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American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc. Beyond Intrinsic Value: Undermining the Justification of Ecoterrorism Author(s): Charles S. Brown Source: American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 66, No. 1, The Challenges of Globalization: Rethinking Nature, Culture, and Freedom (Jan., 2007), pp. 113-126 Published by: American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27739623 . Accessed: 02/06/2014 06:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Journal of Economics and Sociology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.194.14.7 on Mon, 2 Jun 2014 06:28:45 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: The Challenges of Globalization: Rethinking Nature, Culture, and Freedom || Beyond Intrinsic Value: Undermining the Justification of Ecoterrorism

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

Beyond Intrinsic Value: Undermining the Justification of EcoterrorismAuthor(s): Charles S. BrownSource: American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 66, No. 1, The Challenges ofGlobalization: Rethinking Nature, Culture, and Freedom (Jan., 2007), pp. 113-126Published by: American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27739623 .

Accessed: 02/06/2014 06:28

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to American Journal of Economics and Sociology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.194.14.7 on Mon, 2 Jun 2014 06:28:45 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Part II: Rethinking Nature; Globalization and the

Challenges of Environmental Ethics

5

Beyond Intrinsic Value

Undermining the Justification of Ecoterrorism

By Charles S. Brown*

Abstract. Both Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" and Arne Naess's "deep

ecology" have been criticized as providing intellectual justifications for

both a misanthropic ecofascism and a policy of ecoterrorism for

environmental activists. This chapter argues that each of these two

approaches to providing a ground or framework for an environmental

ethics is subject to the charges of ecofascism or ecoterrorism only to

the extent that each is committed to the notion of "intrinsic value" as

a nonnegotiable moral absolute or, as Kant puts it, "a value beyond all

price." This chapter begins by describing shared value experience between humans and animals and then points the way to an alterna

tive and pragmatic concept of value that can better guide environ

mental thinking on matters of law, policy, and activism. This concept of value emerges from an experiential and epistemic understanding of

the inherent rationality of value experience. A description of value

experience reveals that the lived significance of value experience exhibits a meaningful and referential structure in which anticipations of future experience are either satisfied or frustrated in future expe rience. This meaningful structure of value experience, in which value

experiences point to their own confirmation or disconfirmation, con

stitutes a self-correcting tendency or a prima facie rationality inherent

in value experience. The result is a pragmatic conception of value that

takes all value intuition and attribution to be intrinsically r?visable in

light of future experience. As such, value experience is always subject

*Charles S. Brown is Professor of Philosophy at Emporia State University. He is the

co-editor of Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself '(SUNY Press, 2003) and author

of many articles on intentionality, value theory, and environmental ethics.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 66, No. 1 (January, 2007). ? 2007 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

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114 The American fournal of Economics and Sociology

to negotiation, dialogue, and the weight of future experience. This

conception of value undercuts the intellectual, psychological, and

moral justification for ecofascism or ecoterrorism.

According to recent public declarations by the FBI, animal rights and

environmental activists are emerging as a serious domestic terrorist

threat in the United States.1 The FBI estimates that two organizations, the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, have

committed over 600 criminal acts in the United States since 1996,

resulting in damages in excess of $43 million. Although no humans have been killed in any known case of environmental activism, the

suspicion that environmental activists may be willing to kill innocent

human beings to promote their pro-nature political agenda finds some

support among environmental philosophers who have suggested that

highly respected attempts to ground and articulate an environmental

ethics, such as Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" and Arne Naess's "deep

ecology," lead to an anti-human ecofascism.2

Leopold's moral maxim, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong

when it tends otherwise,"3 would seem to support massive human

depopulation by any means necessary. After all, if it is permissible to

kill individual deer to preserve the underlying ecosystem, and if

humans are plain members and citizens of the ecological community,

then it should be permissible to kill individual humans for the good of

the whole. According to Tom Regan and others, the requirement that

individuals be sacrificed for the good of the whole makes the land ethic into a form of ecofascism.4 A similar charge may be made against an environmental ethics rooted in deep ecology. In their list of deep ecology's basic principles, Bill Devall and George Sessions state that all life on Earth has intrinsic value, that humans have no right to

reduce the richness and diversity of life except to satisfy vital needs, and that the flourishing of nonhuman life requires a decrease in human population? Murray Bookchin, in particular, has drawn the

connection between this kind of thinking and that of John Foreman, Earth First! founder, who has welcomed famine as a means of limiting

the population, and others who have declared humans to be a plague or a cancer on the planet.6

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Brown on the Justification of Terrorism 115

Whatever the merits may be of the charge that deep ecology and the

land ethic lead to ecofascism, the connection between ideology and terrorism is more worrisome simply because terrorism does not

require the kind of top-down totalitarian governmental structure that

any form of fascism does. The possibility of ecofascism is only a dim

and distant threat, while ecoterrorism is not only an ever-present

possibility but also a steadily emerging temptation to some activists. It

is not simply the holism per se of deep ecology and the land ethic that

drive these forms of thinking toward Draconian and violent solutions to environmental problems. The problem lies rather in the underlying notion of "intrinsic value." Ethical holism becomes pernicious only when two conditions are met: (1) when the good of the whole is

thought to override or trump the intrinsic value of the individual, and

(2) when the intrinsic value of the whole is judged to be intrinsic in

the strong metaphysical sense of being an atemporal fixed property inherent in the whole?a nonnegotiable moral absolute or, as Kant

puts it, "a value beyond all price." As long as value is judged to be a

nonnegotiable moral absolute, the possibility and temptation of eco

fascism and ecoterrorism exists.

Environmental philosophy needs a pragmatic and nonmetaphysical concept of value that can guide environmental thinking on law,

policy, and activism while resisting the temptation of ecofascism and

ecoterrorism. In the following pages I hope to develop a notion of

value to serve this need, that is, a notion of value not based on a

metaphysical interpretation of value as a property of things?God, humans, or nature?but rather as an experiential and epistemic under

standing of the inherent rationality of our value experience. This

pragmatic understanding of value takes all value intuition and attri

bution to be intrinsically r?visable in the light of future experience. As

intrinsically r?visable, value experience is always subject to negotia

tion, dialogue, and the weight of future experience. In this way, value

experiences point toward their own confirmation or disconfirmation.

This self-correcting tendency of value experience constitutes a prima

facie rationality inherent in intentional experience in general and

value experience in particular.

The account of value defended here is rooted in a philosophical anthropology that unites a Darwinian conception of moral instincts

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116 The American fournal of Economics and Sociology

and a phenomenological conception of moral experience. I offer a

phenomenological analysis, that is, a description and interpretation of

value experience, to show that value experiences exhibit an inten

tional structure through which value experience anticipates its own

confirmation in future experience and thus contains a measure of

rationality.7 What explicitly renders value experience rational is its

revisability in the face of new experience. This will be brought out by

describing the inherent intentionality in value experience. The idea of an evolutionary account of moral sentiments was first

developed by Charles Darwin in his The Descent of Man, where he

gives an account of the naturalistic origin of what he calls humanity's "moral sense."8 The implications of Darwin's attempt to sketch an

evolutionary origin of morality have been developed by natural sci

entists such as E. O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, and Frans de Waal

and philosophers such as J. Baird Callicott. Common to these thinkers

is the idea that our so-called moral sentiments of empathy, affection, and sympathy are evolutionarily shaped responses that are selected

because they make social groups more efficient, more stable, and

more permanent. The claim that morality is made possible by the

linguistic conceptualization of inherited social feelings is on the right track but overlooks an important phenomenological fact about moral

experience. Moral experience or moral phenomena display an inten

tional structure not captured by the view of morality as instinct plus

language. What is missing from the received view concerning a

Darwinian account of morality is a theory of intentionality. Our basic

dispositional ways of behaving as humans, our basic possibilities, are,

no doubt, prefigured in our genes and in our kinship with other

animals. The fundamentals of our moral psychology may start out as

gut instinct, but these basic proto-moral sentiments are not just

reactions to outside stimuli. They have the quality of being directed to

something or are about something. Empathy is not only a feeling with

someone or something, but a feeling that has the phenomenal quality of being directed toward some object or state of affairs. Altruism is

aimed toward the other. These moral sentiments are experienced by

humans not as raw, unstructured feelings but as referring to the other

in an attitude of compassion and solidarity. These are psychological/

somatological moments directed to an empathetic other and exhibit,

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Brown on the fustification of Terrorism 111

as we shall see, a prediscursive intelligibility and a prima facie

rationality.

Moral theory and moral philosophy may be a uniquely human

activity, but we are not alone in our basic capacity to respond to the

world in an attitude of concern. Other social mammals are very much

like humans in this respect and share with us, at least in some basic

way, a moral or proto-moral openness to the world. Many people

believe that dogs are our closest animal companions, and the age-old

dog-human relation is, in part, built on our commonalities as well as

our differences. I offer the following moral fable to illustrate the moral

openness to the world shared by humans and dogs and to locate our

moral nature in our animal nature.9

Imagine that my canine companion, Lily, and I are playing in my

backyard, which is separated from my neighbor's backyard by a large

privacy fence. Because of this fence, Lily and I cannot see into the

neighbor's yard where another dog lives. Further imagine that one day the dog in the adjacent yard is terribly injured and Lily and I hear the

dog's cries and howls but we cannot see him. Lily and I share a

common response to the other dog's suffering. We hear and under

stand his pain and suffering in his howls. We both experience a

considerable anxiety and an empathetic concern directed toward the

injured dog. We both experience a sense of dread over what will

happen next. We know something is wrong. We share the immediacy and urgency of the situation. Lily feels she needs to do something, but

she doesn't know what. She feels frustration on top of an anguished concern for the dog. I know Lily feels that because I feel it as well. I see her behave very nervously, running to the fence, pawing at it,

running back and forth and around in circles; she looks at me and seems to be frightened; she whines and barks. I can hear the agitation and concern in Lily's sounds, and she can hear it in mine.

Skeptics will claim that my interpretations of Lily's experience are

mere projections, yet I believe Lily and I share a feeling with a similar intentional structure, a similar cognitive directedness toward the

injured dog with similar anticipations. One large difference is that I

interpret my anguish at the dog's pain through numerous millennia of

linguistic history and the metaphysical categories that dominate those worldviews. But the basic way of experiencing the suffering of the

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118 The American fournal of Economics and Sociology

wounded dog is not so different between Lily and myself. We do not

have direct access to the dog's pain, but we seem to have something

close to, if not identical to, direct access to the dog's suffering, just as

we have with humans. Both of us experience a sense of urgency, that

something is wrong now, and a sense that something must be done

now, as well as the frustration of not knowing what to do. I believe

this kind of response is a part of human moral psychology that we

share with many mammals and primates.

The Darwinian view of moral instincts that I have just been sketch

ing undermines the traditional anthropocentric view, which holds that

humans are the source of all value. Not only do nonhuman species

activate my moral sentiments, but other species also share those

sentiments. Anthropocentricism may, in some ways, illuminate human

dignity, but it also masks a larger and more comprehensive vision of

moral experience by establishing a hierarchical conception of moral

phenomena and, with it, a logic of domination that is often used to

support more particularistic forms of anthropocentricism such as

patriarchy, racism, nationalism, classism, and speciesism?each of

which appeal to their own conception of intrinsic value as an atem

poral metaphysical property. Anthropocentricism encourages us to

dismiss any moral sentiments we may experience toward nonhumans

as subjective and irrational.

I am always amazed at the stories of scientists who, under the sway

of Cartesian dualism, performed vivisections on animals while inter

preting their cries and howls not as genuine expressions of suffering and distress but as mere unmeaning mechanical responses. Even Lily

knows better that this. Surely, if we look at and listen to such cries and

howls not through the distorting lenses of anthropocentric metaphys ics but in a spontaneous openness to the world, we are confronted not

with mechanically produced sound and motion but with an immediate

and natural expression of pain and suffering.

Both Lily and I share an attitude of concern and empathy toward

the other's suffering. We share an immediate intuition that some

thing is wrong. This intuition is as much somatic as it is cognitive.

We feel, as Hume would say, in our "breast" as much as we project

it toward the howling dog. My own human response to the howls

of the hurt dog?the somatic anxiety dreadfully directed to the

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Brown on the fustification of Terrorism 119

suffering dog, a gut reaction that something is wrong, a vague and

diffuse feeling that something should be done (I think I share all this with Lily)?is integrated into my own linguistically based con

ceptual system and worldview. The prelinguistic intentional com

portment of my felt sentiment is conceptualized in ways that Lily's is not. I suspect that Lily's prelinguistic intentional comportments, in

this case, an empathie openness to the suffering of others, come

and go, and play themselves out quickly. In my own case, the

symbolic power of language extends these sentiments by binding them to longer-term projects.

While I think that Lily and I begin at a similar place, a mammalian

response to suffering, my own intentional comportment toward the

injured dog goes far beyond what I suspect Lily is capable of. Both Lily and I try to get past the fence to access more closely what is

happening. The original experience of hearing those howls has been

extended into a seeking out of more information?we both look to see what is wrong, we both anticipate and project. These anticipations and projections may be confirmed or disconfirmed in future experi ence. If we managed to come face to face with the injured dog and I see that the dog is caught in a nonhumane wolf trap, I will search for a way to release the dog. My recognition of the trap as a human

artifact opens my experience into new conceptual domains and

worlds, and these worlds bleed into my understanding. I don't think

Lily would understand the wolf trap. Her projections are more imme

diate. If we got through the fence and saw the dog was being eaten

by a lion, Lily would, I think, understand this. For Lily, all this would

unfold into projections of her immediate future. She would run from

the lion, anticipating trouble if she stays put, but her power to extend

her experience into the future or into other symbolic domains is cut

short by her lack of language. The structure and content of human cognition, moral or otherwise,

is distinguished from that of other prelinguistic animals by the tem

poral range and symbolic worlds that language gives to our immediate sentiments. As our moral instincts are folded into our conceptual

systems, they take on new meanings. I can imagine that if I came

through the fence and found the dog in an old and carelessly discarded wolf trap, my empathie anxiety of shared suffering would

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120 The American fournal of Economics and Sociology

begin to take on air of moral disapproval as the trapped animal

opened up the world of animal trapping and that, in turn, opened up the world of human domination of nature. This sense of disapproval is largely cultural and conceptual, but it is made possible and sus

tained over time by the gut feeling, the moral instinct, that something is wrong. We can hear that in the howls.

Because value experiences are intentional, they bring with them

their own procedure for confirmation grounded in the temporal structure of anticipation and either satisfaction or frustration of such

anticipation. This anticipatory projection within value experience pro

vides or denies a justification for the sense of that lived experience.10 If I experience friendship or marriage as good, it is not simply that I

enjoy friendship or marriage; it is that I have a sense, even if

unarticulated, of how and why each is good. Even if we cannot

express it, we know that friendship or marriage extend our sphere of concern while comforting us in ways that help to provide our lives

with meaning. To experience friendship or marriage as good is to

interpret and impose the sense of good on these relations, but it is also to expect to continue to find goodness in these relations and to have such expectations fulfilled. The very experience of positive values like

marriage and friendship is bound up with an implicit understanding of the meaning of marriage and friendship. Our experience of these as

good is also subject to the possibility of breakdown, as the final test of value is the test of time.

Experiences of positive value that we call "good" involve knowing what to expect. It is this anticipatory structure that provides an

ongoing validation of our experiences of the good. If we initially find

friendship and marriage to be bad and fraud to be good, openness to

further experience will almost always correct this. That we find value in friendship and disvalue in fraud is not arbitrary. Rarely do our

considered judgments about these things disappoint us. Our experi ence continues to establish friendship and marriage as good in an

ever-evolving process of being open to the good. By grounding our

values and beliefs in the evolving wisdom of our collective experi

ence, we can avoid the perils of absolutism and relativism. We can

avoid dogmatic absolutism by understanding that our experiences and

conceptions of the good are always open to revision, and we can

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Brown on the fustification of Terrorism 121

avoid relativism by recognizing that our experiences of the good demand their own confirmation in future experiences.

The conditions for the possibility of moral experience are embed

ded in our animal nature and are greatly expanded by our ability to

conceptualize our moral sentiments and intuitions within our linguistic

and conceptual worldviews. Even though our moral categories and

concepts, rooted in our historically constituted worldviews, allow us

the power of abstract moral thinking and moral imagination, we are

too often closed off from a genuinely emancipatory moral conscious

ness because our thinking is too often dominated by the metaphysical

categories controlling our thinking. When the openness and tempo

rality of moral experience is reduced to the ahistorical categories of

God, humanity, or nature, the open-ended possibilities of experience

are eliminated in favor of a finite set of rules governing what can be

said or thought about moral experience. The anticipatory structure

of value experience demands that our sentiments and evaluative

responses to the world be understood as prima facie intuitions about

the goodness or badness of the matters at hand. A first glance always

requires a second look. Our various understandings of the good are

subject to continual assessment in light of subsequent experience, just as we continually reassess our initial understandings of the real and

the true. Over our lifetimes and through the centuries the world has

unfolded in ways that have rendered our previous understandings of

the good as imperfect and parochial. This analysis of moral phenomena is an experiential and epistemic

understanding of the inherent rationality of value experience rather

than a metaphysical interpretation of value as a mysterious or mystical

property of things. The goods we appreciate for ourselves and for

others are never given as absolute but always are provisional and

subject to the satisfaction or frustration of future experiences. Here we

find the deepest flaw of biocentric approaches to environmental ethics

such as the land ethic and deep ecology. To the extent that these and

other ecophilosophies understand intrinsic value as an atemporal

metaphysical property, biocentricism repeats the pattern of the other

centricisms by making its experience and conception of intrinsic value

into a metaphysical and moral absolute. Thus, to the extent that

biocentric thinking interprets our moral experiences around a

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122 The American fournal of Economics and Sociology

nonnegotiable ahistorical metaphysical and moral absolute, the door is

still left open to the temptation of ecofascism and ecoterrorism. The logic of domination reenters the picture with the emergence of a

moral absolute.

The radical ecological project of unmasking ecodestructive ele ments in our worldview does not end with the development of new,

alternative, and ecofriendly worldviews, but rather with the more

radical possibility of shifting power within our worldviews away from the controlling authority of fixed concepts and categories and toward an openness to how the world unfolds. To attempt to think without a

radical questioning of the historical and contingent nature of the

concepts and categories controlling thought is simply to articulate the

combinatorial possibilities of fixed semantic regimes. Rather than give in to a prepackaged way of thinking, we must hold out for a kind of

thinking that is open to the world, a kind of thinking that is able to

take the world in, to be available to the revelation that the world may offer. Such thinking accepts what the world offers but always takes a

second look. Such thinking is characterized by its intrinsic revisability in the face of an always open future.11

Moral experience is always a dialectic between our animal senti

ments and our historically constructed worldviews. Neither our animal

sentiments nor our historically constructed value systems are infallible.

We live morally responsible lives only by playing one off against the other. Moral experience is always directed toward a future that is yet to come. The final categories of moral understanding are forever

postponed. Without final categories there can be no final answers, and

without final answers there can be no final solutions. Final solutions are always based on metaphysical absolutes. Ecological philosophy and environmental ethics will best be served by a notion of value that

recognizes the temporality and interrelatedness of all things. By

tracing our capacity for moral experience to the becoming of natural

selection and the historicity of our worldviews, we can learn to

interpret our various intuitions and experiences of value as a prima

facie understanding of goodness to be born out in future experience.

Such a prima facie understanding of goodness, worth, and value is

never absolute and final; it is always provisional and subject to further, but never perfect, confirmation. As such, it would provide a poor

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Brown on the fustification of Terrorism 123

means for the justification for fascist or terrorist solutions to environ

mental or animal rights issues.

The account of value developed here runs counter to the uncritical

notion of "intrinsic value" prevalent in mainstream environmental

ethics. That notion of intrinsic value?a property inherent in the

thing-in-itself?falls out of a tradition interested in providing a meta

physical grounding of value. Such accounts will always be highly

speculative and subject to endless challenges. The account developed here focuses on the dynamism and temporality of value experience.

This account urges us to understand moral experience as emerging

from social relationships?from the face-to-face openness to others

structured by compassion and care. Moral philosophy has been too

long dominated by an abstract, universalizing rationalism that takes

acting from abstract principle as the center of moral phenomena and

pushes sentiment and feeling to the margins. The account developed here sees moral phenomena as emerging from relationships, from

particular contexts and particular situations.12 Moral phenomena, in

this understanding, is open-ended, in process, and ultimately,

although beyond the scope of this paper, in dialogue.

Notes

1. James F. Jarboe, "The Threat of Ecoterrorism." In congressional testi

mony before the House Resources Committee, Subcommittee on Forests and

Forest Health, February 12, 2002. For the full testimony, see http://

www.fbi.gov/congress/congress02/jarboe201202. 2. For two insightful essays concerning the possibility and threat of

ecofascism, see J. Baird Callicott's "Holistic Environmental Ethics and the

Problem of Ecofascism," in Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environ

mental Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1999) and

Michael Zimmerman's "The Threat of Ecofascism," in Environmental Philoso

phy from Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, eds. Zimmerman, Callicott,

Warren, Klaver, Clark (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005).

3. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford and New York:

Oxford University Press, 1949), 220.

4. Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 1983), 262. Similar criticisms of the land ethic have been

made by K. S. Schrader-Frechette in her "Individualism, Holism, and Environ

mental Ethics," in Ethics and the Environment (1966) 1:55-69, and by W.

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124 The American fournal of Economics and Sociology

Aiken in his "Ethical Issues in Agriculture," in Earthbound: New Introductory

Essays in Environmental Ethics, ed. T. Regan (New York: Random House,

1984), 247-288.

5. Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature

Mattered (Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Books, 1985), 70.

6. Murray Bookchin, "Social Ecology Versus Deep Ecology." Socialist

Review 88(3) (1988): 11-29. 7. Charles S. Brown, "The Intrinsic Rationality of Moral Phenomena."

Skepsis XV/I (2004): 477-494. 8. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: And Selection in Relation to Sex

(New York: Heritage Press, 1972). This is a reprint of the 1874 second edition.

9. An earlier version of this moral fable appeared in my "Ecofascism and

the Animal Heritage of Moral Experience," in Dialogue and Universalism,

7-8/2005. The focus of that essay was on ecofascism rather than ecoterrorism.

10. Charles S. Brown, "The Real and the Good: Phenomenology and the

Possibility of an Axiological Rationality." In Eco-Phenomenology. Back to the

Earth Ltself eds. Brown and Toadvine (Albany, NY: State University of New

York Press, 2003), 3-18.

11. Charles S. Brown, "Respect for Experience as a Way into the Problem

of Moral Boundaries," forthcoming, in Boundary Explorations in Ecological

Theory and Practice, eds. Brown and Toadvine (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press).

12. Val Plumwood, "Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental

Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism." Hypathia 6(1) (Spring 1991): 3-27. Plumwood's criticisms of traditional moral theory are compatible with

the account of moral phenomena sketched in this paper.

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