with seeing something as a mere resource, so that one who feels proper awe towards a natural place will not hastily destroy it for profit.  And cherishing something generally involves being willing to work for its preservation and/or cultivation.  But these attitudes do not reduce to the actions to which they give rise, and focusing purely on actions misses the importance of the sort of passional relationship that is proper for human beings vis a vis their natural environment.

 

           In general, then, Smith includes a wide variety of passions and attitudes within the purview of ethical evaluation, and this variety is helpful for environmental ethics.  Attitudes such as cherishing or awe, which  do not depend upon the interests of their objects, and attitudes such as appreciation and grief, which do not necessarily give rise to action, are all important for developing a right relationship with nature.  What is more, all of these attitudes ascribe – at least often – intrinsic value of one kind or another to their objects.  Thus Smith allows for articulating a wide range of different sorts of intrinsic value, many of which involve the non-instrumental, non-relational value of nature.  To complete this account, he need only provide an account of when these valuing attitudes can be proper.

 

b. Evaluating Sentiments for Propriety

            “Propriety” is Smith’s fundamental ethical concept, and an attitude is proper when an impartial spectator can sympathize with that attitude.  Smith’s account of propriety begins with the observation that human beings are capable of sympathizing with one another, where sympathizing involves attentively imagining oneself in the situation of another and responding emotionally to that imaginative change of place.