Near the beginning of his Aristotelian Society Presidential Address, ‘Nature, Respect for Nature, and the Human Scale of Values’ (Reference Wiggins2000), David Wiggins quotes at length from a farmer, Robin Page, arguing that UK and European policies since World War II have wreaked environmental and human devastation in Page's native Cambridgeshire and beyond. Wiggins aims to show how, insofar as Page's claims are true, we may understand Page's indignant complaints as reasonable – even though these complaints are not framed within and might not be justified within an economistic framework of costs and benefits.Footnote 1 In order to make sense of some of these complaints, Wiggins argues, we need to understand them as expressions of a frame of mind that he calls ‘respect for nature,’ which he proposes we understand on the model of ancient Roman religio. To someone with this frame of mind, nature appears as a limitation on human will that we transgress at our peril. Page's complaints are reasonable, Wiggins seeks to show, because recognizing such limitation on the will is reasonable.
Wiggins argues dialectically, proposing objections and introducing some of the considerations he needs by way of response. I'll proceed more directly, doing my best to separate and set out in a systematic way some of the considerations that Wiggins assembles to vindicate respect for nature. My aim is a reconstruction that is recognizably within the spirit of Wiggins's account, even as it proposes a tendentious reading of the way in which some of the considerations fit together. My account will depart from Wiggins's on a key point. Wiggins understands respect for nature as a special attitude or orientation toward a sui generis object, Nature as such. I will argue, by contrast, that the natural systems that comprise the proper object of respect for nature are kindred, for practical reason, to complex, imperfectly understood, inherited social, political, and economic systems on which we also depend for important goods. And I will argue that the respect that we owe to such valuable systems is continuous with the respect we owe to persons and to valuable objects generally. In all of these cases, respect consists, in part, in recognizing limitations on human will.
1. Respect for Nature as Defeasibly Constrained Deliberation
In the long passage that Wiggins quotes, Robin Page, writing in Reference Page, Barnett and Scruton1998, describes the ways in which, in the years since World War II, wetlands, hedgerows, and grasslands in Cambridgeshire that provided habitats for non-domesticated plants and animals and made the land beautiful have been drained or plowed under, and the populations of wildlife they supported have been diminished or extirpated locally. Prolific application of herbicides and pesticides put further pressure on wildlife and livestock alike. At the same time, industrial farming methods diminished the need for local employment and so drove human populations out of farming villages, while market pressures forced large numbers of small farmers to sell to larger operations. In the name of efficiency, cows were fed sheep offal, which led to BSE. Farms were turned into factories, the land was ‘transformed into featureless fields – the factory floor,’ and ‘what had been seen as a way of life became a business’.Footnote 2
The passage brims with lyrical expressions of felt loss – at the disappearance of meandering brooks with their flowering rush and marsh marigolds, at the diminished song of skylarks, at the absence of the harvest mouse. It also brims with indignation at the economic and environmental policies that (insofar as Page is right) led to these losses, and at the way in which ends such as efficiency and competitiveness on world markets were offered as justifications for the policies that caused the losses he catalogues. In the name of these ends, Page says, ‘[i]t was thought to be morally and economically acceptable to feed offal to cattle, turning herbivores into carnivores’ (ibid.). Page's implication, of course, is that it was neither morally nor economically acceptable to do this for the sake of these ends. The claim that this was not economically acceptable might naturally be read as an imputation of epistemic error to the ‘urban-oriented and environmentally illiterate politicians’ who designed the policies: they aimed at what was best in economic terms, but through (predictable, perhaps culpable) ignorance they missed their mark, and the measurable costs now in fact exceed the promised benefits. But the claim that this was not morally acceptable asks to be read in another way. It suggests not merely an error in foresight or calculation. The complaint, according to Wiggins, seems to be that calculating possible costs, benefits, and probabilities with the aim of maximizing expected value was never the right way to approach the question (for instance) whether to feed offal to an herbivore, or to destroy the habitat on which the swallow depends.
On Wiggins's reading, a person or society with the respect for nature that Page seems to demand, when presented with a proposal to feed offal to cattle or to root up the habitat of the swallow, will recoil with intimations of the holy dread that characterized Roman religio.Footnote 3 In normal circumstances, a respecter of nature will simply refuse to entertain such courses of action. Her deliberation will in this way be constrained – and she will demand that others constrain their deliberation similarly. However, the constraints on deliberation that she embraces herself and demands of others are not absolute.Footnote 4 When we find ourselves between a rock and hard place – for instance, when the only way to meet some vital human need is to run the risk of extirpating another species – she will be willing to consider what trade-offs of competing goods or competing risks might then be necessary, perhaps in the light of estimated probabilities and comparative evaluations not unlike those of the policy-makers about whom Page complains. Her deliberation in those circumstances, however, will be specific to those circumstances and will not presume that such trade-offs are to be contemplated at all in circumstances that are not so exigent. The thing that a respecter of nature will not want is ‘a normal routine by which prices are fixed for the “sale” of things like the swallow in Cambridgeshire’ (ibid., p. 5).
Respect for nature, as Wiggins seeks to understand it, involves more than a disposition to defeasibly constrained deliberation. It involves, at the very least, dispositions to feelings including gratitude, awe, disgust, and fear. These help to support the sense of nature as a limitation on the will, of which the disposition to constrained deliberation is an expression. But the disposition to constrained deliberation is the core of what that we need to understand, in order to understand Page's complaint, and so I will focus on this disposition.
2. Epistemic and valuational reasons for constraints on deliberation
Wiggins's vindication of respect for nature echoes the ecological tradition from Aldo Leopold to the present in its appreciation of the unfathomable hidden complexity of natural systems, and the epistemic humility they should therefore command.Footnote 5 Again and again that tradition has showed us that to pull on one, small thread is often to alter or unravel vast swaths of fabric, often at a remove in space and time from our action, in ways that defy even well-informed human prediction.Footnote 6 The decision to feed sheep offal to cattle is especially notable, not primarily because the consequences for animal welfare, human health and the farming economy were so severe, but rather because the severity of those consequences and the rough outlines of the causal path to them became so evident to all, once understood in retrospect. The consequences were not, however, something that anyone could reasonably have been expected to foresee, depending as they did on the efficacy of infectious agents, prion proteins, of whose existence and workings scientists were largely ignorant. An attempt to calculate the expected value of this farming practice in advance would have foundered, because no one would have been in a position to imagine the consequences that ensued, let alone to assign probabilities to them.
If the goods that we risk losing by disturbing the complex natural systems in which we are embedded were trivial, then our lack of understanding of those systems would give us little reason for the sort of scruples and misgiving of which religio provides a model. However, Wiggins points to ways in which the goods that nature affords us are not only important, but distinctively so. Among the most obvious of the goods that natural systems afford us are goods that meet vital human needs: for a start, water, air and – with the application of human labor – food and shelter. The idea that goods which meet such needs comprise a real category with special import for practical deliberation figures in Wiggins's work at least as far back as his 1985 ‘Claims of Need’, (collected in Wiggins, Reference Wiggins1998). It is superficially similar to the idea that economists try to capture in terms of the diminishing marginal utility of money: the dollar that puts food on the table is worth more to a person than the dollar that helps to purchase her an overseas holiday. But the economist's quantitative representation does not capture the difference in kind to which Wiggins points. The morally and deliberatively relevant fact is not simply that food provides more utility (better satisfies an agent's preferences) than does a holiday, but that food is necessary to human life and flourishing and overseas holidays are not.
There is also a less obvious way in which the natural world as we find it affords goods that deserve a special place in practical deliberation: it provides one part of a framework or set of conditions in which human beings have found it possible not merely to survive, but to lead lives they find good and meaningful. (Again, this is a long-standing theme in Wiggins's work.) In part, Wiggins suggests elsewhere, this is due to fact that the natural world is tractable to the application of human work.Footnote 7 In part, it is because it affords us not just what is useful, but what is beautiful, fascinating, or awesome. It might be the case that if we altered this framework radically – if we replaced hedgerows, wetlands, and the skylarks and marsh marigolds that inhabit them with amusement parks, and the need to work with the possibility of ‘an aeon of human leisure’ (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins2000, p. 18) we would find different, but not less good, sources of joy, wonder, and meaning.Footnote 8 But perhaps we would not. Just as it is a mistake simply to assume that, no matter how radically we disturb the natural world, it must continue to meet our more mundane vital needs, it is also a mistake to assume that, no matter how we transform the natural context in which we live, we will continue to find meaning to sustain us in the lives we lead.
Recognizing the importance and precarity of natural goods might justify a healthy fear, even holy dread, of disrupting the poorly-understood systems that provide them. But showing that such fear is healthy or reasonable is not, on its own, enough to justify the sense of nature as limitation, with its attendant constraints on deliberation, to which a respecter of nature is disposed. To see this, it is helpful to cast our gaze beyond nature, and to note that the inscrutably complex systems that we have inherited and on which we depend include social, political, and economic systems as well as natural ones. Fear of the unforeseeable consequences of disturbing these, too, seems reasonable – indeed, dread of such changes might be the fundamental political instinct of a Burkean conservative.Footnote 9 But social and political history have taught that while conservative fear might forestall disastrous changes for the worse, it can also inhibit needed changes for the better (including changes that may be difficult to foresee or even imagine from within the framework of inherited systems).Footnote 10
A person or a culture might harbor a healthy fear of disturbing the inherited natural or social world, and yet that this fear might be counter-balanced in motivation (whether decisively or not) by hope for goods those changes might bring. The virtue that Wiggins sees in Roman religio, and which he thinks we might cultivate in ourselves even without the causal or theistic beliefs of the Romans, can be understood in contrast to this possible combination of attitudes – at least with respect to natural systems. The Romans not only feared nature; they actively cultivated grateful contentment in the goods nature offers, celebrating and taking joy in its bounty with ritual observances.Footnote 11 Religio is a thus virtue of correct valuation and so of practical wisdom: it involves not only valuing what is genuinely important (and thus correctly regarding its loss as something worthy of fear), but also correctly classing the technological or material progress that might be purchased by endangering those goods as unimportant in comparison, so that the insistent desire for more (and other) appears as avarice, a recognizable human vice. The disposition to constrained deliberation that characterizes a respecter of nature like Page, as Wiggins seeks to understand him, reflects the sort of valuation that religio embodies and aims to cultivate. A respecter of nature recoils with holy dread from entertaining courses of action that endanger existing natural systems, because her attention is fixed firmly and gratefully to the goods those systems afford. For her, these are enough. Her response can be understood on the model of the character from Pushkin that Wiggins quotes: ‘Cards interest me very much… but I am not in a position to risk the necessary in the hope of acquiring the superfluous’ (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins2000, n. 40, p. 31).
3. The objection from the Anthropocene
As Robin Page tells it, the inhabitants of rural Cambridgeshire before World War II lived in a ‘living countryside producing good food sensibly and humanely, providing employment, while at the same time creating rich and varied habitats for wildlife in an attractive landscape’ (ibid., p. 3). This was a world, it is suggested, in which vital human needs were met sustainably, in harmony with a flourishing natural environment. This picture shapes Wiggins's characterization of the respect for nature that Page seems to demand. A respecter of nature is someone who refuses, in all but the most dire circumstances, to entertain disruptive interventions in the existing, sustainable natural-human systems ‘which make up the habitable world and have served us so far’ (ibid., p. 31). In circumstances of the sort Page describes, such interventions would risk a senseless departure from Eden.
Whatever the merits of Page's characterization of early Twentieth Century Cambridgeshire, we now find ourselves in quite different circumstances. If anything is clear about our own Anthropocene Epoch, it is that economic, social and political systems globally are not in harmony with the natural systems we inherited. As things are, the important goods these different systems afford are in competition with one another, and hard choices among these goods are a structural feature of our age.Footnote 12 These facts suggest a worry about Wiggins's account of respect for nature. The worry is not that it is wrong. The worry, rather, is that in the Anthropocene, the defeasible constraints on deliberation that distinguish a respecter of nature are in fact systematically defeated, so that there is nothing distinctive about her deliberation. In the spot between a rock and a hard place where we now live, a respecter of nature will have to consider exactly the same trade-offs as someone whose deliberation was never constrained at all: both will be forced to navigate and manage competing risks, doing their best to trade off goods and evils against one another in the light of estimated costs, benefits, and probabilities – and both will do so as a matter of routine. Footnote 13 The prevalence and inescapability of such trade-offs in our current circumstances motivate the suspicion that the holy dread with which Wiggins's respecter of nature recoils from transgressing natural limits is, at best, a relic from a more innocent time, when we had less power, and had not yet progressed so far into the Anthropocene. The list of examples that could serve to illustrate this objection is long. I will offer two that are particularly close to Wiggins's own.
3.1
In 2020, food, agriculture and land use were together responsible for 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Wilkinson, Reference Wilkinson2020, p. 10), and they comprised the strongest driver of ecosystem loss and species loss. Agricultural land already covers 37% of the earth's ice-free land surface, and about 75% of that agricultural land is used for grazing animals or producing animal feed (Foley et al., Reference Foley, Ramankutty, Brauman and K.2011). Even if individual diets remained constant, agriculture's contribution to climate change and species loss would be expected to worsen in coming decades as world population grows from 7.9 billion in 2021 to a projected 10.9 billion in 2100. But diets are unlikely to remain constant as more of the world's poor enter the global middle class and seek the meat-heavy and dairy-heavy diets that the wealthy already enjoy. As more rain forest and other unfarmed land yields to agricultural pressures, and as increasing numbers of cattle and other ruminants swell methane emissions, increased consumption of meat and dairy can be expected to accelerate disaster for climate and biodiversity both.
Let us grant that meat and dairy consumption is a superfluity, not a vital human need or a right,Footnote 14 and that issues of animal welfare, in addition to the environmental costs of meat consumption, give everyone moral reasons to be vegetarians, or at least to eat low-meat diets with no intensively raised meat. (A prohibition against a meat-heavy diet seems to be a particularly clear verdict of Kant's Formula of Universal Law.) Perhaps a sound public policy would prohibit both intensive livestock rearing and further deforestation, or perhaps it would put a very high tax on meat and animal products, in order to internalize their external costs. Be all that as it may, these are conclusions that only a small minority of humanity has reached.Footnote 15 So long as most people, in most places, are not ready to support such a policy, the conflict between democratic governance and preventing climate and biodiversity catastrophe is profound.
Technologists are at work on a possible solution to this problem: animal stem cells may be genetically modified, then cloned, cultured in vitro, and 3-D printed onto substrates to produce steaks and other cuts of meat that are (in contrast to present plant-based alternatives) indistinguishable to the pallet from those produced by butchering animals, with a fraction of the environmental impact.Footnote 16 If one were to design a transgression against natural processes with the sole purpose of instilling holy dread in a respecter of nature, it's hard to imagine that one could do much better than this. Who knows what unforeseen consequences this technology might have for human health or the environment? If it were possible both to avoid accelerating environmental catastrophe and also to satisfy the demands of democratic governance without such high-technology reworkings of our food, a respecter of nature could plausibly argue that we ought not to consider cultured meat. On a planet hurtling toward climate and biodiversity disaster with a majority of people continuing to demand meat, however, a respecter of nature may concede that it would be unreasonable not to consider this possibility, and to explore its potential risks, costs, and benefits. We face risks on all sides, and the best we can do, it seems, is try to manage and balance those risks as thoughtfully as we can.
3.2
‘Degrowth theorists’ argue that there is a systematic, irresolvable conflict between economic growth and preserving a habitable planet: because the natural world is a finite resource (with finite capacity to absorb our greenhouse gasses and other wastes), the only way to avoid ecological catastrophe is to revise the premise, upon which actual economies and large swathes of economic theory are based, that unending economic growth is possible and desirable.Footnote 17 ‘Ecomodernists’ argue that degrowth theorists are mistaken, and that with the advent of cheap renewable energy and other green technologies, it will be possible to decouple economic growth both from increased use of land and material resources and from many forms of pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions, going forward.Footnote 18 Suppose that degrowth theorists are correct, and there are grave risks involved in letting our current economic order continue. A clear application of the Burkean insight noted in §2 is that there are also grave risks on the other side – risks that ought to inspire something like holy dread. Our economic systems are tightly interlocked with our inherited social and political systems, and all of these interlocking systems are, like the natural systems to which Wiggins points, very complex, poorly understood, and sometimes fragile. While the existing order is very imperfect in many respects, the Burkean claims, it is nonetheless far preferable to the anarchy or tyranny into which it might, inadvertently, be pushed by well-meaning interventions. Moreover, the suggestion that we need to move toward a degrowth economy inspires more specific fears in keen observers of political economy. They note that in otherwise varied political systems around the world, prolonged deviations from economic growth tend to provoke authoritarian politics built around perceptions of zero-sum competition among individuals, sub-national groups, and nations, and to undermine precisely the sorts of trust necessary for collective action in pursuit of public goods that the climate crisis requires. If degrowth theorists are right, in other words, then we are indeed far from early Twentieth Century Cambridgeshire, in a place where the best we can hope to do is to manage competing risks.
Suppose however that ecomodernists are right, and that it is possible to decouple economic growth from ecological and climate damage in the long term or medium term. For all that, the conflict is no less real and profound right now. While the worst harms from climate change lie ahead of us, climate change is already destablilizing ecosystems, driving species to extinction, impoverishing people, forcing human migration, and killing people today; and each additional ton of CO2eq that we emit does further harm.Footnote 19 Moreover, because the climate system contains feedback loops that we understand only very partially, there is a chance – small, but increasing with each additional tonne of CO2eq that we emit – that we have passed a crucial tipping point already, and are on an irreversible path to civilization-ending catastrophe.Footnote 20 The more rapidly we drive fossil fuel consumption toward zero, the more we can reduce harm to humans and the natural world, and the lower the odds of existential catastrophe. But these reductions in harms and risks are only reductions relative to a situation of unabated emissions. Until we reach the ‘drawdown’ point at which we are actually decreasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses, our activities will continue to worsen those harms and risks in absolute terms. We could, in theory, stop worsening those harms and risks tomorrow, if we immediately and fully stopped burning fossil fuels, clearing forest land, raising cattle, and so on. But the result of doing this in an instant, if it were possible, would almost certainly be civilizational collapse and mass starvation. So, we find ourselves at this moment between Wiggins's rock and a hard place, facing a trade-off: in order to avoid what would effectively be genocide, we need to go on burning fossil fuels and transgressing other natural limits (for now), even though, by doing so, we are already killing people and further damaging and endangering the natural world.
An initial reply to the objection from the Anthropocene might be to note that from the fact that conflicts between natural, economic, social and political goods are pervasive, so that constraints on the deliberation of a respecter of nature are routinely defeated by exigency, it does not follow that such constraints are always defeated. This reply does not show much, however. While it is true that, even in the Anthropocene, a respecter of nature will distinguish herself by refusing to consider heaping further insults upon nature that are not forced by real exigency, it may also be the case that the largest and most consequential questions that the Anthropocene forces upon us concerning possible interventions in nature (should we consider injecting sulfates into the stratosphere, in order alleviate some of the symptoms of climate change?) are or will be forced real exigency,Footnote 21 so that a reasonable respecter of nature will, like everyone else, have to consider further insults to nature and manage competing risks.Footnote 22
A better reply to the objection will note that a respecter of nature's deliberation is not exhausted by her deliberation at the moment when she is faced with a hard choice among competing goods, when the constraints that would otherwise govern her deliberation are defeated. At such a moment, the deliberation of a respecter of nature may perhaps be indistinguishable from that of anyone else. But she will differ from others in the way in which she regards these deliberative circumstances: precisely because they force this sort of choice, she will regard these as bad circumstances. Even if there is nothing she can do about these circumstances in the moment, the badness of circumstances like this is, itself, deliberatively relevant for her: it constitutes a reason to try, in advance, to prevent such circumstances from arising; and it constitutes a reason to try to bring an end to such circumstances, or to mitigate them, when they exist already. Thus, for instance, while a respecter of nature at our current moment may weigh the risks of cell-cultured meat against the risks of the accelerating deforestation and animal methane emissions promised by the trajectory of current consumption patterns (just as a non-respecter would), she will also look for ways to alter those patterns so as to make no-regrets solutions possible in the future – for instance, by waging public education campaigns concerning the health and environmental impacts of deforestation and intensive animal agriculture, and so raising support for public policies that would curtail both, even if those policies would dramatically raise the price of meat. Likewise, in the moment in which we find ourselves, a respecter of nature might weigh the human, social and political risks of policies that would slow economic growth against the environmental (and thus human, social, and political) costs of maintaining current economic growth rates. However, if she is convinced of the inherent incompatibility of growth and sustainability, as degrowth theorists are, she will work to restructure the economy with the goal of eventually bringing about an economy in which slowing or stopping growth does not risk human, social, and political costs. Alternatively, if she is convinced by ecomodernists, she may seek to accelerate technologies to decouple economic growth from material resource use and pollution.Footnote 23
Even if it is impossible to end the general, systemic tendencies toward conflicts among important goods that characterize the Anthropocene, it may be possible to eliminate or reduce the tensions between those goods in specific cases. Perhaps economic growth cannot be entirely decoupled from pollution and resource extraction; nonetheless, it may be possible to decouple those ills from parts of the economy.Footnote 24 Perhaps it is possible neither to garner democratic support for policies that would restrict the supply of meat nor to satisfy the demand for meat from a growing global middle class without further environmental harm; but some suite of less disruptive practices, such as feeding cows kelp to reduce their methane emissions (Roque et al., Reference Roque, Venegas, Kinley, de Nys, Duarte and Yang2021), or feeding them protein from insect larvae rather than from soy grown on deforested land (Shumo et al., Reference Shumo, Osuga and Khamis2019), may reduce those harms. A respecter of nature will actively seek to bring about circumstances which diminish the need for trade-offs, even if they do not eliminate it.Footnote 25
4. Demanding Constrained Deliberation from Others
So far, I have argued that a disposition to constrained deliberation of the sort that Wiggins takes to characterize respect for nature is reasonable (§2) and that its expression is distinctive, even in the Anthropocene (§3). The considerations I canvassed in §2 to justify constrained deliberation can be cast in prudential terms: the respecter of nature (Robin Page, say) recognizes his epistemic limits in the face of complex natural systems, and he understands the importance for human beings of the goods which those systems provide and the relative triviality of many of the goods for the sake of which those goods might be put at risk; so he is disposed to recoil from risking the greater good for the lesser. Such prudential considerations do not seem sufficient, however, to explain the full force of Page's indignation at others who would put at risk the goods that nature affords, or of his demand that everyone – indeed, ‘society’ – should deliberate and act subject to the constraints that govern his own deliberation. To understand this indignation and this demand, we need to move beyond considerations of comparative value – roughly, considerations of the good – to considerations with a deontic shape – roughly, considerations of the right.
Wiggins gives voice to the sort of recognizably deontic thought that might lie behind Page's demand in the course of replying to a possible objection from an applied economist. Wiggins imagines the economist insisting that we need to put a money value on the swallow's continued existence in rural Cambridgeshire, because we need to decide whether we can ‘afford to save (i.e. not to extinguish) the swallow’ given the costs to us (for instance, in reduced farm productivity) of doing so. Wiggins rejects the question:
[T]he question ‘can we afford to save the swallow?’ presupposes that the fate of the swallow (etc.) is already ours to determine. It is one expenditure against another expenditure of our resources. But is it really all right to presuppose that? Are we prepared to say positively that it's as if we own the swallow and its fate? (2000, p. 15)
Clearly Wiggins's claim that it is wrong to presuppose that fate of the swallow is ours to determine does not rest upon any comparison of the value of the swallow to the value of something else. (That is just what Wiggins rejects.) But why might it be wrong to presuppose that the fate of the swallow is ours to determine?
We can make a start on this question by noticing that the actions of a few upon nature, at small scale or large, may harm goods that are public, and so may harm many who have no say in those actions but who depend upon or enjoy those goods, and may do so in ways that are unjust in themselves and that compound existing inequities. Those affected may be contemporaries of those taking the actions in question; or, because many of the losses we risk by our interventions are permanent or as good as permanent, those affected may extend far into the future.Footnote 26 Whether the inequities perpetrated are intra-generational, inter-generational, or both, the indignation of the respecter of nature seems to be, at least in part, a response to this manifest injustice.Footnote 27 ‘The simple thought,’ Wiggins writes, ‘is: how dare they put at risk, for the sake of rather trivial benefits, the lives or the livelihoods of countless people that depended on some concatenation of factors that [have]… never been reckoned or enumerated?’ (ibid., n. 39, p. 31). One way to put this thought is to say that at least one reason to respect nature is that doing so is partly constitutive of respecting persons and their rights.
The charge of intragenerational or intergenerational theft does not, however, seem to me to exhaust the force of the claim that it is not right to act as if we own the swallow. Even if ‘we’ is taken to include all of humankind, past, present, and future, there is still room to wonder whether it is right to act in this way. One way to deny that that it is right to act as if we own the swallow would be to claim that a swallow, or perhaps the species swallow, is itself a bearer of rights, and that this is why we may not treat it just as we please.Footnote 28 Even if a philosophical argument can make good such an heroic claim, however, the argument would clearly take us very far beyond what is ‘already well established in our value-consciousness’ (ibid., p. 7). But, as Wiggins suggests, the question whether it can be right to treat the swallow as our property seems to be one that we can intelligibly ask, and perhaps answer, entirely with the resources that ordinary value-consciousness affords us.
The reason not to treat the swallow as our property to which Wiggins seems to point, drawing only on resources afforded by ‘the human scale of values,’ stems from the way in which human beings may value the swallow and the rest of nature. Robin Page does not value the swallow, Wiggins suggests, solely as a means to or constituent of his own welfare or that of any other human being. ‘Swallows bring content [to Page] by virtue of a pre-existing engagement with such things that is independent of our pursuit of our own content or happiness. To one so engaged, the existence of swallows will matter whether they are seen or not seen’ (ibid., p. 11). That a person may value someone or something otherwise than as a means to or constituent of her own (or anyone's) welfare is a well-established insight in the theory of value, familiar at least as far back as Butler and Hume.Footnote 29 Wiggins seeks to draw out an important implication, however, which we can state most clearly by contraposition. To treat the swallow as if it were human property would be to treat it as if the only thing that ought to matter, in determining its fate, is human purposes or welfare. But that is not the way in which people like Robin Page value it. So, in treating the swallow as if it were human property we would be failing to treat it in a way that is consonant with the way people like Robin Page value it.
These considerations help to refine the question with which we started this section. We asked for an explanation of Page's righteous indignation at others who would put at risk the goods that nature affords and of his demand that everyone – and society – should deliberate and act subject to the same constraints that govern his own deliberation. We can now add that no other way of deliberating is consonant with the way in which he values the swallow. Clearly, however, not everyone values the swallow as Page does. (One assumes that the urban-oriented politicians he mentions, and perhaps their local constituents, do not.) So we still face the question: on what grounds can Page demand that others, and society, deliberate in a way that is consonant with the way in which he and those like him value the swallow?
One possible answer is that everyone ought to value the swallow, and the rest of nature, in the way that Robin Page does. Roughly: we ought all to be nature-lovers. On this account, those who find themselves unmoved by the swallow's plight are making a mistake, or at least missing something. The problem with this suggestion is that even Robin Page does not value all of nature in the way that he values the swallow in Cambridgeshire. He could not. There are many thousands of ecosystems and of vertebrate species, not to mention plants and other organisms, of which he is surely ignorant. He can be under no requirement to seek out information on all of them, even if that were possible. And even in the case of those species or ecosystems of which he happens to be aware or made aware, he can be under no requirement to value them as he values the swallow of his native Cambridgeshire. He cannot be faulted if he is not emotionally vulnerable to them as he is to the swallow, and if he does not take active steps to care for them and preserve them, as his valuing the swallow might lead him to do in its case. His cognitive, emotional, and practical capacities are, after all, finite.
A second possible answer is that Robin Page might reasonably demand that everyone's deliberation concerning the swallow ought to be constrained just because he and some others value it, and hence are emotionally vulnerable to the fate of the swallow. An initial objection to this proposal is that people value many things that are not worth valuing (for instance, their own prestige or fame), or that are positively bad (the cause of white supremacy). It is doubtful that others have reasons to constrain their deliberation in order to shield those who value such things from emotional harm. Even putting that objection aside, however, the reasons this proposal identifies are just the person-respecting reason for defeasibly constrained deliberation that we met earlier. On this telling, respect for nature would derive, after all, solely from respect for persons.
We can find a third and better possible answer in a claim of David Velleman's concerning the relationship between love and respect for persons. Velleman proposes that respect for a person and love for a person are ‘the required minimum and optional maximum responses to one and the same value’ (Velleman, Reference David Velleman1999, p. 366). His idea, roughly, is that the same thing that makes any person, just as such, worthy of love (so that another person, or perhaps God, would be justified in loving her) is also what makes it appropriate to treat any person, just as such, as a source of limits on the will. Respecting a person – that is, recognizing and responding appropriately to limits on what we may do and how we may deliberate concerning her – is a way of acknowledging the value that a person has. Put aside, for a moment, the suspicion that the valuing of nature and respect for nature that Wiggins seeks to defend are related at best as puns to the love and respect with which we may respond to persons; and put aside, for a moment, Velleman's Kantian views of what love of and respect for persons actually involve.Footnote 30 The suggestion would then be: Robin Page values (and perhaps even loves) the swallow in Cambridgeshire. Page does not experience his love or valuing of the swallow as merely an affective, arational response to it. Rather, he sees the swallow as valuable in a way that makes it worthy of his love or valuing, with all of the attendant emotional vulnerability to the swallow's fate. If he is articulate, he may be able to explain, at least in part, what it is about the swallow that captures his attention, sustains his non-instrumental concern and makes its passing from Cambridgeshire worth grieving. If, like many of us, he less articulate, he may only be able to gesture at this value. Either way, the respect for the swallow that Page demands from all of us is the required minimum response to the very same value or values that make the swallow lovable. In Kieren Setiya's terms, the value of the swallow is both ‘an insistent, decisive reason for respect, and a sufficient, noninsistent reason for love’.Footnote 31
The two suspicions that we put aside might seem to block any illuminating analogy between the relations of love and respect for persons, on the one hand, and love and respect for nature, on the other – even if we grant that Velleman's claim about the relation between love and respect for persons is correct. The analogy seems promising at first, because respect for persons, on Velleman's Kantian view, involves not only constraints on the way we may treat a person in our overt action, but also constraints on how we may deliberate concerning him: ‘a ban on subjecting him to comparisons, which would implicitly subordinate his value to some ulterior or overarching value’ (Velleman, Reference David Velleman1999, p. 367). This is not far from Wiggins's demand, on Page's behalf, that we put no price on the swallow, or from Wiggins's insistence that no price can compensate someone who values the swallow for its loss. But for Wiggins, of course, such constraints on deliberation are defeasible. We must not allow a routine by which prices are fixed for the sale of things like the swallow in Cambridgeshire; but when we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place, we may indeed ask whether preserving the swallow is more important, in this context, than meeting some vital human need that might only be met by digging up its habitat – and if it is not, we may decide to sacrifice the swallow. The constraints on deliberation and action involved in Kantian respect for persons, on the other hand, are supposed to be absolute. It is only thus, Kant and Velleman think, that we acknowledge that a person has dignity, rather than a price; and if we fail to acknowledge this, we are not showing genuine respect for, or recognition of, the value of a person. Thus Page's respect for nature, as interpreted by Wiggins, seems to be a different attitude from the respect that persons require.
Are Kant and Velleman right, though, that genuine respect for persons must involve constraints on deliberation and action that are absolute – that in the absence of these, one shows that one sees a person as having a price, rather than dignity? Certainly many have balked at biting so hard a bullet. Sometimes we really are between a rock and a hard place. Pace Kant, it is hardly obvious, for instance, that in shooting an innocent Indian on the grounds that nineteen lives are worth more than one, Bernard Williams's Jim would betray a lack of respect for persons or a failure to recognize their dignity.Footnote 32 The fact that he is forced to put an implicit price on the lives at stake in order to make a decision does not entail that he thinks the price adequately captures everything that matters about those lives, or represents all the reasons for action that those lives give him.Footnote 33
Rather than understanding respect for nature on the rigoristic model of Kantian respect for persons, what if we attempted to understand respect for persons on the model of Wigginsian respect for nature – as involving constraints on deliberation and action that are defeasible? In replying to the objection from the Anthropocene we saw that the deliberation of a defeasibly constrained deliberator is distinctive, even in cases where the constraints on her deliberation are defeated. The constrained deliberator sees circumstances that force comparative evaluation of natural goods against vital human needs, or, we may now add, of persons against persons as, ipso facto, bad circumstances – precisely because they force the sacrifice of something whose worth is not adequately captured or represented in whatever price one might set upon it for the purposes of comparative evaluation. This badness is, itself, deliberatively relevant to her: it gives her reason to try avoid or forestall such circumstances (in advance) and to aim to find a way out as soon as she can (when she is in them), because only by doing these things can she respond adequately to the values in play. The unconstrained deliberator, by contrast, need see nothing wrong with a routine by which prices are fixed for the sale of things like the swallow in Cambridgeshire – or, we may now add, of things like the infringement of a person's rights – so long as the price is appropriately high. If we imagine Williams's Jim as a defeasibly constrained deliberator, his respect for persons would be evident in the initial horror (holy dread is surely appropriate here) with which he recoils from the choice which the captain asks him to make, in his desperate search for a no-regrets solution as a way out (‘Jim… wonders whether if he got hold the a gun, he could hold the captain, Pedro, and the rest of the soldiers to threat…’ (Williams, Reference Williams1973a, pp. 98-99)) – and, as we may imagine the story continuing, in his attempt to make what restitution he can, after the fact, to the family of the man whom he has shot.Footnote 34
The proposal we now have on the table brings both the Kantian discussion of love and respect for persons and Wiggins's discussion of love and respect for nature into contact with a third, more general discussion in the theory of practical reason. Recent work there has emphasized a distinction between valuing an object, on the one hand, and judging that object to be good or valuable, on the other. Accounts of what valuing consists in differ, but most agree at least that valuing an object involves emotional vulnerability to the object and its fortunes, whereas judging an object valuable does not.Footnote 35 Valuable objects are rationally eligible to be valued; in Setiya's terms, they provide everyone who is aware of them with non-insistent reasons to value them. But no one can value everything that is valuable, or even everything that she judges to be valuable. As Michael Bratman puts this point, rational valuing is underdetermined by judgments of value (Bratman, Reference Bratman2007). Respect, by contrast, is not underdetermined by value: valuable objects provide everyone with decisive, insistent reasons for respect.Footnote 36
I have already suggested that Wiggins's understanding of respect as involving a disposition to defeasibly constrained deliberation works not only in the case of respect for nature, but also in the case of respect for persons. Limits to the will that are defeasible are not thereby less real, or less capable of shaping deliberation. I am now suggesting that this understanding might work more broadly still, as a way of understanding the respect that all valuable objects require of us. Respect for a valuable work of art, or a valuable institution, or someone's valuable personal project or ideal, imposes constraints on one's deliberation, so that in favorable circumstances one will not consider sacrificing them in order to achieve one's ends. Of course, circumstances are not always favorable, so often we will have to make trade-offs among valuable things, beginning with those that are (in that context) least important. But respect does mean trying to avoid such trade-offs – for instance, by searching hard for a no-regrets solution first.Footnote 37
If Wiggins's account of respect for nature can indeed be generalized in the way that I have suggested, then Robin Page's way of valuing the swallow is not a special attitude, nor is there anything special about the respect for the swallow and for nature more generally that he evinces himself and demands of the rest of us. These attitudes are continuous with the way in which we may rationally value and respect all manner of valuable things: works of art, institutions, aesthetic ideals, persons. To call any of these things (non-instrumentally) valuable is already to say that it imposes a limit on what we may will. Nature as such is, of course, different from some valuable objects because it is comprised of complex systems, many of whose workings are opaque to us but on which we depend to meet our vital needs and perhaps also to find the meaning in life that we do. So, we have good reasons to fear disturbing it – as we have good reasons to fear disturbing some of the social and political systems in which our lives are embedded. But if what I have been arguing is correct, then none of this requires a special addition to moral psychology or to the theory of practical reason. Rather, insofar as Robin Page is right, what we need is to understand the ways in which nature is non-instrumentally valuable – the ways in which people like Page may reasonably find it or its constituents to be worth loving; and we need to extend the respect that we already show for other valuable things to include nature and its constituents.
