CEPPA Talk (in-person & online) – James Hutton (Delft)

In environmental ethics, we find many competing theories of environmental value, but little discussion of the epistemological grounds for believing one theory rather than another. Building on the framework of moral empiricism (which I’ve developed elsewhere), I propose an “Emotion-Based” methodology for environmental ethics. The Emotion-Based methodology requires treating our emotional experiences as defeasible intuitions about value, wrongness, etc. – accepting their contents, unless we have substantive reason not to. I offer some rationales for adopting the Emotion-Based methodology, exploiting analogies with other domains of knowledge. In the final part of the talk, I zoom in on the emotion of wonder. Wonder, I argue, presents its object as valuable for its own sake. If we take seriously the full range of our experiences of wonder, we face pressure to adopt a pluralist view of environmental value, on which some nonsentient beings (e.g. trees) and collective entities (i.e. ecosystems) are valuable for their own sake. Thus, while moral empiricism is an abstract view about the conditions for moral knowledge, it turns out to have fairly radical first-order implications for environmental ethics.