Box 16, Item 1223: Drafts of Deep-green ethics chapters, and short version of On the value core of deep-green theory

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Box 16, Item 1223: Drafts of Deep-green ethics chapters, and short version of On the value core of deep-green theory

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Typescript draft of chapters from Deep-green ethics and two copies of short version of On the value core of deep-green theory

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The University of Queensland's Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291, Box 16, Item 1223

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This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, Dr. N.A.J. Taylor.

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For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library.

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Australian National University Office - Typing Table at End of Desk

Text

DEEP-GREEN ETHICS
Contents
PARTS

CHAPTERS

0

I

II

III

IV

Prologue

DEEP, GREEN, ETHICS, and PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND

1

Deep [and] green fundamentals

2

Ethics without humans; philosophy without humans

3

Philosophical setting: deep-green plurallisms

4

Inhibiting presumptions and myths

AXIOLOGY: value core

5

Value and its varieities: basic theory and its development

6

Alternative primitives and theoretical beginnings

DEONTOLOGY: necessary moral structure

7

Obligation and its deontic circle, and moral dilemmas

8

Rights, and justice

VIRTUE and INACTION

9

Environmental virtues: what they are and
something of their theory

10
V

Environmental ethical practice

NATURE of ETHICS

11

Ethics, its new character and revised foundations

12

Principal questions of reoriented ethics, and proposed answers

13

Epilogue

17 .5.96

DEEP-GREEN ETHICS
PROLOGUE
Philosophy and its branches, ethics especially, are among the last places where prejudice
would be found, found alive and thriving, so it might be imagined. Wrong. In the first place,
prevailing ethics all exhibit heavy prejudice in favour of humans, human chauvinism. So they
are one and all defective, wrong in a deep way. An adequate ethic will remove the prejudices
involved. That means, in turn, a radical transformation of prevailing ethics, from the bottom
up. Such a transformation constitutes a main objective of this book. Deep-green ethics aims
not simply to reform present arrangements and systematizations, but to replace them. Abolition
of prejudice has early priority.
Prejudice in philosophy, privelege in prevailing ethics.
There are only about two and half millenia of recorded philosophy on Earth. To a
disconcerting extent, those millenia represent two and half thousand years of prejudice-partial
exceptions occurring and prejudice subsiding somewhat only when ideological empires were
fractured (e.g. fruitful periods of "warring states" in ancient China and Greece). Ethics is far
from alone within philosophy in exhibiting serious deficiencies, in incorporating prejudices that
should not figure so prominently in what is ideally an impartial subject. Much the same holds
for other branches: politics obviously (partly through its interdependence with ethics),
metaphysics and logic perhaps less obviously. Yet prevailing metaphysics display a deep
prejudice in favour of the actual, against what does not exist. In logic the prejudical situation
has in fact been accentuated through the rise of modern symbolic logic. Regrettably mainstream
symbolic logic is wrong. All its forms validate incorrect principles (such as implicational
paradoxes), these results flowing primarily from an underlying prejudice in favour of the
consistent, against the impossible. 1
Several of the systematic prejudices embedded elsewhere in philosophy impact upon
ethics. The prejudice in favour of the actual has served to distort, very seriously, the issue of
obligations to future creatures for example, in this fashion:- Remoter future creatures do not
exist, and therefore, according to prevailing prejudice, cannot have any relevant features, any
preferences or desires, self-traits or satisfactions, to be taken into ethical account. Therefore
All the themes are presented and defended in detail elsewhere. As regards metaphysics, see JB; as
regards logic, see e.g. BGB and generally in philosophy , see TM. There are several coupled
prejudices and prejudical drives, as will appear; for instance the drives to power and to maximization,
strongly manifested in logic, see e.g. RLR.
Prejudice in ethics was explicitly recognised by Bentham, almost two centuries ago; unfortunately
however he imported his own very influential prejudical framework.

2

"they" can be discounted entirely. The same prejudice also enters in a very different way. All
the standard positions concerning universals, all of which reflect the metaphysical
presupposition that discourse concerns existent objects, show up in ethics. They appear in
vexing issues as to the ontological status of values, such as the good, and of deontic notions,
such as obligations and the right. These are not only difficult items to discover in the world, but
they do not seem adequately housed in conceptual or linguistic apparatus: where are they
located? Whence derives immediate pressure for many mostly bizarre reduction exercises; for
instance of values to human constructs, contructs from social preferences or from
sociobiological drives, and of obligations from veiled contracts. The initial question of location
makes, however, the defective metaphysical presupposition, and lapses therewith. Values,
though significant items, do not exist; so they are not located, anywhere.
Prejudice rooted in established logic has impacted differently, upon a variety of issues in
ethics. The absolute requirement of consistency upsets a straightforward treatment of
obligations, general sets of which are typically inconsistent, thereby leading for instance to
awkward theories of hierarchies of obligation or of merely prima facie obligations. Running
parallel with this, the requirement utterly distorted an initially straightforward theory of ethical
dilemmas, treatment of which is a significant part of any comprehensive ethical theory.
Established logic has also impacted heavily on such different issues as fact-value inferences
(e.g. the prescriptive fallacy) and regarding the extent of pluralism in ethics. The assumption
behind the rationalistic critique of relativism is that there is a single correct logic, governed by
requirements of consistency, namely standard logical theory, which (when combined with the
facts) will eliminate various ethical stances as incorrect, indeed which may, given sufficient
critical thought, lead to a single correct ethics. 2 But the assumption fails; for it too depends on
ancient prejudice.
Pluralism is one most important component in removing prejudice generally, certainly in
reducing it generally, by admitting alternatives, and allowing some to flourish. 3 Elaboration of
deep-green theory is another important direction in removing prejudice, in favour of humans,
persons, or like agents from ethics especially but not only. The main development that follows
will take both these directions, though focussed upon ethics: it will track and investigate
pluralistic deep-green ethics.
Human chauvinism is not the only major prejudice damaging ethics. An extraordinarily
privileged position given to egoistical considerations is another. Western ethics in particular has
2

3

The approach involved, that of traditional rationalistic ethics, is regularly deployed by Singer (e.g.
his Encyclopedia conclusion to Companion to Ethics); the strengthened version features in Regan.
Of course how it is supposed to proceed, the details of how reason works this miracle, is never
revealed.
See esp. TM, epilogue.

3

recently been deformed through a substantially unquestioned axiom of self concern, that agents
are interested in and motivated by their own (self) concerns and only by them. (Of course an
agent's self, or extended self, may be grander than the agent's soul or person or body or
whatever; it may include the agent's family or even the agent's tribe, or differently it may
comprehend the agent's land or environment. But under such extensions the axiom is already
beginning to disintegrate.) Such an ubiquitous, but largely unquestioned, presumption has lain
behind reductionistic exercises that have distorted much of modem ethical (and political) theory.
The leading idea is simple enough: given that action is justified through human self-interest, and
only thus, if ethical theory (and likewise political superstructure) can be justified through some
construction or modelling on that basis (bringing in only indifference and like neutral
assumptions) , then justification will be transmitted, it too will be justified. Thus those
contractual and utilitarian exercises which have loomed so large in recent theory. 4 The same
dubious presumption also features large elsewhere, for instance in the acclaimed derivation of
Deep Ecology from the ultimate norm of Self-realization!
It is not just prejudice and allied presumption that have damaged and distorted ethics.
Narrow ethics, parading as universal or absolute in defiance of pluralism, ethics often
underwritten by religious or papal presumption, have severely disadvantage d ethics.
Furthermore, connected therewith, ethics has been destabilized, and cast in an unfavourable
light, by


a quest for absolute foundations, and in tum connected therewith

an invidious comparison with science, which is supposed to have such foundations.
The quest is quixote: there are no such foundations. Nor does science have such foundations,
so the comparison is misplaced. Not only is absoluteness for science increasingly disputed, but
it is becoming apparent that science is in the same sort of pluralistic situation-pre dicament
some, still questing for the old false certainties, would say-as ethics. 5
Through the assumption, or pretence, that it can deliver (whether from religious, rational
or other resources) certainties of a type that it cannot deliver, ethics has become discredited. But
that is only part among reasons why on the contemporary scene ethics is not the force that it has
mostly been in bygone times. At least as important as such intellectual reasons are matters like
removal of social and political pressures to conform, redirection of indoctrination practices (into
consumerism, etc.), and so on, some welcome and some definitely not.
4

5

Roughly, ethics, knocked down to what's in it for everyone (some aggregated base class), is justified
through what's in it for each me. Prima facie the grand construction is based on a simpler fallacy of
aggregation: an invalid each to all inference.
The theme is argued in detail in TM chapter 10.
The quixote quest is strikingly engaged in by Williams, for a entertaining criticism of which see
'Bernard Williams and the Absolute Conception of the World' in Putnam 92.

4

Aspects of the discreditation have in turn been exaggerated. Ethics, it is said, makes no
difference, even can never make a difference; it never effects change. Such claims are seriously
astray, as examination of elementary examples like human slavery and treatment of animals
quickly reveals. Environmental ethics too can make a difference (perhaps, when coupled with
other practices, a major difference), and they are beginning to do so. But naturally they cannot
compel change; nor should they be capable of doing so, as that would exceed proper roles of
ethics (and other proper practices). 6
Rectification of ethics requires, then, not merely removal of now conspicuous prejudice
and presumptions, but deflation of pretensions. What results-hardly unique naturally, but one
selected for good reasons among many, hardly entirely exclusive but overlapping and admitting
others-is an ethics which differs from standard ethics in the following respects at least: Such
an ethics is:
• deep-green, removing prejudice in favour of humans, and in favour of certain (egoistic)
agents, in an affirmative fashion; and
• Pluralistic in a thorough-going way, accordingly not pretending to absolute or objective
status.
The run of prevailing ethics, including so-called "applied ethics" and "environmental ethics" are
chauvinistic; a satisfactory (environmental) ethic is not. The run of prevailing ethics are
absolutist, or otherwise relativist; a satisfactory ethic is neither.
However the conditions so far presented are but necessary conditions; they are not jointly
sufficient for adequacy. Even among theories that are nonchauvinistic and duly pluralistic,
reductionism may persist. Such reductionisms come in striking variety; thus, on just one
dimension, individualisms, sentientisms, vitalisms, (i.e. all that has value is alive, somehow),
and so on. To avoid such reductionisms, another blanket condition of adequacy is:
• non-reductionistic.
The main task consists in elaborating in detail an ethic, with other preferred features, that meets
these conditions of adequacy.
Regrettably, removal of prejudice cannot be accomplished in ethics alone, as a separate
pollution-free zone. Prejudice in ethics flows through from other regions, religion especially,
but also from psychology (which in the past made little gods of humans with sacred souls of
their own, justifying very differential treatment for them in the world), and from elsewhere.
Removal of these latter sorts of prejudices requires a severe erosion of belief, in regions strictly
outside ethics, but heavily exporting into it; of beliefs fostering intellectual prejudice.
Nonetheless ethics has a role in removal of prejudices elsewhere, because, very simply,
these prejudices ought to be removed. The basic principle, which can also be presented as one
6

These points are developed at some decent length in GE part IL

5

of rationality, runs as follows: belief ought not to exceed warranting evidence, but should be
appropriate to it.
None of this is as clean and clear-cut as it may initially appear, because source waters
have become very muddied. Sources for instance take a range of forms (this is part of the
ancient issue of the criterion reput in more contemporary terms). Sources include not merely
empirical evidence, perception especially, the favoured, or even exclusive, source of
empiricism. They also include such sources as: emotional presentation, or emotion; postulation
or presumption; reason; authority; a range of psychic and extra sensory perception (ESP) forms;
and, differently, a range of intuitions. Some of these sources overlap; consider for instance
divine relevation. Plainly those sources are very different kinds, quality and calibre. Some
such as reason, which includes itself a disputed variety of forms, are more processing of
information kinds than sources (thought reason becomes a source, of sorts, in pure rationalism,
and a degenerate source of necessary truths in classical logical theory where theorems are
proved, by paradoxical means, from nothing so to say).
While some of these kind of sources are not important or at issue in ethics, for instance
controversial kinds of ESP giving information on remote (spatially distant or past or future)
items, several are. It is not going too far to say that ethics is severely vexed as regards sources,
and many distortions such as naturalism can be seen as coming about as ways of trying to
secure reliable sources (if some naturalistic reduction were correct then ethics would be brought
within the orbit of science and even empirical perceptual bases could be adopted, as in science).
But ethics does not resemble science; its sources are not (except incidentally) primarily
perceptual, thus breaking any very close analogy between epistemology and ethics.
A major source in ethics is emotion, by contrast with epistemology where the major
source is perception. From there already derives a major difference between the fields, as
perception tends to be less variable, more intersubjective, less culturally dependent across the
range of subjects usually taken into account. Accordingly, in any quest for a more objective
ethics, more has to be drawn out, out of the processing substructure, whence the emphasis on
coherence, good reasons, ethical on coherence, good reasons, ethical argumentation. Ethical
inputs, sources, and processing are assessed in detail in the text.
Although this work is focussed upon ethics, it does not, and evidently cannot, merely
concern ethics. Since the ethical theory is itself approached primarily (though not exclusively)
by way of value, it bears upon other areas, such as normative-infected social sciences, where
value theory features. For another example, it also impacts upon aesthetics, heavily. For,
according to the theory advanced, there is no sharp boundary, indeed really no division at all,
between what has been dubbed "aesthetic value" and "ethical value". Value is value, without
these artificial divides. Evidently too, as will appear, the work intrudes in normative reaches

6

merging into ethics, in particular, wherever normative or deontic dilemmas are encountered,
such as reaches of social choice theory and legal theory. Differently, the work includes much,
though indirectly, upon philosophy of nature. For it is especially concerned to supersede an old
defective philosophy of nature, which included a heavy devaluation of nature, and aided and
abetted a manifestly chauvinistic ethics. The ethical theory to be elaborated fits with, and in
significant respects presupposes, a·different theory of nature. 7
Although investigations in this text are primarily theoretical, they have significant practical
implications. Putting the theory to work in various environmental fields is something that
happens elsewhere (see further in the Epilogue). Some of this has already occurred, in essays
in the Green Series, and some is reserved for other texts on field ethics. 8
Notes on terminology In this text several familiar terms, such as 'green' and 'deep', are
converted into quasi-technical terms. That is to say, special uses of the terms already in
currency, such as the use of 'green' to mean environmentally committed, are further refined.

The result could be signalled by deloyment of appropriate new terminology. Something like
that is assumed done, except that the familiar terms will be retained-onl y now they are to be
read in the quasi-technical way. To put the point differently. Let 'grene' (Olde English) or
'gre-een, (Newe English), for example, be the quasi-technical explication of 'green' in the
relevant sense. Then in the subsequent text, 'green' will normally signify gre-een, or
equivalently 'green' operates as (effectively abbreviates) 'gre-een. Why such a strategem? One
reason is that people are now rather conservative regarding terminology. Indeed they are often
turned off by new terminology (despite regular ruination of established terminology). As a
result, established terminology gets revised for all sorts of new purposes (witness the bizarre
high-school reuses in advanced physics), with a resultant overloading of senses. By contrast,
recycling of old terminology (words or spellings), that has fallen into disuse would be rather
more commendable. Here, rather than pressing our luck with explicit recyclings like diep and
chalowe, we resort to the fiction that the terms 'deep' and 'shallow' deployed throughout the
text stand in for the technical recyclings. As a result 'deep', as figuring in deep approaches,

deep green, deep theory and so on, has no connection with profundity, or 'shallow' with
superficiality.
As several have said, in several respects deep/shallow terminology is unsatisfactory,
execrable it is sometimes said. Founder N aess did a disservice introducing it, and subsequently
7
8

Such an appropriate underlying theory of nature is advanced in the companion work on metaphysics,
namely TM.
Green Series is a popular label for discussion papers in environmental philosophy, published from
Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. One of the other texts is
tentatively entitled Green Ethical Fields ..

7

in explaining it, so slackly. While it is too late to easily change the terminology, some
undesirable associations may be shaken off by resorting to older or variant spellings, and
simultaneous ly refining senses intended. That we do. But then we concede to the general
intellectual will, by the substitution or "abbreviations" strategem.
Even so, we have risked a few neologisms, and we shall chance, just here, one or two
more. One we risk, is euthics, for universalizab le ethics, that is an ethics meeting
universalizability requirements (in some appropriate fashion). This bit of terminology helps in
resolving a significant ambiguity in philosophical usage of 'ethics', and making an improved
start on the vexed issue of why an agent should adhere to an ethics, or differently to an euthics?
One we chance is viridology (from Latin virides, green, and Greek logos, study of, in modern
palance) for: theory, principles and practices of deep-green; that is, a single classical word for
diep-grene theory. A purer alternative we contemplated, from among many, was prasinology
(or should it be prasinomics) from Greek (and Latin) prasinus, dark green, leek green.
Acknowledg ements and antecendents: personal development and conceit.
The production of this work owes much to other humans, with of whom I have little or no
acquaintance. The debts are both intellectual and practical. On the heavily practical side, I am
most grateful to Frances Redrup for the processing of reems of rough scribble. On the broad
practical front I am pleased to acknowledge the continuing support of my research endeavours
by the Australian National University. That academic support, while generous by often
niggardly world standards, has recently declined, through contraction of research support and
expansion of alleged accountability practices. In this little respect, there has regettably been
interference in my research, dur the earlier stages of work on this book, by no doubt wellintentioned academics occupying supervisary roles who have deemed by performance less than
satisfactory. It is with regret too that I record that, in part owing to biassed appointment
practices within the University, there has been negligible imput to the present work from any of
my academic colleagues there.
But outside imput there has been of course, of two main sorts: from recent activity in
environmental philosophy and from past exercises in value theory. While environmental issues
have operated as a main stimulus in my recent work in ethics, my own interest in and
investigations in ethics reach back to my graduate work in Wellington, New Zealand, where I
produced a characteristic ally initative work on ethics, entitled Moral Scepticism (I do not
suggest that anyone read that work, which it is far too late to suppress).
In New Zealand, I was educated in the 20th century British type and style of ethical
theory, primarily Oxbridge material, with not antipodean influence of any significance what
cover, except in the obscure background Prior' s quocit little book Logic and the Basis of Ethics
(although my professor at Wellington, George Styles, had ethics as a manfield, I learnt only a

8
certain technigue from him; I do not recall one position, little theorem argument or there I must
attribute to him, for the very simple reason, (suspect, that he never advanced very much).
Among Oxbridge characters, Moore revoided the dominant influence though much of Hume and
his near contemporaries-N eurall-Smith Tomlesia and others-was scround up to a tiny circle
of ethical enthusiants and fellow academic travellers. Moore is still an influence in this book; in
my occasional more conceited moments, I like to envisage the book as an appropriately greenish
update of Principia Ethica. At least it may be as near as I ever come to producing such a work:
Principa Ethica Virida. What on excessively ambitious idea, sheer hubris! Yet, for all the fuss,
Principia Ethica is not really such a good book; rather it enjoys other advantageous features. A
few companions with Principa Ethica will be ventured.
But, by and large, other ethical theories will not be investigated in much detail. For one
reason, that has been done, to a sufficient extent elsewhere (in others' work more than my
own). For another, in the wake of accumulating evidence, notably from environmental
awakenings, revealing their narrowness and prejudice, they scarcely justify further post
mortems.
More than Moore and Priest, the present work is indebted to Meinong, and through him to
the tradition of Austrian value theory. The theory elaborated in fact fits, more or less, into what
has been called critical cognitivism ..
The evil of ingratitude, for example, ...

Here and there, the present text draws, heavily sometimes, on my own past work,
especially concerning environmental ethics. As much of the work, for example in the local
Green Series in Canberra, is rather inaccessible, such borrowing may not matter much. There
remains a small overlap-ideally vanishingly small as revision proceeds-betwee n this text and
better circulated complementary works, notably essays in Environmental Philosophy and parts
of The Greening of Ethics.

INTRODU CING DEEP-GR EEN THEORY
Deep-green theory aims eventually to supply a comprehensive alternative environmental
philosophy. While it stands on its own, it is alternative because it stands in radical ideological
opposition to dominant ways, nowadays predominantly industrial. It offers a philosophy both
in the contemporary narrower sense, and in the older sense of an intellectually informed and
critical way of life. That philosophy is centred on an ethical theory (upon which this issue
concentrates), which is in form centred upon a value theory. But the ethic issues, in a fashion
broadly associated since Aristotle, in a politics and political economy. But the output of the
value theory in fact reaches much further, into practical decision making in a range of
environmentally impacting areas such as fishing, forestry and agriculture. The value theory is
also intertwined with philosophical issues which are often considered more fundamental, those
of astophyism and epistemology. Indeed there is no part of philosophy that remains untouched.
Therein lies part of the claim to comprehensiveness.
The particular form of deep-green theory elaborated is by no means independent of
(acclaimed) advances recently made elsewhere in philosophy (those in object-theory, and
relevant and paraconsistent logics especially). But though the theory given is influenced and
sometimes in fact shaped through these developments, deep-green theory more generally can
avoid them (The type of theory given could easily enough be recast in a more classical
Platonistic form - undoubtedly a much less plausible form. Nor will these background advances
intrude, it is hoped, in the given elaboration of deep-green theory; the background will remain,
fairly directly in the background, and not come to dominate proceedings or know proceedings
depend upon special new controversial features of it. Where more technical agreements are
required, they will be relegated to appendices.

1. As to deep theory.
Deep-green theory is the environmental branch of a much larger affair, deep theory. There
is a point, in fact a real expository need, to place deep-green theory in the larger setting of deep
theory. For deep theory influences several of the choices made in deciding upon the way deepgreen theory goes, the shape it takes. Although the influence will become evident, particularly
with the intertwining of truth and value that .... , it is worth giving an example. Too much of the
Anglo-American discussion of intrinsic value and of obligations to future generations is taken up
with - hung up upon - ontological questions, about universal items in the first case, and as how
there can be obligations regarding future items which do not (yet) exist in "suitable" determinate

2
form in the second. Deep object-theo ry slices straight through these issues, removing the
problem generating ontological assumptions.
Deep-theor y is a grander theory lying in the background , which significantl y influences
the philosophic al approach taken in deep-green theory, as well as being influenced by it. There
is no reason why that grand backdrop should remain hidden; there is no hidden agenda. The
backgroun d theory, of which deep-green theory is a part, is called simply deep theory. For it
represents the confluence of several deep positions with deep-green theory: deep pluralism,
depth relevant theory, deep item-theory, and so on. As a theoretical endeavor, deep theory aims
to pull together, into a unified coherent theory these various deep positions. It thus draws
together and integrates as well, several other interrelated efforts (on dialethism, process theory,
anakyrie, etc. With deep theory I aim to supply eventually a fairly comprehen sive philosophical
package. I used to imagine that with moderate comprehen siveness as regards present
philosophic al problems would come a certain completene ss; but I've come to think that a total
philosophy is an illusion, like pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, and rainboweri a themselves.
Deep theory is no doubt a presumptu ous title (there are worse about, e.g. 'total
philosophy ', 'ecosophy' ), not it is altogether satisfactory given the problems and obscurities, to
be encountere d, lacking in the notion of depth. My main excuse is that I did no exactly choose
the title myself, but had it thrust upon me: problemati c, presumptuo us, it looks to good to
refuse. It emerged from a terminolog ical confluence of several areas in which I'd been
struggling to assemble ac. capirred theory - deep-green theory (itself a union of green thought,
or environmen tal philosophy with a revised deep ecology), deep relevant theory, deep pluralism
(which deepened radical pluralism), and deep item-theory (which deepens object-theory).
To give a picture of deep theory, it suffices for present purposes to indicate some main
features of deep positions, some of their integrating interrelatio ns, and some of their
revolutiona ry potential. Deep theory overturns or subverts very much of what has been
assumed or presuppos ed in Western philosophy , and particularl y in Enlightenm ented
contempora ry philosophy.
For example, it overturns the following widespread assumptions:• the Ontologica l Assumptio n, that truth, and also, meaning, are functions of reference, and
thereby presuppose existence. On the contrary according to (deep) item theory, we can perfectly
well talk and think truly about items that do not exist, and also about items that are not individual
but are complex but perhaps indetermin ate wholes, and finally what items are impossible .
Therewith repudiated also then is an occasionall y favoured full-back from onticalism, namely
possibilism , which assumes

3
• the Possibilist Reduction, of everything that counts in discourse to possible individuals; there
are no other genuine subjects, all else can be analysed (or thrown) away.
Bound up with possibilism are
• the assumptions of modalism, of the correctness of classical logic, and of the absolute
requirement of consistency. Under more throughgoing transconsistency (or paraconsistency)
these connected assumptions are one and all repudiated. The transconsistent connection
assumes an important role in the straightforward treatment of moral and other dilemmas, in
showing for example how an agent may coherently operate under inconsistent obligations or
with incompatible needs.
Important special cases of modalism are such theories as that
• entailment is strict implication (or its metalinguistic analogical) and that conditionality amounts
to a modal function of material implication 1. The rejection of such themes and their courses is
part of what motivates deep relevant logic.
While the parts of deep theory are integrated and are intended to be materially reinforcing,
nothing prevents their fairly independent elaborations. The holism conceded does not exclude
separation or analysis. In particular, deep-green theory is amenable to independent development
and analysis.

Material implication is the implication defined in terms of truth-functions thus: A materially implies
B iff not last A and not B, or equivalently, iff either not A or B. Strict implication is the
necessitation of material obligatory i.e. A strictly implies B iff necessarily A materially implies B, or
equivalently, iff it is not possible that not A and not B.

ON THE VALUE CORE OF DEEP-GR EEN THEORY
This essay aims to uncover the value theory of deep-green theory, exposing thereby a
central area of that theory. Though the value theory is (inevitably) abstract, it issues in what is
more concrete, such as an applicable system and practical ecological directives, potentially
destabilizing for prevailing policies and institutions.
Deep-green theory which stands in significant ideological opposition to dominant
industrial ways, is intended to supply a comprehensive alternative environmental philosophy.
At the core of deep-green theory lies a value theory. A fundamental theme thereof, part of what
makes the structure deep, is that a range of environmental items are valuable in themselves,
directly and irreducibly so, so that their value does not somehow reduce to or emerge from
something else, such as features of certain valuers or what matters for them. Thus value does
not answer back in some way to humans, or sentient creatures (or other value-responsive
classes), their interests, uses, preferences, or such like. Many natural items, such as forests
and rivers, mountains and seashores, are intrinsically valuable. They are valuable in their own
right - irrespective of whether they are interesting or useful (to any intentional operators,
themselves interesting or useful or not), indeed whether or not there exist any valuers. Value
spreads through and reaches across the natural domain; it is not bounded by mind, or linkages
with subjective states; nor does it stop with sentience, or associated pyschological features like
satisfaction; nor does it end at life; it observes no such compromising bounds. Although value
is distributed richly if irregularly throughout nature, it is not then encapsulated in some isolable
natural feature, such as life or sentience, or even in defeasible ecological values such as
richness, diversity and variety (and so open to a different, naturalistic, reduction). But of
course such ecologically important features afford criteria for value, and should be represented
in recipes (such as "objective functions") for assessing overall value.
From the presence of natural things of value, and accordingly of natural values, it is a
short, though controversial, step to the important conclusion that there can be values without
valuers. For valuers are sentient creatures with appropriate capacities, but things of value may
precede and succeed all such valuers; that is, these things can persist, their values intact,
without any valuers. As there can be shapes without any shape-perceivers, so there can be
values without valuers. (The theme, like others advanced, can be backed up by more detailed
argument and by formal proof, neither attempted here.) In valuational relations then, which
relate valuers as subjects with values as objects, both ends of relations have independent
standing; though interrelated, as the descriptions are deliberately chosen to suggest, either can
stand without the other. It is a fashionable mistake to try to collapse this relation - usually to
endeavour to soak up values into a modification of valuing subjects (e.g. as a predicate

'relation-to-values', in which inconvenielt values are locked away). The mistaken procedure
is in fact just one important example of an archetypal modern reduction of relations to
functions; other examples, locking undesired objects away within functions, are those
rendering wholes (such as ecosystems and organised structures) functions of their parts, and,
under functionalism, minds and types of intentionality, including value-direction, as functions
of bodies or their parts such as brains. Values are not, and do not disappear into, functions of
valuers.
A connected corollary is that values are not apart from the actual world, something
"projected" or imposed on it by a favoured class of valuers, something colouring (and even
emotionall y clouding) the otherwise valueless physical world, in rather the way that
reductionistic materialism tries (erroneously) to construe colour itself as projected onto a
colourless physical world. Of course this projection effort, never adequately explicated, does
not succeed, on its own, in removing values. For they remain, left as some function of the
valuers. To try to bulldoze through this difficulty, a second reduction is invoked, of evaluative
features of valuers to "natural" features, commonly preferences, consumer desires or such like.
The second reduction runs into obstacles that halt even the naturalistic bulldozers (e.g.
naturalistic and related fallacies), but the first reduction is the critical one in removing key
environmental values, such as those of wilderness and wild things, which become valuable
only in the focus of certain sentient beholders, and not in and for themselves. This reduction
too is blocked by insuperable difficulties. On the one side, like the parallel proposed
phenomenalist reduction of material objects to sensations, the reduction never achieves
satisfactory support or even a satisfactory statement. On the other, it is counterexampled by
various modellings or thought-experiments revealing intuitively-assessed value in situations
devoid of valuers (as e.g. in the well-known Last Person argument). Values remain then part
of the still rich actual world; they are objects in the domain of actual and other worlds. But
they are not of course material objects; creatures will not fall over them any more than they will
trip over shadows or mere shapes.
Value, like shape, is an attribute, which things have or may lack, and which furthermore
creatures can recognise or may fail to discern. Thus value is, like shape and colour and their
determinate forms (round, red, etc), a universal , distributed across things, individuals and
wholes. The comparison of value with shape is decidedly more helpful than the regular, but
exhausted, comparison of value with colour, or of goodness with colour determinates such as
yellow. For example, shape is not bound by a set of determinates as colour is in the specific
colours, but comes in a spectacular variety of forms, not totally or linearly ordered (as in a
rainbow), or contracted to some primary set (as in colour triangles); shape which pertains to
wholes as well as particulars, links with gestalts better than colour; shape discrimination is
more culture dependent and sensitive; yet shape is, or was, a primary property, and thereby

3

more immune to reductionist strategies than secondary properties such as colour. Again shapes
like values, can be vague, indeterminate; that does not prevent things, perhaps unique things,
exemplifying them. But naturally the analogy can only be extended so far. Shapes can be
approxima ted by polygons, values cannot; shapes are regularly perceived through sense
perception, by vision or touch especially, values are not, but are differently apprised. Value is
its own thing, not something else; it is what it is and does what is does; it is not something
else, like some quantitative mathematical or economic function. Nor does it contract into some
mark of value, or to what it comes down to in highly restricted settings; most important, it does
not disappear in the style of modern economics into (expected) utility, or into just two
economic forms, value-in-use monetarily and value-in-exchange (price), neither of which may
reflect worth. Value means what it means, and has meant: worth ; and it ties with general
assessments of merit and demerit, goodness or badness, not an economic or other truncation
thereof.
The powerful drive to reduce or deny values has several sources. Part of the motivation
for reduction of value springs from epistemological worries, concerning how values can be
ascertained and known, so far as they are (subjective translation proposals are then a direct
evaluative counterpart of phenomenalism). Part derives from supposedly problematic cultural
relativity (whence the attempt to impose values by identification of value with some favoured
assessible feature, and with it cultural or economic imperialism). Part of the motivation comes
from more sweeping ideological commitments, such as varieties of materialism or scientism,
which leave no space for immaterial values.
As already apparent, attempted reductions of value come in a dazzling variety of forms • subjective, which make use of psychological features, such as desires, interests, emotions,
and the like; or more objective aggregations of these, such as community preferences or utility;
or objectively naturalistic, which enrol single track value-making characteristics such as
richness or evolutionary development as value;
• consequential, which consider only outcomes; or purely motivational, which consider only
attitudes and ignore leads and outcomes;
• straightforward, as in translation proposals for translating value judgement s into reducing
statements; or oblique, as in supervenience propositions (no variations in value without
underwriting variations in reducing features); or obscure, as in unarticulated projection claims.
Values are not well accommodated within these reductionistic schemes, or accommodated at all.
Deep-green value theory, which is thoroughly nonreductive, repudiates all these reductionistic
options. They are not so difficult to avoid, as the options are neither exhaustive nor exclusive.
In particular, value reduces neither in subjective nor objective fashion; it does not reduce.
Evaluative judgements are nonjective, that is, neither subjective nor objective (in any absolutist

4

fashion). Obversely, evaluation of an act does not reduce to assessing consequences; nor does
it come down to an assessment of motives; both may matter.
The virulent idea is abroad however that science can offer a reduction, can sweep up
value along with all other information, where philosophy has conspicuou sly failed.
Unfortunately for such optimistic ideas, fortunately perhaps for deeper thought, current basic
science does not have much to say at all, or of merit, about values, and if it did reductions
through it would be circular. But, to the contrary, there is a long-standing pretence that science
gets along "well" without values, in appropriate value-free fashion. Nowadays it is
increasingly realised that the positivistic assumption of such value-freedom is a myth, that
much of what passes as science is heavily value-penetrated. While the residual ideal of pure
engagement in pure science may offer the illusion of an escape from value, there is no escape.
For, in any case, reductions do not succeed, as a copious literature, littered with failed
attempts, meanderingly establishes. Nor are they generally desirable, since mostly shallow,
aiming at a reduction to features of some privileged class presented as ideal (i.e. core value is
covertly assumed, so there is no real reduction). Nor are they needed; explanation and
assessment do not require reduction. Evaluations may be arrived at, and value frameworks
expanded, by enhancement methods, which organise and expand emotional presentation by
coherence methods.
The enhancement methodology in fact resembles that sometimes proposed for further
acquisition of scientific information. As accumulated empirical information can be further
extended through presentational input and assessment for overall coherence, so further
evaluations may be arrived at and assessed through a combination of presentational and
coherence procedures. At the (marginal) stage where the next round of evaluations is
undertaken, the following active ingredients figure, in an idealised breakdown:- Firstly, a
background stock of judgements and value experience will have been accumulated or inherited;
in principle all of this is revisable, and some may be up for reassessment. Apart from the
background, which enters in assessing overall coherence of system, what is involved is,
secondly, emotional presentation, which corresponds to further perceptional and sense data
input, and, thirdly and not independe nt, coherence processing , which supplies the
interpretational and rationalisational components. At bottom, parallelling perception in the case
of empirical information, is emotional presentation, gut or visceral reaction in starker forms of
acceptance or rejection, but more generally comprehending a variety of sentiments, including
overall well-being, and also relational impressions, such as empathy, identification, and so on.
As a perceiver perceives shapes, so a valuer feels raw value and disvalue. The basis of
perception is sensation, the basis of valuation is emotion. Apprehension of value is seated in
emotional, and especially visceral, presentation; but what is apprehended is not to be confused
with its apprehension any more than what is perceived. All the warnings about sensation as an

information source have to be repeat~d, with heavy emphasis, as regards emotional
presentation; for example, reliability cannot be guaranteed, interference with presentation
through drugs, alcohol, temporary excitement or other inputs may render it dubious or
unacceptable, conditioning may have occurred, including substantial cultural conditioning (so
that a person is terrified by harmless spiders but not sickened by bloody massacres of dolphins
or seals). As with perception, there are checks on emotional presentation, such as constancy
over time and after reflection.
Emotional presentation, supplying primarily inclusions and exclusions or prohibitions, is
but the basis of reflective evaluation and value apprehension. The further critical part,
coherence processing, builds on the basis taking account of other inputs or controls including
background (which supplies relevant components of already adopted judgements, assimilated
subculture and so forth) and constraints (such as moral substitutional requirements like
impartiality, e.g. whether considered judgements hold for substitute valuers, and uniformity,
e.g. whether similar acts are judged in similar ways). Essentially, the coherence procedure
consists in asking whether the next or a relevant judgement fits together with what has been
accepted, while meeting constraints, without leading to what has been rejected or excluded. If
it does fit it is added to the included side, otherwise it is sent to the excluded side. Because an
aim of this rationalisation procedure is achievement of some sort of equilibrium such coherence
procedures have gained currency under the rubric "reflective equilibrium". Observe, however,
that equilibrium reached at some stage may be lost as new types of problems arise and further
information enters. No doubt the whole methodology (like the parallel methodology of an
empirically-based coherence theory of truth) is highly idealised, and only practicably applicable
in rudimentary parts. It does however surmount a major theoretical obstacle for environmental
value theory; it reveals how in principle a nonreductionistic value theory can function, and
deliver a tenable value system. Whether what results is however an appropriate deep
environmental system will depend above all on the presentational input, the extent to which
environmental sensitivity enters and is not suppressed.
Enhancement methods reveal too that value systems are not uniquely determined, any
more than other comprehensive theoretical frameworks. There evidently are rival value
systems measuring up to rigorous rationality requirements, much as there are rival logics and
rival physical and biological systems. In particular chauvinistic systems, narrow or shallow
value systems, which are unresponsive to and take no account of environmental items and
values, cannot be excluded on rational or straight logical grounds. Unfortunately such systems
remain in ascendancy, and tend to dominate social and political practice; in recent times
economism, a narrow type of utilitarianism, has all too obviously dominated much terrestial
practice.

While such value frameworks are open to severe criticism, for instance as
chauvinistic, as violating universality requirements of morality in the case of economism, they

do not succumb to definitive refutatiog (for the reason that requirements of morality,
universalizability of principle, impartiality and so on, can simply be repudiated; immoral or
amoral frameworks are still value systems). Even so, much can be done to shift or alter
values, though as usual effectiveness cannot be guaranteed. A range of argumentative,
educational and persuasive techniques, of varying quality, can be put to work to move valuers
indoctrinated in old damaging structures, often enough successfully. Important among these
are positive presentations of environments, their habitats and creatures, by way of new
information and experience.
The availability of rival value systems, while it implies a certain desirable (and also
troublesome) pluralism, does not mean relativism. From a deep-green viewpoint, rival
narrower and shallower systems are definitely inferior, and criticised accordingly, while
economism is an anathema which does not even make the moral grade (e.g. too many
principles stop at class or state boundaries). However a critical pluralism does acknowledge
and offer a place in the wider scheme of things for other systems, even if as less favoured or
satisfactory. One political upshot is evident; deep-green theory promotes, what matters in these
irrational times of numbers, alliances - in particular, a green alliance, organising green
positions, against prevailing forces of environmental degradation.
The systematic pluralism of deep-green value theory interpenetrates not only social and
political domains above, but also metaphysics traditionally placed below. In the underlying
metaphysical pluralism of deep-green theory, value runs very deep - so deep that even truth
depends in part upon it. For not merely selection of a correct comprehensive theory or worldview is a value dependent choice, but choice of associated actual world is also. That choice,
insofar as it is consciously made, of world structure and conceptualisation, is a constrained
choice, constrained by informational inputs, such as those of refined perception. But inasmuch
as it is rationally accomplished, that choice, like other choices of structure, proceeds according
to a standard value-information analysis (regularly oversimplified however to a preferenceinformation or even desire-belief modelling); that is, to extract the salient point, it involves
value essentially.
Truth and value are then intertwined; truth, though naturally different from value, is value
dependent. Both are plural, and differently so. So, unremarkably deep-green metaphysics
resembles the value theory in significant respects. For example, as the value theory is
nonreductionistic, so also is the metaphysics; in particular, there is a no-reduction theme that
neither parts nor wholes reduce eliminably to one another, as opposed to atomistic and holistic
views of environmental interrelations. As the value theory is pluralistic, so also is the
metaphysics; in place of established absolutism, a plurality of worlds, with associated truth
definitions is discerned. Indeed a main aim of deep-green theory is to dislodge dominant

7
destructive ideologies, which (each of them)
assume an absolute truth, from their positions thereby providing intellectual living-space for natural environments.

Much of deep-green theory devolves then from the abstract value theory. As with the
metaphysical way sketched, so it is with the fuller ethical theory, which includes as well as a
specific axiological system, elaborating deep environmental values and virtues, a deontic
framework, supplying obligations, rights, taboos, and similar. For example, given that a
certain wild river is intrinsically valuable, as we can verify by on-site experience and
enhancement methods, and given that we duly respect that value, as deontic principles will tell
us we should, then we are not free to do as we like with that river, to dam it with concrete, to
channel it within concrete, stripping it of its riverine ecosystems. But that does not preclude
respectful use of the river, swimming or sailing quietly in its waters, and the like. Value thus
guides action, practice, and use; it is the ground also upon which principles are formulated,
principles that are assessed and validated by way of enhancement methods. Important among
these are non-interference principles, which exclude unwarranted interference with other
preference-havers and unwarranted damage, ill-treatment, or devaluation of items of value.
Such deontic principles circumscribe environmentally-limited freedom of action. Given noninterference principles, a major shift in onus of proof from homocentricethics takes place.
What is required now is that reasons be givenfor interfering with the environment, rather than
reasons for not doing so. Also direct responsibility for environmental interference or
modification falls upon those who would seriously interfere or significantly modify, who
would tread heavily on the land. Non-interference does not preclude use - only too much use
and use of too much. What it does lead to is the theme that, where use occurs, it should be
careful and respectful use.
An important respect thesis regarding environmental items is founded on such non-interference
principles and the no-reduction theme: namely,
• not to put others (other preference havers) into a dispreferred state for no good reason;
• not to jeopardise the well-being of natural objects or systems without good reason;
• not to damage or destroy items which, while they cannot literally be put into a dispreferred
state, can be damaged or destroyed or have their value eroded or impaired.
These apply to ecosystems, their surrounds, their parts, and so on. The mere making of
further excess profits, or similar economic excuses, are not good reasons. Such a respect
thesis forms part of the ecological outlook of deep-green theory.
Deep-green ethical theory amounts to much more than just another non-reductionist
ethical theory, which highlights ecological values and virtues, and so forth. It changes the
character and shape of ethical enterprise. Perhaps most strikingly, it removes humans as such

from the centre of the ethical stage (or ~xclusive occupation of the stage). The biological
concept of being human ceases to be a significant ethical category. To elevate it to such is to
fall into human chauvinism, a type of class chauvinism which unwarrantedly discriminates in
favour of the human species. The prevailing chauvinism is not inevitable; it is very logically
avoided by directly connecting ethical characteristics with the categories of items that can have
them. Relevant categories include those marked out by features like: having well-being,
preference-having, rights-holding, contractual-capability, and so on, categories not necessarily
connected with any particular species. Hitherto virtually all Wes tern ethical theories, and the
institutional arrangements they help support, have not merely limited ethical matters to interhuman affairs, but have been blatantly chauvinistic, exhibiting substantial and unjustifiable
discrimination in favour of humans (or certain privileged humans).
Deep-green theory thus implies the inadequacy of prevailing social, political and
economic arrangements and institutions. These structures are the defective products of inferior
value frameworks which take quite insufficient account of environmental desiderata and values.
Richard Sylvan*
RMB 683
Bungendore NSW 2621

*

Thanks to David Bennett for comments on an earlier draft. For more on deep-green theory, see
essays in and work referred to in the Green Series, i.e. Discussion Papers in Environmental
Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National University, Canberra.
This compressed essay was solicited by and written for Island Magazine (Tasmania). Upon receiving
it however, the editors decided that it was too dense, and insufficiently journalistic and popular (not
features they had at any time requested), for their magazine.

I

\. '1

11.10.95

CHAPTER 1

DEEP AND GREEN
AND PRESUPPOSED FUNDAMENTALS

It soon emerges from preliminary exploration that, under natural characterisations,
relevant notion of both ethics and green presuppose the notion of agency. So with something
on agency, enough to get started, we shall begin. In terms of agency and proclivities to
environments, green can be characterized, and in turn green approaches. Then, within green
approaches, three relevantly different types can be distinguished: shallow, intermediate, and
deep. It is the last, and really only the last, that matters for the ethical theory that follows.
1. Action, agency and agents: a summary . 1
Action theory is grounded in process theory. For actions are types of processes, agentascribed processes. processes are directed functions, ordinarily time-directed functions, 2 ?
framing of certain functional sorts. All the ordinary sorts of processes-ec lipses, transits,
removals, reflections, and so on and on-are processes (and ordinary processes can be
separated out logically, such as by applicability and inapplicability of certain predicates, e.g.
they take place, they are not facts, etc.)
Processes themselves in no way require agents. Actions, however, as distinguished
within goings-ons and taking-places, do require agency, and so agents. There is no reason at
all why these agents should be humans. Many agents are not humans, some humans are not
agents. But it is often quite erroneously assumed agents are humans, or persons. Excess
requirements on agency are partly to blame, the mistaken idea that agents have to be purposeful,
responsible, rational-feat ures that can be added to distinguish subtypes of agents. Rather,
actions can be roughly delineated through answers to questions like What is so and so (the
relevant agent) doing? How is so and so acting? The result reached following through this
route is this: process a is an action iff for some agent x, a is properly ascribed to x, it is x' s
doing. To break residual circularity, it remains to define agency. Agency is defined, such is the
proposal, in terms of exercising a causal role (which may be misdirected or similar), through the
following circuit. First, x is and agent as agents a iff, for some p directly partinent to a, x
causes Pbut x is not caused to cause p. In terms of agency-regarding, other notions can be
defined as follows: x is a sometime-agent, someties an agent, iff for some a, x is an agent as

2

As full an account of processes as so far worked up from notes appears in 'Process and actions',
which does provide detailed background for this section.

'2

regards a. Agency is a characterizing attribute of sometime-agents. An agent is a sometimesagent that establishes a history of agency (a small reputation therefore).

2.

Explaining Green.
In characterizing green we start with agency. Such relevant features, of greens (or
environmentalists), as being positively concerned about nature of natural things, supporting
environmental causes and similar, are closely tied to practice and action; they are features of
agents. In an original central sense of 'green' so redeployed, an agent was green if that agent
firstly believed that some parts of the natural environment should be protected, and secondly
took some relevant action. 3 In short, a belief-action analysis emerges, which can be recast as a
standard belief-desire-resultant action account. For instance, the agent believes that some
natural environment is worth protection, desires that it should be, and acts (in some way,
perhaps feebly) accordingly. All the parts of this sort of account call, however, for some
elaboration. To remove a certain circularity, resulting from characterising "green" through
terms like "environmen t", 'natural environment' can be replaced by 'parts (surface
configurations) of the Earth substantially uninterfered with by humans'. To specify protection
satisfactorily, protection/ra m what should be indicated. And so on. But there is a little point
in elaborating this already weak characterisation, which can be satisfied by an agent interested in
saving a few square metres of the Earth's surface from exploitation. For the notion has been
further weakened, almost from its inception.
To characterise this laxer, but ubiquitous notion, let us insert the intermediary notion of an
environmental cause. Such causes include not merely protecting natural environments, but
limiting impacts on environments, which may not be pristine, for instance by pouring less
sewage or detergents, CFCS or Greenhouse gases, into them, or conserving items, which could
be exploited or consumed now for future use or for future human generations (to use or
conserve, etc.). The first of these further causes beyond protection, original green, is a largely
consumerist notion of green, the second, an economistic notion (it takes in such beloved

constraints as intergerational equity). There are other related causes of importance also, such as
restoration of something that has been over-exploited or damaged, such as agricultural lands,
waterways, urban air, soils (soil conservation), or even human artefacts such as monuments or
buildings. The shallow green cause of fighting pollution, for human health reasons, can fit in
here. Needless to add the restoration may not be to pristine conditions, but to quite low
3

Although we are explicating terms that are now in widespread usage, in a way substantially
faithful to that usage (but not some of its dilute or corrupt expansions), we shall regard the terms
as quasi-technical. We see these terms, as the discerning reader also may, as spelt not with a
double 'e' but a triple 'e', as 'greeen' and 'greeening' (insert hyphens as need be for appropriate
pronunciation, e.g. 'gre-een' _. The effect is to peel off dilution and corruption of 'green' (e.g. so
to include every politician, at least when any confronts concerned constituents) and to discard all
those unwanted and often undesirable senses the colour term green has accumulated.

standards. In sum, causes include as well as protection, such matters as nondestruction,
conservation, maintenance, restoration, and so on.
Now substitute supporting an environmental cause for protecting a natural environment.
Then an agent is green in this expanded laxer sense if the agent believes in supporting an
environmental cause and takes some relevant action in that direction. Such an action component
is essential: green does imply some practical, if utterly token, involvement.
The lax account connects in the right ways with testable sociological criteria. For
instance, believing in supporting a cause can be cashed out in terms of joining an organisation
working for that cause, or even, reducing the slight action component still further, considering
joining such an organisation. 4 The appellation green applies not only to individual agents, but
also to groups, coalitions, institutions, even corporations and governments. As a green
government can, meet similar lax conditions, it is evident that there really are very few
requirements, even weak sponsorship may serve.
Many there are now trying to take advantage of green movements-adve rtisers, vendors,
politicians, professors, merchants, even generals (with "defence forces" retooling as
environmental defence forces). Cashing i in on the movement by producing a goods or services
presented as environmentally friendly does not thereby make parties doing so green, especially
if what is supplied adds to overall environmental impacts (as do "environmental markets"
delivering environmental junk, sometimes portrayed as "green goods"). The requirement of
serving environmental causes has been lost.
The excessive generosity of the account arrived at, which allows agents with only passing
or slight active beliefs in some cause to count as green, does not matter. For firstly, it
corresponds moderately well to current lax usage, which allows almost any sort of concern for
environments, coupled with an action component as slight as paying a token subscription, to
serve. Secondly, it still exercises quite enough exclusive power. Many agents are not green.
For instance all those exclusively tuned into possessive individualism, mainstream economics,
or similar creeds are not green (i.e. not even lax green). Thirdly, needed discriminations can be
made within the class of (lax) green. An important subclass of green comprises ecological
green, where the causes include maintenance and protection of natural ecosystems (including
wilderness) and these causes enjoy some primacy. "Ecological green" is by no means a
tautology.

4

In a study entitled 'GREEN PACKAGES IN AUSTRALIA', greens were picked out from the whole
sample of respondents to the Australian Election Study of 1990 in terms of answer to question:
How likely are you to join groups campaigning to protect the environment, or are you alrady a
member? Permitted answers: (1) I am a member, (2) I am not a member but I have considered
joining (3) I am not a member and I haven't considered joining, and (4) I certainly would not
consider joining. Those giving answer (2), perhaps token greens, were accounted green.

4

To be green in more than a token fashion is to have some commitment to containing or
reducing the environmental impact of humans on the Earth or regions of it. By virtue of the
environmental impact equation (for a given region) that means commitment in the immediate
future term to either


human population reduction, or



less impacting lifestyles for many humans, or



improvements in technology to reduce overall impact.

Most humans in a region can do little to implement the third requirement, except to hope.
Accordingly they cannot satisfactorily demonstrate their commitment in this way. A genuine
green will meet both the other conditions. But since as big coalition as feasible is sought for a
green coalition, marginal greens who meet only one of the requirements, perhaps in weak form,
will not usually be excluded (from almost any green church). Issues of population afford a
simple test (a necessary condition) for a genuine green in Australia; for that agent fails who
suppoes that while efforts (including the agent's contribution) to effect human population
reduction should be invested elsewhere, as in parts of Asia or Africa, Australia can keep on
growmg.
From filling out the conditions delimiting green commitments, a green platform can be
derived. Specifically it will include, along with the action clause, derivative directives as
regards curtailing population, refining and limiting consumption, adjusting technologies, and
consequent thereupon altering administrative, political and economic arrangements and
institutions accordingly. What so results is a proper subplatform of the Deep Ecology platform.
A fair approximation to the full Deep Ecology platform can be derived by adjoining
requirements for depth to those for genine greenness of the action platform; so result themes
concerning intrinsic value in nature, and commitments deriving therefrom. In short, the wellknown Deep Ecology platform accounts (as a fair approximation) to a deep green platformwhich can accordingly supplant it.
As genuine green and green platform can be characterized given the initial notion of green,
that is lax green, so similarly can other green compounds and modified forms be explained (in a
preliminary way). For example, a green ideosystem is an ideosystem (an ideology, in the
unbiassed sense) that coheres with green commitments, and typically organizes and guides
them. As genuinely green, it is a system that includes a green platform, and it could be defined
in that way, as an ideo-system coherently extending a green platform. Similarly for green
ethics, and for green philosophy (and also for other green notions that could be defined but are
not presently needed, e.g. green goods, green consumers, green parties, green ideas and so
forth). A green ethical system is a green ideosystem which is an ethic. Green ethics comprises

5

such green ethical systems and their theory. 5 Green ethics thus comprise a decidedly restricted
subset of environmental ethics. For an environmental ethic in the broad usage, an ethics that
addresses environmental issues, among others, may well contain themes that could not be
adopted by a green agent, that may even operate against environmental causes. In consequence,
a green ethics is an ethic that could be coherently adopted by a green agent, that does not run
counter to environmental causes.

3. Different approaches to the environment: shallower and deeper.
People can do more or less what they like with the environment, with the land and the sea,
and with what grows and lives there-such was and, in only slightly modified form, remains a
dominant theme of Wes tern cultural heritage. It was not the view of other cultures, such as
some of the American Indians or Australian Aborigines; nor was it the only view included in the
Western cultural package. But it has dominated, especially in colonial and imperial expansion.
It is only recently, for example, that some social or governmental restrictions with teeth have
been imposed upon what Australians can do with the land they occupy or claim, and these lag
far behind advanced green thinking as to what is required. For the most part there has been little
weakening in the Wes tern assumption that people own the land, that it is their possession, to
mould to their purposes and whims. 6
This unrestrained approach proved damaging enough while the land was wide and
humans comparatively few; now that human populations are expanding more rapidly, perhaps
to critical limits, now that much land is damaged and less fragile land is in increasingly short
supply, it is time to re-examine older attitudes and the accompanying practices. Any deeper
reassessment has to look at the presupposed land ethic, and more generally at the underlying
ethical and ideological assumptions.
A land ethic, according to Leopold, who introduced the term, is 'an ethic dealing with
man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it' .7 Thus a land ethic
amounts to a nature (or environmental) ethic, with land a symbol for the whole of nature (or the
more comprehensive environment), and man a symbol for all relevant agents. The unrestrained
position, which imposes few or no constraints upon treatment of the environment, affords a
land ethic of only a degenerate sort. The unrestrained position would, for example, have little
5

6

7

Although we are anticipating here-as ethics and ethical systems are explained essentially
reportively however, in the next chapter, there is no circularity. For ethics is separately and
independently characterised.
Indeed, with the renewed libertarian movement emanating from industrial north-eastern America,
this assumption has gained in strength. Foreign "resources" are not to be hoarded but should be
saleable to the highest bidders for "free" economic use. And sometimes it is broadly hinted: or
else!
A. Leopold, A Sand Country Almanac with other essays on Conversation, New York, 1966,
p.238.

6

compunction about using up materials, forests, pristine environments and so on, immediately or
even destroying them.
In the end the unrestrained position can be excluded from properly ethical positions. 8 For
it fails to meet the basic universality requirement on moral principles, of independence of
person, place or time, a requirement which iplies that persons of different races, colours, sexes
or ages, or at different places or times are not treated unfairly or seriously disadvantaged.
Insofar as the unrestrained position would permit the exploitation, degradation and even
destruction, of all present resources and environments, it places future humans at a very serious
disadvantage. The position is thus one of expediency, not morality, typically yielding, like
economics, evaluative assessments based on short-term narrow local interets, rather than
appropriately based on long-range values.
Opposed to the unrestrained position are various conservation ethics; what Leopold saw
as the land ethic is just one of these. Conservation ethics can be classified, conveniently for
subsequent development, into three groups: shallow, intermediate and deep. 9 Unlike the
unrestrained position, all these politions would conserve and maintain certain things-materials,
creatures, forests, etc. The shallow conservation position differs from the unrestrained position
primarily in taking a longer-term view and taking account of future humans, their welfare and so
forth. It is more enlightened than the unrestrained position in taking a longer-term perspective:
hence its alternative description as resource conservation. Though this conservation position is
only a small step away from the unrestrained position, it does pass one test for morality proper
in that future people are not treated unfairly. Most of the big rush into fashionable
environmentalism does not get beyond shallowness.
The shallow and unrestricted positions are closely related by an important feature they
share-and which justifies lumping them together as shallower positions. They are both highly
anthropocentric; they do not move outside a human-centred framework, which construes nature
and the environment instrumentally, that is, simply as a means to human ends and values. Thus
they take account ultimately only of human interests and concerns; all environmental values
reduce to these or similar human on closed notions. It is in this respect especially that these
shallower positions differ from deeper, less resource and exploitation oriented, positions.
8

9

This is a substantial, and controversial claim, especially since it accounts much economic activity
unethical, as involving practices of expediency, not morality. For the fuller case for obligations
and commitments to future humans, see e.g. R. and V. Routley, 'Nuclear energy and obligations
to the future' in Responsibilities to Future Generations: Environmental ethics, (ed. E. Partridge),
Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1981, and other essays in this book.
This classification refines Naess's non-exhaustive distinction of shallow and deep ecology, and
extends it to render it exhaustive. For the original distinction, see A. Naess, 'The shallow and the
deep, long-range ecology movement' Inquiry 16 (1973) 95-100. An elaboration on Aess's
position, to which this discussion has some debts, may be found in his 'Philosophical aspects of
the deep ecological momvement', Environmental Ethics, to appear.

According to deeper positions humans are not the sole items of value or bestowing value
in the world, and not all things of value are valuable because they answer back in some way to
human concerns. But deeper positions differ in the weight or relative importance they assign to
human concerns. According to the intermediate position serious human concerns always come
first; and while other things, such as higher animals, have value or utility in their own right,
their value is outranked by that of humans. The deep position rejects this assumption, and
maintains that even serious human concerns should sometimes lose out to environmental values.
FIGURE 1. THE POSITIONS SEPARATED, AND SEPARATING PRINCIPLES

SHALLOWER

UNRESTRAINED

DEEPER

SHALLOW

INTERMEDIATE

I

I

I

I

J,

J,

J,

DEEP

MORALITY

SOLE VALUE

GREATER VALUE

REQUIREMENT

ASSUMPTION

ASSUMPTION

(of human apartheid)

(of human supremacy)

The watershed principle which divides the shallower from deeper positions is the sole
value assumption. According to this major assumption, which underlies prevailing Western
social theory, humans are the only things of irreducible (or intrinsic) value in the universe, the
value of all other things reducing to or answering back to that of humans in one way or another.
This assumption is built into most present political and economic arrangements; for example,
only aggregated preferences or interests of certain (present) humans are considered in
democratic political choice, and likewise in economic decision making; other creatures and
natural items are represented at best through the preferences or votes of interested humans.
Similar assumptions are made in mainstream ethical theories. Typical are reductive
theories which endeavour to derive ethical judgements from features of closed systems of
humans.

Examples are provided by presently fashionable ethical theories, such as
utilitarianism. 10 According to utilitarianism what ought to be done, as well as what is best, is
determined through what affords maximum satisfaction to the greatest number of individual
humans. In theories like utilitarianism, the outside world of nature does not enter through direct
inputs or outputs, but only insofar as it is reflected in the psychological states of individuals.
Such ethical theories are appropriately described as those of apartness or human apartheid. Man
10

But the same holds for other fashionable theories on the American-dominated ethical scene, namely
contractualism and libertarianism. These theories, along with utilitarianism, are explained in most
modern American introductions to ethical theories or moral problems.

is, or is treated as, apart from Nature; there is virtually total segregation. Nature or the land
enters only as a remote experiential backdrop, and onstage is the drama of human affairs and
interests.
However, humans cannot be entirely insulated from their environment; for example,
volcanoes affect temperatures thus affecting climate thus affecting crop yield and food supplies.
At least limited intercourse with the environment has to be admitted as a result. So, in
economics, ethics, and political theory, secondary theories, dealing with linkages to the
environment, have been appended (thus, for example, extemality theory in economics, some
allowance for "side" constraints in more sophisticated utilitarianism, and so on). But the land
remains treated as an awkward or tiresome afterthought, when it is considered at all.
There is, however, another approach, also with historical standing, vying with (and
indeed often confused with) human apartheid which can accommodate secondary theories a little
more satisfactorily. That is the position of superiority or human supremacy, according to which
Man, though included in Nature, is above the rest of Nature, meaning ethically superior to it.
While human supremacist positions can incorporate the sole value assumption and thus remain
in the shallow ethical area, they have the option of rejecting it in favour of the less objectionable
greater value assumption:: other things being equal, the value of humans is greater than that of
other things; the value of humans surpasses that of all other things in the universe. This
assumption allows that other objects, such as some higher animals, may have irreducible value;
what it insists upon is that, at least for "normal" members of respective species, this value never
exceeds that of humans. What is generally presupposed is that other objects-animals, plants
and their communities-are never of much importance compared with humans. Though human
supremacy has appeared in versions of utilitarianism where animal pain is taken into
consideration along with human, Western ethics and associated social sciences such as
demography, economics and political theory, remain predominantly apartheid in form.
It is the repudiation of the greater value assumption that separates deep from intermediate
positions. Perhaps the most familiar example of an intermediate position is that of Animal
Liberation, in the form in which animals are taken to have value in their own right, though in
any playoff with humans, humans win. Under the deep position such an outcome is by no
means inevitable; in cases of conflict of animal or natural systems with humans, humans
sometimes lose. I I
There are various arguments designed to show that the deep assessment is right, that
humans should sometimes lose out. A typical one takes the following form:- Some humans
lead worthless or negative lives, lives without net value. The point, though not uncontroversial,
11

So too for some men and some sparrow. So we should reject the intermediate ...... : A man is
worth more than a sparrow! (Drungson/ Ralston etc.)

9

can be argued even from a shallow utilitarianism.1 2 Take for instance a life of pain and
suffering and little or no happiness: it has a substantial net negative utility. But some small
natural systems do have net value; one example would be an uninhabited undisturbed island (a
live example might be a tropical island before Club Mediterranee depredation). Now consider
the situation where the considerable value of a small natural system is to be sacrificed (in a way
that shallowly affords no ethical impropriety) on behalf of a set of humans whose lives each
have no positive net value. For instance, the system is to be exploited, just for the continued
maintena nce of these humans, or for their addition (as new settlers) to an establish ed
population. Then in such circumstances, these humans lose out; the natural system takes
precedence. Similarly, trivial satisfactions of humans do not dominate over the integrity of rich
natural environments.13
Let us look ahead to glimpse paradimatic expansions of the positions indicated (in figure
1). For the positions soon expand, when applied to real life issues, to more comprehensive
positions; indeed they have expanded all the way to what are now called social paradigms, that
is to full social perspectives. For example, the deep position has expanded from the two core
theses-a s initially reformulated, values in nature, which is a positive counterpart of the sole
value assumption, and biospecies impartiality, which is a positive elaboration of greater value
assumption 14-to fuller deep ecological positions which involve as well many other themes.
12

13

The point is argued in detail in R. Routley and N. Griffin, 'Unravelling the meanings of life?'
Discussion Papers in Environme ntal Philosophy #3, Research School of social Sciences,
Australian National University, 1982.
There are significant cross-classifications of environmental positions. Some further dimensions
are included in the following diagram.
Environment not taken
I
Environments is taken
into account
I
into account

p

14

--------- --------- --------- --------- --------- ---

shallow

intermediate

I dogs
I //////
I
I
E
I
individual
I
I
H
I
holistic
I
I
Another dimension is the static/dynamic. But no one want to be just stauc, really.
According to the values in nature theme natural items other than humans and human artefacts have
intrinsic value; while according to biospecies impartiality members of one species, humans in
particular, are not favoured or valued over members of another simply on the basis of species. The
danger of favouring one species is encouraged by the species fallacy, commonly invoked in
favouring humans. This is the mistake of concluding that because a few members of the species
have accomplish ed something of (immense) value, all members of the species therefore are
(highly) valuable; all members of the species manage to free-load for the ride, obtained by a few
members, so to say. The assumption, once challenged, usually falls back on an argument that
goes by way of capacities: the remaining members of the species have the capacity to achieve these
sorts of things also. But, firstly, that isn't true: intelligence, skills, and the like, vary somewhat
within species, and from our narrow perspective, very considerably among humans, some of whom
have no capacity for advanced mathematics or music. Secondly, it requires more than capacity: it
requires circumstances, a favourable environment to exercise them, (hence, in part, the folly of

lU

The expansion is not uniquely determined; there can be various different deeper paradigms.
However it characteristically includes a fuller statement of themes recognised as in the spirit of
"deep ecology", in particular ecological themes, but also interconnected economic and political
themes. In a similar way shallower positions are subsumed in shallower perspectives, and
principally in what is called the dominant social paradigm, some relevant themes of which are
indicated in figure 2.1s
FIGURE 2. RELEVANT COMPONENTS OF THE ENCOMPASSING PARADIGMS.
DOMINANT SOCIAL
PARADIGM

DEEP ECOLOGICAL
ALTERNATIVE

Dominance over nature
Natural environment a resource

Harmony with nature
Values in nature/biospecies
impartiality
Less material goals/less growth
orientation
Earth supplies limited
AJ?propriate technology/limits to
science
Doing with enough/recycling
Regional/decentralised/small-scale

Material/economic growth
Ample reserves/perfect substitutes
High technological progress/
scientific solutions
Consumerism
National/centralised/large-scale
SHALLOW

f----------------------------- ➔

DEEP

4.

Criticisms of these beginnings and other beginnings
A main challenge we shall have to meet is that there can be no deep ethics, ethics and
axiology are inevitably shallow, because they must answer back to human valuers. This
challenge we presently set aside (until the next chapter). But it should already be apparent how
we can start to upset the challenge (already taken up by deeper utilitarianism), namely by
displacing humans by relevant agents.
Other challenges grant that something might answer to deeper ethics, but contend that
nothing should-objectio ns of substance-or that making anything much out of it is
unwarranted, for example because preliminaries in making out the distinctions have not been

15

more humans in decidedly suboptimal cities), together with a will and drive actually to follow
through appropriately on capacities.
Much fuller accounts of the dominant social paradigm and environmental alternatives are given in
S. Cotgrove, Catastrophe or Cornucopia, Wiley, New York, 1982, and in R. Routley 'Roles and
limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action' in Environmental Philosophy (ed. R.
Elliot and A. Gare), University of Queensland Press, 1983. The linkage of the dominant paradigm
with maximizing, and the deep alternative with sufficing, is elaborated in R. Routley,
'Maximizing, satisficing, satisizing: the difference in real and rational behaviour under rival
paradigms', Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #10, Research School of Social
Sciences, Australian National University, 1984.

11

properly accomplished-objections of form and from technicalities (cf. challenges to the
analytic/synthetic distinction). We consider examples of both sorts of challenge.
The misanthropy charge. Deep environmentalism has been criticised for what it does, so it is

alleged, to ethical treatment of other humans; it leads, it has been alleged, to neglectful,
negligent, or downright callous treatment of other humans, to inhumanity. The actual impact of
deep environmentalism affords but little ground for such allegations. Nor does the theory.
Deep environmentalism could leave intrahuman ethics, standard morality virtually entirely intact.

If it did so, deep environmental ethics would provide a conservative extension (in the familiar
technical sense) of standard intrahuman ethics. In this event the allegations would fall; for the
ethical treatment of humans would be in principle just the same as before.
But it is unlikely that any deeper environmentalism will leave standard morality entirely
intact in its own prime sphere of operations, that restricted to humans. For instance the
evolution of humans, and attributions of virtues or vices to them, is bound to be influenced by
how they act or respond towards nonhumans and the environment. A virtuous puritanical oldstyle industrialist who makes his affluent living through environmentally damaging practices
will no longer obtain the virtuous ranking that would have been accorded to him on the older
prevailing morality. (Of course that morality too is changing, but it hardly changes rapidly
enough to keep pace with a deeper ethic). The change in the evaluation of and moral standing
accorded to hard-working but environmentally exploitative business people, technologists and
engineers reflects a more far-reaching adjustment; that of removal of special privilege for
humans (or persons). Even in the more austere of standard ethical positions, such as duty
ethics in the Kantian mould, it is very easy to gain the impression of persons (usually males on
traditional ethics) as kings. There will be a club of kings, that was where more egalitarian
industrialism was proceeding also, to make us all kings - with the rest of nature as subjects.
While the unwarranted privilege accorded to humans under conventional ethical wisdom
will topple then, the treatment of humans by humans need not. To the contrary, if people
develop a more respectful and careful attitude to the environment, then they may well develop a
better, different and more careful, approach to other people as well. Here the awful Kantianstyle theme that decent treatment of animals will trickle down from a decent treatment of other
humans is partially reversed; a better treatment of other humans (a decent treatment is already
ethically required) will percolate up from a more gently and respectful treatment of natural
environments.
Nor finally then need a deeper environmentalism abandon the quest for social justice. 16
Deep-green theory certainly does not; the ethical-change agenda is much wider than social
16

There are two American groups where the quest for terrestial social justice appears to have been
abandoned or comprised: eco-fascists and nature greens, as they are sometimes called from outside.

12

change alone, but social and human concerns do not thereby fall off the agenda. They remain,
but no longer in such isolations. What they do lose their unchallenged preeminence, and they
may also lose priority.

Problems with the Greater Value assumption (after Attfield).
A prime alternative to a shallow/deep distinction is (what is sometimes considered no
alternative, but a variant on it) the anthropocentric/ecologic distinction.
Notes: 1. Not the same distinction. While shallow positions are normally anthropocentr ic,
converse does not obtain.
2. Distinction never made out properly (really degree issues), and leads to typical 4-fold
outcome.

5.

Domination and chauvininism.

The greater or sole value accorded to humans, as compared with (other) valuations,
justify the domination of nature by humans. The main argument is simply that what has lesser
or no value should give away to what has greater value, the conventional assumption being that
what has greater value is better (analytic) than what has less, and should prevail over it
(substantive assumptions of conventional ethical themes such as utilitarianism).
Domination and associated class chauvinism are justified not only directly through
consideration s of greater or supreme value, but also less directly by pointing to highly valued
features possessed by the favoured class. Similar appeals to prized features are of course
likewise used to justify class chauvinism.

Appendices :
1.

Deep ethics are not automatically acceptable as satisfactory.

Consider e.g.whole chauvinism, where Wholes are intrinsically valuable, each and every
one, and their value much exceeds that of everything else, humans included. So wholes come
first. (This is a doctrical some superwholes may hold).
Two rough comparisions: cows in India, humans on earth.
Other unsatisfactory deep ethics, apart from those that aberate one species, are those that
focus exclusively on certain elements. Those e.g. individualisms, strong holisms, etc.

2.

Arguments to shallowness.
1. Simplistic (from one James O'Connor of Canada).

' ... the word "value" is a human word, with human meanings, in this case transposed to
non-human nature. Hence to say that nature is inherently valuable means that it is inherently
valuable to humans'.
Ecofascists, who follow a route pioneered by Hardin, call for a triage of nations on lifeboat earth
and abandonment of those nations, such as Bangladesh, seen without prospect of recovery. But the
position is not deep, it is certainly not a properly moral position; for due criticism see Griffin and
Bennett.

u
2. Problem with shallow/deep terminology, e.g. acquired too many associations for comfort.
Intellectual offensiveness shallow, etc.
3. Shallowness involves a reductionist exercise. Making (trying to make) environmental issues
in all that matter environmentally-answer back to shallow concerns.
Series of arguments advanced to try to establish ..... .
Counter argument. These do not succeed and can be counter-evolelled.

3. Cross-classifications reformism/revolation is, like anthropocentrism, a poor
classification. It can be shallow without reformism and unethical economism with reformism.
DE itself is largely reformist in character (and excessively personal).: Anthropo-/ecocentric.
No doubt 'anthropocentricsm' meaning what its etymology implies 'centring in man'
(OED), is a useful term. Theories such as Coperican and Copenhagen quantum theory can be
criticised (or praised) as anthropocentric. What is in doubt is the new contrast of antropocentric
with ecocentric.
While the vague anthropocentric-ecocentric distinction is alright, so far as it goes, as a
starting stage, it is no place to stop. For there is a need for a value specific distinction,
antrhopocentr can be any sort of human centredness.
'Anthropocentric' is a poor choice of contrasting terminology, for several reasons. One,
which may be convenient to some, lies in its vagueness. There is no sharp cut-off in what is
human centred. Similarly for its supposed contrast term 'ecocentric', which presumably
expandents to 'ecologically centred'. Second, it becomes apparent that no proper contrast is
made in many cases. University textbooks on natural ecology, for instance are both ecocentric
because about ecology and anthropocentric because set and supplied for humans. Human
ecology, a subject increasingly encountered in universities, is directly both (not both under
different aspects). Were the classification satisfactory, it would provide a nice contradiction.
But the classification is far from satisfactory. It is not exclusive: nor is it exhaustive, but the
remainder obscure. But worse, any practical ethics, no matter how deep, is bound to be
anthropocentric, not ecocentric, even though duly concerned with ecology. The reason comes
to this: any adequate ethics is bound to be heavily concerned with agents, their obligations and
responsibilities, and for all practical purposes (on earth) these agents are generally certain
humans. This is, an adequate practical ethics is, as a contingent matter, anthropocentric. Of
course such an ethic, by contrast with main traditional ethics, may also be presented as an
ecocentric ethic, inasmuch as it may be focussed upon ethical agents' relations to ecological
items, human treatment of nature.

14

Problems with the anthropocentric/ecocentric contrast do not mean that something like the
contrast cannot be made good. But it would involve redefinition of the critical terms, and could
accordingly be better accomplished with adjusted terminology.
Anthropocentrism is implausible, once a modern pict "of universe" becomes available.
(Scuh a sufficiently modern picture was already available to Descartes.)
The sun is a medium sized star of very common sort even within its galaxy. The
probability of planets like the Earth within this university is extraordinarly high. The probability
of other agents is also very high. Even the probability of other ..... ./competent agents is high.
But even if it were not, or even if there were other agents, the discourse to be embarked
upon would be significant. It is also pointful, for instance in disposeing of much philosophy.
If anthropocentrism is so implausible as regards "main place in nature", why is it not
implausible as regards intuitionality, value, etc.
Ironically, the swing away from anthropocentrism in the sciences in modern times (with
the advert of Copenhagen quantum theory and anthropic principles) was overpinged by
increasing anthropocentrism in what are misleadingly distinguished as the humanities. Above
all intentionality and value were emptied out of the wider universe and concentrated in the
exclusive focus of humanities, humans.
To adopt Freud:
Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great
humiliations to its chauvinism .17 The first was when it was realised that our earth was not the
centre of the universe, but only a speck in the world system of a magnitude hardly
conceivible ... . The second was when his logical science robbed man of his particular privilege
of having been specially created and relegated him to a descent from the animal world' (puoted
in Unozco Ev ..... May 1982 p.3)
There are further shocks in store for humans-poor old humans!

3. Explaining depth [contrasts pale/pallid].
For a good sort of depth, what is needed a deep structure, extraction or format that lies
(partially) hidden from the surface. E.G. plate ponites in geology, strata in archasology, logical
form in grammar. Deep = penetrating to fundamentals in several ways and nonchauvinistic, not
shallow. [Mention also pluralism-so only a framework aimed for, on which grew various
detailled positions.]
Part of depth of Deep Green theory lies in its penetration below the surface of classrestricted or interested humanism to a genuine nonchauvinistic ethical structure: the (ill-named)
annular structure, which ties moral principles to nonhumanistic categorestion. Annular structure

17

Freud says: to great outrages upon it naive serif love.

15

is a deep structure. A deep structure. Maybe can produce one for deep green theory (see Critiq
p.93, bottom halt) Start as above other measures of depth (pp.44-5) misconceived.
1'. Extent of searching of perception of value; depth of (value) perception.
1. Extent to which humanism (h.ch) abandoned for econvisonmental perspective.
2. Extent to which conventional moral and value judgements put op for reassessment.
(Naess's depth of questioning conventional wisdom) 2 is tied to 1; for abandoning heh
involves much reassessment.
Note differs from usual reflective equilibrium, which takes many generally accepted
judgements for granted.
More on what depth means (pragmetinally): Many environmental outcomes sought in deep
grounds can be supported in shallow ways (of course). But there are differences, as examples

show:
• pesticides (in forestry) should not be used, despite insect damage. For pesticides violate
natural succession and healing processes. Toxicity questions, though important, are secondary.
On shallow view: the main problem becomes not the use of pesticides, but whether they are
safe.
• natural world appears as a resource. Life forms which interfere with uses are pests.
2. Reformist/Transformist Variations upon Shallow/Deep Ecology
Unhappy with the derogatory implications of "shallow", Devall and Sessions tried to
convert shallow ecology in ecological reformism. While there was certainly a basis for this
conversion in Naess's original brief account of shallow ecology (which almost invited such
reconstrual), the result has been that something different has emerged, notably in green politics.
For what such conversions, along with associated imagery accompanying reformism,
achieve is not elucidation, but introduction of new contrasts, and therewith political crossclassification of the shallow-deep ecology contrasts. There are various contrasts with (mere)
reformist adjustment on political theory, for instance revolutionary change and radical change.
A revolutionary direction appears inappropriate as regards deep ecology (as revealed both by the
literature and political stances of leading members of the movement), but a politically radical
direction on environmental issues does emerge from later developments in N aess' s work.
Accordingly a rough contrast, which admits sharpening, can be made out between green
reformism and green radicalism. A machine image, which often operates not far from view in
such contrasts, is initially helpful in indicating the differences. Reformism does not interfere
with the main operation of the machine, its motor, though it may alter the adjustments, retune or
fine tune it, add filters or mufflers or converters, alter its appearance cosmetically, and so on.
By contrast radicalism would alter the machine, would interfere with its motor to some extent,
depending on the level of radicalism.

16

In political terms reformism is exemplified in such measures as limiting pollution by
emission devices, further treatment of sewerage, small reserves and roadside veneers of trees
amid clear-cutting operations, tidying up of litter, and so on. The main motor of liberal
democratic market capitalism, the economic engine designed to deliver maximum economic
growth, and its main institutions, remain untouched and uncriticised; no change is proposed for
them. For radicals such measures and like reforms do not proceed far enough, towards the
sources of the problems. To tackle the range of environmental problems more radical change in
economic, social and perhaps political machinery is required. But evidently the extent of change
envisaged can vary, very considerably. For example, a frugal conservation program, directed at
limiting economic growth through removing conspicuous and excessive consumption, need
carry no accompanying program for radical social and political change. Again, deep ecology,
which offers no well worked out, or even well signposted, radical program or radical
restructuring, does not appear to be politically radical. Alternatives to liberal democratic
arrangements are not really advanced or investigated. By contrast some anarchist and marxist
influenced ecological positions are politically radical, for instance, social ecology. In short,
there is room for a classification of green radicalism, as shown by a preliminary grouping
according to whether the radicalism affects which of separate (though overlapping) economic,
social, or political matters.
The reformist-radical distinction is a vague one, without a sharp boundary. Reforms can
so accumulate that what was a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind, what was
extensive reformism turns out to be radicalism. In such an incremental fashion, positions which
were reformist can find themselves radical, without having undergone any conspicuus
radicalisation.
The contrast between reformism and radicalism can be sharpened somewhat within a (an
improved) theory of social paradigms. Then reformism is intra-paradigmatic, whereas
radicalism is not (but is extra-paradigmatic). That is a reformist works, like a normal scientist,
within the operational paradigm (the given political motor) and does not seek to change it,
whereas the radical does; success of radicalism resembles abnormal (even revolutionary)
periods in science. As there are many ways of deviating from a paradigm, which typically
involves a complex set of presumptions, so there are many sorts of radicalism.
The extent to which the political conversion of the shallow-deep contrast into green
reformism-radical contrast affords not a restatement, but a different classification, may now be
evident though perhaps not to its full extent. The most notable further feature is that green
radicalism may be utterly shallow, entirely anthropocentric. 18 Green Marxism affords a useful
18

In these terms Naess conflated two contrasts in his original 1973 article; shallow-deep and
reformist-radical. Different followers have latched onto different contrasts.

l'/

example; it is socially and politically radical while shallow (of course it can be argued that it is
environmentally incoherent, though not in the mentioned features, but in its plan to supercharge
the economic motor and make it run even faster, with evident environmental fall-out). Social
ecology offers another example; for while more radical than deep ecology, it is certainy not
deep. Something of the rich variety we have come upon can be glimpsed from the following
table.

All the positions enumerated, except 9, are occupied, we suspect (though positions are often so
poorly or incompletely presented that is difficult to be sure ). 19 Positions 9 is practically
excluded for committed deep parties who duly care about the demise of what is of intrinsic value
under mere reformism. Position 5 is however occupied, by those who want (or believe they
have achieved) improved arrangements for and treatment of animals (e.g., no circuses, no
ordinary zoos, no cruel contests, etc.) but are not committed to a radical animal liberation
agenda. Green party territory is usually shallow, but some of the proposals presented may
extend to position 4, for instance in demands for participatory democratic restructuring. Of
course, many supporters of green parties may adhere to deeper positions.

19

It is worth noting that such positions will in principle supply their own forms of sustainability,
sustainable societies, and so on.

24.10.95

Chapter 2

ETHICS WITHOUT HUMANS,
PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT HUMANS,
and COROLLARIES
It is a commonplace that ethics has proceeded not merely as if humans were on centre

stage, but as if humans really were all there is, all that mattered in ethics, as if nothing else
enters into morals and ethics, or does through only through them. That commonplace is
moreover commonly strengthened to a claim of necessity, that this must be so, that nothing
else can enter, except indirectly by way of humans. Ethics has to be thus anthropocentric.
Since environmental ethics began to shift humans, if ever so little, off centre stage, there has
been a heavy philosophical reaction, a sometimes bitter blacklash against greener ethics that
would background humans, or dare sometimes to remove humans, from the scene altogether.
Among many other things, it has been contended that by the very meaning of ethics and
morals, these subjects must be human-centred.

A crucial argument for necessary anthropocentricism of ethics makes human centrality
a matter of definition. This crucial argument will be broken, in the first of several stages,
through a detailed characterisation of morals and ethics in a way that is independent of
humans. The characterizations adopted depart in only minor and justified (though highly
consequential) ways from received dictionary definitions; that is the characterisations are
substantially reportive, as they have to be if they are to serve their iconoclastic purposes. The
matter of characterising ethics is in any case part of our business. Where would deep-green
ethics be left, as a subject of investigation, without an appropriate account of ethics?
1. On inadeqacies of what prevails: a sheaf of defective accounts.

It takes but little effort to discover severe shortcomings in most preceding investigations, and
that most accounts, many of them far too casual, are inappropriate for what they are intended
to cover, still less for environmental ends. There is no end to bad and defective definitions to
dissect and discard.
Even textbooks and guidebooks on ethics often make no attempt at a definition, and
often have little or nothing of due generality to offer on what ethics is about. 1 Unremarkably
then, many of those presenting or teaching ethics, perhaps well enough, have no adequate idea
of what ethics is about. This is revealed by the sorts of definitions they slop down and by
what they say ethics is about. The slop presented indicates they did not even bother to consult
their dictionaries with any care. It is an elementary exercise to show deficiencies in most
proposals.

A striking recent example is Singer (ed.) Companion to Ethics, supposedly an encyclopaedic work
on ethics.

2

A few sample definitions recently encountered will help confirm our claims. Utterly
defective is the account of ethics as 'the relation between you and other people' .2 Such
connections as the spatial relations between people, for instance where they sit at a seminar,
do not belong to ethics. Narrowing relations to those of treatment, as in 'how you treat other
people' improves the account a bit, but not enough. Decent treatment of relevant kinds no
doubt comprises part of ethics, but a small part. Nor is such treatment confined, especially as
regards receivers, to people; animals, nature and more, all matter.
A more interesting account, presumably designed to encompass applied ethics, takes this
remarkable form: "'ethics" [is] defined as disciplined reflection by persons in all walks of life
on moral ideas and ideals'. 3 As a definition, this too fails entirely, appearing circular, and
converting ethics away from, what is essential, practice into head stuff, into something like
meditation, a kind of widely practiced theorizing, though practised on certain parts of ethics!
There are too some unfortunate side-effects of the insertion, aimed at making ethics applicable
to all walks of (human) life: namely, as there are walks of life which have no room for
disciplined reflection, so there is in fact no ethics. Back again to the drawing board.
Similarly for Russell's fuller attempt:
The study of Ethics is perhaps most commonly conceived as being
concerned with the questions "What sort of actions ought men to perform?"
and "What sort of actions ought men to avoid?" It is conceived, that is to
say[!], as dealing with human conduct, and as dividing what is virtuous and
what is vicious among the kinds of conduct between which, in practice,
people are called upon to choose. 4
Owing to feminist criticism of male chauvinism, many now wince at Russell's; piquant use of
term like 'men' (in fact throughout his numerous works). Environmental criticism of human
chauvinism has not been so (terminologically) successful, sad to report.
Back to the board.
It takes little effort to assemble a sheaf of inadequate definitions and accounts of ethics. Many
include too little, for example the popular account of ethics as "how we should live", which as
well as being too narrow is parochial. 5 Similarly, though fractionally better; a coherent set of
values to live by is enough for an ethic. For that appears to omit a deontic component,
obligations and permissions, and certainly leaves out ethical virtues. A major shortcoming,
even in fuller characterisations, concerns the concentration on humans and their parochial
affairs. For, as will soon appear, ethics does not essentially concern humans. An adequate
ethics says nothing about humans, members of species Homo sapiens, their obligations and
rights, values or virtues. It applies but contingently to humans; it applies similarly to
hominids, humanoids, and to persons generally, and functions in the absence of persons
altogether. As a result, the following familiar sorts of pronouncements on what ethics amount
2
3
4

5

John Langford, on ABC radio, 22 February 1993.
Engels, 6.
Russell p.1, F & S, from Elements of Ethics 1910.
For such an account see e.g. Single [Encyl. Brit.]

3
to are seriously defective: 'An ethic may be thought of as an ideal of human behaviour, an
environmental ethics as ideal human behaviour with respect to the environment, natural and
built" _6 Not everyone got it quite so wrong. For instance, Brandt gets away to a nice neutral
start, even if he does not cover the spread of ethics. Consider his opening:
Moral philosophy has traditionally been a systematic attempt to answer
some questions of apparently universal interest [!] about: what is worth
wanting or working for (what is worthwhile, of worth); what is the best
thing for an agent to do from his own point of view; what is morally right,
and what is morally just). [Also what is rational in these regards.]7
The nice start does not last. Agents turn out to be humans; utilitarianism soon begins to effect
an ugly intrusion, and so on.
2. On how to define ethics and morals more satisfactorily.
It is not difficult to do noticeably better than ethics teachers and writers have managed,

simply by consulting better dictionaries. But it is also not so difficult to re-organize and
improve upon what dictionaries offer. It is significant that dictionary definitions of moral and
ethic contain no essential allusion to humans, nothing essential concerning humans, man, or
we, us and co. (andwhere 'human' does enter, as in 'principles of human duty', it can simply
be elided, it is inessential). But the dictionary accounts do harbour some problems.
For one thing, like some of the preceding definitions, the dictionaries seem mired in a
common and damaging circularity: ethics is defined in terms of morality (and its adjuncts,
decent treatment, and similar); but then morality is itself defined through ethics. Fortunately
the loop back to ethics can be broken.
A particularly satisfactory way to workable definitions of notions in the ethics orbitethic, ethical, ethics, to take direct cases-is through those in the presupposed moral orbitdirectly, moral, morality, morals. For all these ethical notions are regularly defined, in better
dictionaries, through moral notions. This approach reverses the difficult and so far
unsuccessful strategy, sometimes tried in ethical theory, of attempting to define morality (e.g.
through universalizability conditions) inside a somehow independently characterized ethics. 8
The bases, upon which moral notions are carried, lie in turn in the action orbit, in
features of actions and their agents. 9 As agents are entailed by actions-beca use actions just
6
7

8

9

See 'A universal environmental ethics' Connect, UNESCO-UNE P Environmental Education
Newsletter XVI(2)(June 1991). pl.
Brandt p.l.
Long ago I used to think this was now it had to be done, through some singling out of morals
within ethics by way of a combination features of humans and requirements of morality (such as,
variously, consideration of others, universalizability). Not recognising the virtues of agency, I too
erroneously supposed that morality had to pertain to humanity.
No doubt the main definitional enterprise can be carried out, more or less, the other way around,
beginning with ethics, then cutting down to morals within, through agency. Moreover, such an
alternative route (starting out easily enough from the notion of ethics as the theory and
systematization of the good and the right, valuable and permissible, the virtuous and responsible,
and so on) should arrive at the same place, at a similar end result.
These action basics can in turn be explained, as before, within process theory, see Sylvan 1993. A
classification of agents can be drawn from there. It is not claimed that this is how we have to start
or that action nexus affords unique starting point. But its features have to be included sooner or

4

are agent-ascribed processe s-actions , more generally processes, form bedrock here. Neither
processes nor actions have any essential connection with humans. Relevant elements of
action nexus, upon which moral actions are carried, are now indicated: Single action
snapshot, capturing agent-acts -in-environment nexus:

AGENT

has

motives
emotions
volitions
objectives and goals

of

prior causes
ACTION

has
subsequent consequences

impacts upon (relevant items within) environment
The breakdown of actions, into types, will straightaway yield much that has long been taken
as central in moral theory, such as agonising (as Socrates did) over choices. Choice-making is

a morally critical type of action. Plural actions expose further relevant features, including
conduct, dispositions and character of agents, and suggest typologies (or moral relevance) of
actions and of impacts. Virtue ethics, but part of moral theory, fit here.
Whereas morality -the new ecologically sensitive morality that is-begin s from certain
features of an agent in its environment, ecology begins from investigation of an organism in
its environment. 'From the outset ecology was clearly understood to be the appreciation of
the organism (any organism, note) in and as part of its environment' . 10 'Something along the
lines of "the study of organisms in relation to their environment" is the basis of most ...
attempts ... [at] working definition of ecology ... over [which] there has been little dispute' . 11
Despite initial appearances, the upshot is not (the perhaps appealing one) that morality is a
branch of ecology. For the features investigated are very different (and a satisfactory
definition of 'ecology ' has to be sharpened to indicate what features of organism-inenvironments are studied). Whereas in morality there is much interest in the virtues and vices
of agents for instance, a parallel interest is outside the scope of ecology (and indeed not a
significant question for most organism or for many agents).
Interestingly, the ethical theory being advanced begins in precisely the way Deep
Ecology, in its pristine formulation, implies that no theory should operate, with an agent-inenvironment image. Under the total-field approach of Deep Ecology all such images dividing
up fields should be rejected, in particula r any man-in-e nvironme nt image, a special
chauvinistic case of what our theory operates with. Similarly no doubt for organism-inenvironment images of ecology. Unremarkably no arguments are offered for these rejections;

10
11

later, and it has virtues as a start, including familarity and naturalness.
R. Kitching [New Education], p.39
Ibid p.40 rearranged.

5
cogent arguments would be hard to find, or articulate. In any case, Deep Ecology strictures do
not prevent preliminary or limited uses of field analysis. As it will soon turn out, for more
general purposes, what is needed is removal of agents, not dissolving the image.
These action-theoretic preliminaries admit of much elaboration and variation, both
expansion and contraction most of which however we can pick up as we proceed. For
example, an illuminating expansion would expose the setting, of constraints and incentives,
within which an agents acts; no doubt some of these features, incentives for instance, can be
absorbed into what is already depicted, such as motives, and the remainder could be included
in under a prior-influences category. Striking contractions are those afforded by prevailing
ethical theories, consequentialism and Kantianism, which would erase, respectively, all but
consequences or all but motives. The parable of the Blindman and the Elephant is not only a
clever analogy for a implausible perspectivism; it can serve as a telling indictment of much
analytic philosophical practice. Moral philosophical practice, especially that of analytic
philosophy, consists in only sensing part of a whole (constellation) and failing to see the
rest. 12 Moral and action theory afford good examples of such skimping; for instance,
consequentialism fails to see anything but consequences.
The term moral, generously construed, covers the assessment of agent-intricated
elements of the action nexus depicted, in all the following sorts of respects (as applicable):
excellent, good, indifferent, bad, evil; approved, disapproved;
valuable, of value, or not

axiological

right or wrong (or alright), fair or unfair, proper or improper
obligatory, forbidden, permissible

deontic

responsible, irresponsible;
it also covers principles concerning such assessments. Morality concerns both appreciation
and assessment of agents-acting-in-environments as regards those sorts of features and
resulting systematization. Parallels with ecology should be evident. X's conduct or the like is
moral, broadly so, iff it is a matter for moral appraisal. In short, what is moral is marked out
by classes of functors in an action nexus.
Plainly some of the features, which perform the distinguishin g work, are not
significantly applicable to all elements in the nexus; for instance, impacts of frogs are not
significantly responsible. Responsibility applies primarily to certain agents, their conduct and
character. The sorts of respects cited are, furthermore, more general forms. But many more
specific evaluations are thereby encompassed; for instance, honourable, dishonourable;
decent, indecent, again as applicable.
In terms of the sorts of respects, certain important subtypes can be distinguished. The
first group (given by the first two lines) covers axiological. The second group (given by the
next two lines) covers deontic. The third group (not usually distinguished in "the logic of
12

For a detailed treatment of skimping in philosophy, see DP, chapter 11.

6
ethics") comprises accountability notions.
Such, formerly important, terms as virtuous and vicious-regu larly, but wrongly
included in dictionary listings of respects defining moral (e.g., "of or pertaining to character
or disposition considered as ... virtuous or vicious")-ar e axiological. They can be
characterized in terms of what is already available, thereby avoiding further circularity vexing
dictionary definitions (which define 'moral' using 'virtuous', and 'virtuous' deploying
'moral'). 13 For example, to adjust the dictionaries, virtuous [action] is [that] exhibiting moral
excellence or quality, vicious that distinguished as morally evil. Much the same supervenient
story gets told for duty in the deontic class. For while a duty just amounts to a certain sort, a
rigorous sort, of moral obligation, duty is not among the respects listed in defining the term
moral.
There are several, loosely consequential , attachments often made to what counts as
moral(s), notably: issues of punishments and rewards, with a view to altering proper conduct;
of freedom and determinism, as the latter may appear to place moral enterprise in jeopardy; of
justification of moral principles, which do not stand on its own without moral justification;
and so on, for other theoretical topics that consequently arise. While these further issues do
not form part of dictionary definitions of moral, they are stock textbook fare in moral
philosophy. But that, moral philosophy and moral theory, is where they can comfortably stay.
While the issues that result could be called moral, or distinguished as textbook moral, they
might as well simply be accommodate d more accurately, within philosophy of morality (metamorals).
Morality is, at base, the attribute of being moral. 14 Thus, basically, an item exhibits
morality if and only if that item is moral. In wider compass, morality comprehends a larger
package concerning what is moral; it consists in the theory and appreciation, practice and
principles of what is moral. It follows, from the account of moral given, that morality is all
about certain features of agency, features of theory and practice of agency, namely evaluative
and assessment features and principles concerning these, such as conduct and choice.
Several other significant corollaries also emerge. Firstly morality has nothing
essentially to do with humans. A similar but still more striking result will follow for ethics,
which is characterised, also in a human independent way, by way of morality. Ethics too has
nothing essentially to do with humans (or even with humanoids). Morality turns on features
of agency. Humans, some of them, simply happen to supply, presently, prime terrestrial
examples of full moral agents, those actors who do not merely conduct themselves well or
badly (a kangaroo can be a good or poor mother, a dog can behave badly and know it) but
who make promises, recognise obligations, accept responsibilities, and so forth.
Humans were almost certainly not the only full terrestrial agents; other humanoid

13
14

Thus too much of "virtue ethics" can be absorbed, see further, later chapters.
In logical terms it is defined through attribute abstraction.

7

species that have become extinct (perhaps with human assistance) very likely were also.
Certain humans are probably not the only full moral agents even now in this universe. It is
unlikely that humans will exemplify the only moral agents, perhaps even terrestrially. 15 The
prominen t role of competen t humans in morality, and so as regards ethics, is utterly
contingent. It follows, now quite generally, that those familiar definitions of morality and
ethics in terms of humans and their features are one and all defective. For all the (green)
ethical theory to be developed, humans can drop out altogether. But competent humans are
useful for illustrative purposes; it helps to have some demonstrably actual examples.
Moreove r, in such practical terms as terrestrial ethical impact, they are now almost
unavoidable.
Before explaining how to escape damaging agent centredness, or actocentricity, in ethics
that would result from equating ethics with morals (i.e. morality in this sense), there are loose
ends to be tied up and certain advantages, worth recording, accruing from having actocentrism
as a staging post. One advantage is that unwanted senses of evaluative notions are peeled off
automatically, because they do not apply regards agency. For example, so removed are not
only merely "aesthetic" uses but all those quasi-descriptive uses of commendatory terms such
as good (e.g. 'good car' 'good sort', 'good sox', 'good ox'). Aesthetic uses of evaluative
terms, as in 'fine painting' or 'good book', do not concern, except in oblique ways, action or
conduct of agents. It may well be objected that even so not enough non-moral uses are peeled
off, as various uses like those of mere expediency or practicality are left standing. A countercase will be developed that these should be left standing. For a smarter strategy than
attempting exclusion, includes moralities of expedience, of practicality, egoism and the like
within the moral orbit-so enabling a straightforward answer to such otherwise vexing
questions as Why be moral?- whilst subsequently differentiating within morals a distinuished
subclass (to be called meurals) which does function exclusively through meeting more
exacting requirements of morality.
There is a subsense that should be picked up immediately. Though a vicious or evil
agent is certainly a matter for morality, and within its compass, such an agent would not
normally be accounted moral (as a naive reading of the dictionaries would suggest), but
immoral. What is moral, morality, concerns the span of moral, immoral and indifferent
procedures. Plainly moral in the narrower sense comprehends the definitely positive part of
the span, as good does of the wide value span. Generally, an item (such as an agent, practice,
conduct, or whatever) is strictly moral, moral in this stricter sense, if it is moral, a matter of

15

There are arguments to other moral agents, other full agents even, from evolusionary theory.
According to an expanded theory, every niche is eventually occupied. (In a way, this interesting
theme carries over from the earlier doctrine of a great chain of being, which similarly onto every
position in the chain as potentially occupied.) By a statistical argument (copying those for
intelligent life elswhere in this vast universe), there are, or will be, niches for agents, with requisite
capabilities, wlsewhere in the universe. Therefore, by the theory, these niches will eventually be
occupied.

8
moral concern, and its appraisal is decidedly positive. Naturally for a full account, positive
within the moral span, has also to be defined. However here the strict sense is picked up only
to be set aside.
Focussing upon morality would be unduly limiting from the perspective of
environment al ethics. For although anthropocent ricism has been avoided, easily
circumvented through agency, though humans play no essential role, still morality is
undoubtedly agent-centred. Morality foregrounds agents and assessments of them and their
actions, and backgrounds environments of agents, and environments more generally (those
without agents in them do not even enter into consideration). The environment remains, so to
say, mere backdrop to actions of agents.
Escape is through an intermediary, which is substituted in place of morality in the
account proposed of ethics. That intermediary is an expanded morality, in convenient
shorthand ectomorality. 16 ('Ectomoralit y' is close enough for the present to 'ecomorality' ,
which is of course part of the main focus.) Expanded morality takes into account also
evaluative settings, perhaps devoid of agents; whatever of value that agents, or agent-like
subjects, agentoids, might in principle impact upon, interfere with, disturb, effect, change,
dislodge, or similar. That is, to say, it encompasses all items of relevant value, of worth,
significant items, including many wholes, such as habitats, ecosystems, the Earth itself; and so
also whatever applies morally with respect to these, for instance permission to disturb or to
improve, principles of letting be, and so on. Such ecosignificant items are also called, in the
literature, morally considerable items (a nicely ambiguous term, both sides of which have
unfortunate features, one because a considerable item may not have large significance, the
other because what it is supposed to respond to is some restricting class of considerers). In yet
other and more satisfactory terms, they have ethical standing. Naturally items of significance
other than agentoids may have other ethically relevant features (which they perhaps accrue
through their significance). For instance they may hold entitlements of various sorts, such as
to be left alone, to be represented, and so on.
In order to characterize core notions in the ethics orbit, the basic strategy consists in
plugging in "expanded morality" where the dictionaries give "morality"; similarly substitute
"ectomoral" for "moral". For the adjectival forms 'ethical' , and (equivalently) 'ethic', that is
all that is required. For the form concerned means: pertaining to ectomorality, or
(equivalently) treating of or relating to ectomorals. For the noun forms it is not so simple,
because there are problems with the dictionary accounts (for instance in 'the science of
morality' owing to misplaced definiteness, and dated uses of the term 'science'). Always
ethics(s) is an abstract, signifying features of being ethical; more exactly, always concerning
ectomoral theories or systems. More specifically, ethic( s) signifies
firstly, in both singular or plural though usually plural, the whole field of ectomoral theory
16

Greek ektos, outside. We include the inside with the expansion which incorporates the outside.

9

(the "science" of ectomorals), or derivatively, the department of (philosophical) study
concerned therewith;
secondly, in the singular but pluralising, a system or schematization of ectomorality, that is, at
least rudiments of a system, or of a theory, comprising values, ectomoral principles, and rules
of proper conduct.17

Like stock textbook ethics, most environmental ethics so far are in fact truncated; they
are very rudimentar y schemes, leaving out much that would be expected in a fatter
systematization. Hence in part the vagueness of characterization. So far the vagueness
(which does not exceed that of dictionaries or of ordinary usage), is immaterial, as the
characterisation is workable. But further exactness could be obtained through a technical
upgrade of system and a more detailed specification of what such a proposition system
contains. 18
What are sometimes cited as further restricted senses of 'ethic' are not further senses.
Rather they are restrictions, or designations, of what is already presented. Thus for instance,
the 'moral principles of a particular leader or school of thought' as in Buddhist ethics or
Kantian ethics. Similarly for field indications or application restrictions, as in medical ethics
or bioethics. So much for "senses" of 'ethics'.
In order to reach an adequate definition of ethics, not merely for intended environmental
purposes, but for historical purposes as well (so as to include Stoic ethics, Taoist ethics,
romantic nature ethics and the like as ethics) we have been obliged to adjust (if in an
inconspicuous way) dictionary definitions of ethics. That adjustment was made through
"expanded morality", but could have been accomplished in other equivalent ways (Leopold's
expansion of 'community' is another, though less satisfactory, way of achieving the same sort
of thing). Granted that we have adjusted dictionary definitions, have we changed the very
notion of ethics, or did the dictionaries, not for the first item, get it wrong, getting caught with
chauvinistic definitions? We claim that we have not changed the notion. Rather we captured
what some meant, more or less, by ethics all along-fro m Stoics, Epicureans and others on. It
has never been a very precise notion. In this case (by contrast with terms like right) not too
much hangs on the term, and we could simply divide ethics up, for instance, into wide and
narrow. However, we intend to keep the nice term ethics but to give the dictionaries and
modem opposition the expressions, standard ethics, or conventional ethics.
Our inconspicuous but all important adjustment is both good and bad news. It is bad
news, insofar as it appears to assist the charge that [deeper] environmental philosophy is doing
something different from ethics, that it is guilty of changing the subject (i.e., effectively
committing ignoratio elenchi). However we can freely grant, without incurring damage, that
17
18

Thus ethics include what it has to include, as expanded environment ally: philosophy of
ecomorality, and therewith of morality.
A system is a relational structure of a certain sort. An ethic is a propositional system, since it has
to include principles and the like; thus it involves a theory of strict logical sort. For an illustration
of the use of systems formulations in ethics, see e.g. Routley 1973.

10

standard ethics was, as a matter of definition, at least actocentric, and that, insofar as agents
were identified with humans, it was, therefore, anthropocentric. Even so ethics, as redefined,
includes standard ethics, so it is more satisfactorily seen not a different but a larger subject,
expanded through an expanded morality. It is good news, not merely because it facilitates
environmental ethics and accords with more satisfactory (greener) accounts of the subject, but
because it helps in getting around a snarl of objections to the effect that ethics has to be
homocentric, or at least actocentric. Removing these objections will recur throughout what
follows.
Among corollaries of note, a first one is that plurality of ethics falls out of the
characterisation. An ethic is not unique. Nor (through such a result does not follow as
environmental ethics form a subclass of ethics) are environmental ethics. Nor are military or
professional ethics. Failure of uniqueness is not a deficiency, but a virtue. For, one thing, it
gives places to go in cases of breakdown of an ethic, namely to other nearby ethics. Plurality
is tied up with nonuniqueness and other features of merit: noncomprehensiveness, openness,
flexibility, and so on.19
Secondly, there is more news on what an ethics is; and what an environmental one is. It
is widely claimed that an ethics requires a communit y, in an environme ntal ethic the
community (of concern etc.) is a wide environmental one. Ethics enlarges the community, a
scope of values. Ethics (partaking of ethos ~ the evaluative frame(or spirit) of a community.
While these ideas are popular they are astray.
Environmental ethics shifts the frame of reference for ethical consideration from purely
human concerns to ecological communities. 1-B Human beings as moral agents are not
ethically privileged.
An environmental ethic must be compatible with ecological principles and with life, i.e.
be livable.
3. Within ethics and morals, as so far generously constured: decent and dud distinctions.
Something like the division between the first and second specifics above has been
quasi-technicalized within ethics, and distorted through merger with a theory-metatheory
distinction borrowed from outside ethics. Engagement with the second (as in systematisation,

constructing and working within systems, etc.) has been dubbed normative ethics, or
sometimes to increase the confusion just ethics, or condescendingly, casuistry. Metaethics has
been taken however to be not what the logical analogy, and borrowing, would suggest metanormative ethics, the (positivistically correct) study of such systems, but instead a brand of
analytic philosophy, analysing the meanings and uses of key ethical terms. Taken as
exhaustive, there is much of importance, that the normative-metaethical distinction leaves out.
Nor is the distinction exhaustive. As well, the labels are misleading. In short, the distinction
is ill-made out and rather unsatisfactory, a handicap, not an asset; it can be abandoned without
19

See EEHC p.57.

11

loss and to advantage. Let us do so (so forget this paragraph, if you prefer). Many other
distinctions from standard ethics are also defective, in one way or another. It will be advisable
to resurvey and rechart ethical terrain.
Among other standard, but often dud, distinctions from ethical theory that have to
reexamined after environmental impact, to be duly salvaged or scrapped, are all the following:
• objective/subjective. That the objective/subjective distinction provides a false dichotomy is
easily seen from usual explanations of the terms: 'either objective, standing for a real factor in

things, or subjective, simply standing for a human proposal' 20
• Cognitive/non-cognitive. 2 1
To be retained are some distinctions which certain forces have worked hard to eliminate, such
as that of
• Fact/value (and earlier demise).
• Expedient/moral.
There is an elasticity in the notion of ethics, and a neglected distinction, that it is
important to take into account.. In contemporary ethical theory there is a concerted attempt to
build a universalizability requirement or some sort of equivalent into the very notion of ethics.
The evident result is that selfish systems of evaluation and conduct, systematic egoisms for
instance, are refused the title of ethics, and as an important corollary questions like Why be
ethical? become vexed. 22 Given, in particular, that any such "universality" requirement is
problematic in its formulation, and typically limited, chauvinistically to persons, a superior
course proceeds to distinguish: between ethics as already characterised (reportively) and its
subclass, universalizable ethics. As impartial ethics do have much to recommend them, let us
coin a convenient portmanteau term condensing the clumsy "universalizable ethics", namely
euthics. (Conveniently then un-euthical suggests unethical, which is what from a properly
ethical stance it is!)

There is undoubtedly some pressure to have ethics and morality extend beyond a single
or isolated individual 23 ( even so, a Crusoe ethics is intelligible and feasible, as regrettably is
egoistic morality). But that pressure does not extend very far; and such notions as those of a
tribal morality and an upper-class ethics are not defective on significance or semantic grounds,
even if they are wide open to objections on substantive grounds.
Such restricted ethics are not however immediately ruled out, as ethics, by such
requirements as that like cases be assessed alike, and that differences of assessment be based
on relevant differences. 24 For a tribalist or racist can respond that a foreigner is not like a
20
21
22

23
24

Reese p.157.
See also Reese.
On both, narrowing and vexing, see Singer Impractical ethics (Singer equates moral with ethical).
Singer does not really have an answer to the question Why be moral? though he thinks it not a bad
idea; mainly he tries to put down shuffles that have been presented as decisive.
Pettit reworking a rough route hacked out by Wittgenstein, tries to expand this across into a
philosophical forest denominated "holism", no-dwelling place for an isolated individual.
These requirements are presented by Attfield as basic formal requirements of reason (p.6). No

12

Greek, or that there are relevant differences between whites and blacks (intelligence has been
proposed as such a difference, when skin pigmentation appeared a merely superficial
difference). These sorts of responses, which were long accepted, are no longer acceptable,
because the differences put up are not considered ethically relevant differences (correctly
enough, though ethical relevance itself lacks an adequate explanation). Egoism, for instance,
exhibits rationality failure, as it does not treat likes alike. There are no relevant differences
justifying different treatment.
Singer's main argument for a much wider point of view,for universality, rests upon an
extensive appeal to authority (p.11). What else is offered is but an appeal to usage.
the notion of ethics carries with it the idea of something bigger than the
individual'. [It often does, but it may not.] 'If I am to defend my conduct
on ethical grounds, I cannot point only to the benefits it brings me. I must
address myself to a larger audience'(p.10).
That depends on the conduct concerned. More important, the audience does not need to be so
large, certainly not universal: my family or clan will suffice often enough. Nonetheless there
is this of use 'ethics', especially in such criticisms as 'unethical'.
• due consideration of others, all others;
Parallel to the distinction of euthics within ethics is a distinction of neurals within morals,
neurality within morality. Again the subclass, reflecting widespread philosophical usage of
the term morality, is separated through some requirement of morality, such as

• universalizability, which is a strong way of ensuring the first (do unto others etc.).
Insofar as these principles all allude to others, they often admit easy extension (to other
others). 25
4. Environmental and greener ethics.
As prevailing accounts of ethics are for the most part defective, so are what builds upon
them, recent accounts of environmental ethics. But there are also other grounds for
dissatisfaction with these.
Issues in the characterizat ion of ethics, especially removal of actocentrism and
homocentrism, naturally get transmitted to critical types, such as environmental ethics. But it
might be imagined, rashly, that disagreement ends there. After all, all decent environmental
ethics make the non-human world a proper object of concern, either directly or indirectly.
Differences between explications offered can be ascribed to ordinary philosophica l
incompleteness. "An environmental ethic, broadly, is a set of values to live by which takes
due account of the value of the non-human world". 26 Stated differently, the aim of
environmental ethics 'is to understand and act appropriately in relation of our ecological-i n

25

26

doubt they are, though they appear to figure in no logic of ethics yet formulated.
The distinctions can be filled out (and made to work-verify!) by a strategy like the earlier. Again
the list of moral predicates is deliberately wide. But once again we can later separate off certain
uses e.g. instrumenal, aesthetic uses of good.
Gunn 1987, 3.

13

the broad sense-circum stances". 27 Differently again, " ... sets of principles, which would
guide our treatment of wild nature, constitute an environmental ethic in the most general
sense". 28 The first of these slack explanations leaves out what is essential for an ethics,
principles; the second is unduly actocentric, leaving out what is not, as well as main
paraphernalia of ethics; the third not only neglects values, but excessively narrows scope so
that such an ethics is inapplicable in places devoid of wild nature or to other issues. A better
explication, which avoids these obvious pitfalls runs: An environmental ethics is an ethics, as
defined, which, among other concerns, takes specific account, through its values and
principles, of (significant) environmental items, of parts of nonhuman nature.
But obviously it too leaves much to be explained. How the non-human world is made
the object of concern, how it is moral concern, to what degree it is made the object of moral
concern, what forms of moral concern are applicable to what elements of the environment,
and how to achieve the aim of acting appropriately - all are matters that make environmental
ethics one of the most controversial areas of philosophy and also one of the most exciting,
although many professional philosophers still regard it as a peripheral area. Yet there now is
broad agreement among most of those active in the area that some change is needed and that
environmental matters need much more attention and action.
An environmental ethics is an ethics concerned, usually among other ethical things, with
parts of the environment. Coal-face or factory-floor environmenta l ethics bears on
environmental issues, problems and causes, and can be expected to say something about
environment s or some of their nonhuman components. Academic or board-room
environmental ethics is frequently, however, a remove from direct ethical work, comprising
discussion of environmental ethics, its features, its methods, its variability, its presumed
merely derived and applied character, and so on. Much of this academic environmental ethics
is directed against coal-face environmental ethics, especially that of a genuinely committed
sort aimed at advancing environmental sources.
It is almost immediate that there is an important elasticity -ambiguity, in a slack sense
-in the notion of environmental ethics, between an ethics which considers environmental
matters, whether positively or negatively, and an ethics which is positive about some
environmental elements, which evinces concern about environmental items (as 18th century
sympathy ethics did about other humans). A superficial environmental ethics need not say
anything particularly positive or sympathetic about environments; indeed productions on the
topic may try to dismiss or defeat environmenta l causes and to defuse or dissolve
environmental problems, for instance as not worth bothering about. 29 It may be argued that
27
28
29

Drengson 1989, 15.
Elliot, in Singer, 284.
That is, fashionable contemporary practice with respect to philosophy is transferred to parts of
enviromental philosophy (e.g. by Eco Wittgenstein and AppliedQuine). Environmental philosophy
may in no way interfere with industry and business. To an astonishing extent American academic
environmental ethics tends to conform to such ridiculous strictures (often encouraged by a fawning

14
natural environme nts should serve highest economic causes, which means in practice
becoming reserves for city folks, city corporations and consumers. Under such environmental
ethics ("environmental ethics" it is tempting to say, contravening usage) many an environme nt
should be razed, levelled, and paved over, to become a grand parking lot, shopping mall or
urban escarpmen t of a concrete jungle. What rural environment remains will, also serve those
"high" purposes, be tamed and managed, like much of Western Europe. Witness the
enthusiasm in productions on environmental ethics for landscapes like that of Tuscany, where
virtually everything is under tight human control and no bird moves (else it is shot).
Environm ental ethics and environme ntal philosophy may well prove to be
disappointm ents for enthusiastic environmentalists. For there may be little that is materially
green about them, no commitme nt to changes in old attitudes and practices, no offers of
improved standing and ethical treatment for environme ntal items. As an environme ntal
economics may be no green economics , but (very likely) some part or application of
mainstream economics , some sweep of resource or land economics , so an environme ntal
ethics or environme ntal ethic may not be particularly or at all green, but, for instance, simply
part of establishm ent ethics or an "application" of it to environmental items. Fortunately not
all environmental ethics is like this; beyond environmental is genuinely green ethics.
The elasticity in environmental ethics between superficial and material forms, parallels
that of the term concern (and rather similarly of matter), and can be substantially constricted
to that: an environme ntal ethics is one concerned with environmental items or matter. Thus,
on the one construal, such an ethics may be simply about such topics, it may be a standard
ethics "applied" to such topics, in which case environmental ethics does become just so-called
applied ethics. Alternatively, however, such an ethic may be one evincing concern, worry,
about the treatment of some environmental items on other, and directed at obtaining improved
treatment. Such an ethic is not negative or indifferent towards environme ntal matters, but is
advancing environme ntal causes. They matter. With such ethics, environme ntal ethics
cannot possibly be an applied ethics, for the framework of standard ethics and their
application s, is exceeded. (At best such ethics can be approxima ted by standard ethics by
assuming enlightened agents holding appropriate sorts of values. 30)
5. Human chauvinism and its detailed removal.
Deep-green theory is, unambiguously, a green ethical theory, of deep kind: that is, there
is intrinsic value in nature, natural items have intrinsic value, which may predomina te over
human-bas ed value. In short, the theory rejects both the 'Sole Value Assumptio n' and the
'Greater Value Assumptio n'. The theory finds all standard ethics mired in heavy prejudice, in

30

pragmatism).
Compare also Naess (in Engel 1990) on utilitarian approximation to Deep Ecology, made by
assuming availability of enough agents holding deep ecological values or, more or less
equivalently, having deep ecological consciousness.

15
favour of things human and against things non-human. The distinctive, still pervasive,
prejudice concerned is that encapsulated as human chauvinism, which is itself a special case
of class chauvinism (for the class, human 31 ). Removal of human chauvinism dovetails with
displacement of humans.
Class chauvinism consists in substantia lly differentia l treatment, typically
discriminatory and inferior treatment, of items outside the class, by sufficiently many
members of the class concerned, for which there is no sufficient justification. Human
chauvinism is a feature, a cardinal weakness, of virtually all ethical systems hitherto, so deepgreen theory contends. The main argument takes the following form: there is no
characteristic, such as those tendered in ethical theories as justifying differential treatment in
favour of humans (characteristics such as rationality, language possession, tool making
abilities, needs, preferences, sentience, etc.) which first is held by all and only humans, as
distinct from not all humans and some non-humans, and which second does justify differential
treatment.3 2
Signs and manifestations of chauvinism are many and various, some conspicuous, some
subtle, and so on. For instance, a dead giveaway is any allusion to all outside certain human
concerns that may have a value as resources. For that assigns to the items so referred to mere
instrumental value. A little less obvious is the discriminative mode when individual humans
are counted, but only species of other living things (or a step down, individual sentients but
only species of others).
The thorough-going rejection of human chauvinism itself sets a program: that of
reworking ethics, and indeed much of philosophy, in a way free of chauvinism and humanism,
without any specially privileged place for humans. A first part of such a program has already
been outlined, that of suitably characterising ethics in a way that does not make essential
appeal to humans or their features, or to other favoured groups such as sentients. A further
important part of the program, formulation of ethical theory in a way which avoids entirely
group chauvinism. Such a desirable outcome can be achieved simply through formulation of
ethical theory in terms of ethically relevant categories, assembled in what is called an annular
theory. 33

31

32

33

Insofar as an account of human is required, it can be some improvement on the biological species
definitions, a reworking to remove past biasses (superioristic, rationalistic, masceulinist, etc.) and
to dislodge appeals to aspects of human nature. But, despite the preponderance of human agents
hereabouts, on planet Earth, such an account is not required for ethics, or for philosophy.
Theorizing in these and many other areas can proceed perfectly well without allusion to humans.
The detailed argument for this proposition is presented in Routley and Routley 1980a 97-108,
where chauvinism is spelled out a bit further. A truncated version of this argument appears in Fox
1990, 16-17.
Though the theory is so labelled in several publications, the label, which presumably should stay,
is misleading, because some ethical relevant categories may overlap one another. The concentric
theory (developed in Wenz 1988 and others, perhaps in steps of Leopold), which incorporates a
similar mistake, can be seen as a subversion of the annular model.

16

The annular picture helps show how to redo ethics and philosophy with ideal types, or
with some equivalent thereof. No simple species or subspecies , such as humans or
superhumans, no single feature, such as sentience or life, serves as a reference benchmark, a
base class, for determinin g moral relevance and other ethical dimensions . 34 No ethical
irrelevant distinctions and classes, such as those of humans or base class, are required. What
is required instead is a major shift in perspective , a new focus upon morally relevant
categorical distinctions:
it is not possible to provide criteria which would justify distinguishing, in the
sharp way standard Western ethics do, between humans and certain
nonhuman creatures, and particularly those creatures which have preferences
or preferred states. For such criteria appear to depend upon the mistaken
assumption that moral respect for other creatures is due only when they can
be shown to measure up to some rather arbitrarily -determine d and loaded
tests for membershi p of a privileged class (essentially an elitist view),
instead of upon, say, respect for the preference s of other creatures.
According ly the sharp moral distinction, commonly accepted in ethics by
philosophe rs and other alike, between all humans and all other animal
species, lacks a satisfactory coherent basis (Routley and Routley 80a, 103).
The categorical distinctions thereby proposed do not reject traditional ethical notions such as
rationality, self-awaren ess, having interests; but they do reject the automatic use of the
characteristics of one species, or some base class as the model upon which the characteristics
of all other species or classes are judged. They also reject as unjustified distinctions that are
not "categorical distinctions which tie analytically with ethical notions". 35 For instance, they
hold that the human/nonhuman distinction is not ethically significant. Humans enter only in a
contingent way into general ethical theory, as holders of these or those features, which
34

35

Another common mistake which annular theory helps dispel and avoid is that of trying to stretch
community (or moral commuity) to include webs, mountains, Earth, land etc.-a trend Leopold
started with his land ethic. An agent can have an obligation to care for earth, and soil without
there being part of community. (The Land ethic is misguided). What ethics covers diverges from
any moral community. (Contra Dobson's suggestion p.47).
Routley and Routley 1980a, 108.

17

depending upon their respective capabilities and competence.
It is also desirable to have available some more positive principles corresponding to the
negative rejection of class chauvinism, principles so to say, of anti-chauvinism. Principles
like the biospherical egalitarianism of Deep Ecology represent an unsatisfactory attempt in
this direction. The deep-green improvement on this principle is the powerful principle of ecoimpartiality, according to which there should be no substantially differential treatment of
items outside any favoured class or species of discriminatory sort that lacks sufficient
justification. The appropriate impartial treatment is substantially independent of the
comparative value of the item treated. Most important, impartial treatment does not entail

equal treatment, or equal consideration, and does not require equal intrinsic or other value.
Other distinctive principles of deep-green theory will emerge as the ethical theory
accumulates.
One major conclusion is that human is not a significant ethical category. The outcome
is not anti-human; humans enter to the extent that they respectively deserve to enter. It is not
being claimed that humans lack value, that none of them have much or any value. Quite the
contrary, some humans have great value, some have established themselves as having great
propensity for evil, many lead quite indifferent lives. What is being rejected is the elevated,
often exaggerated, frequently exclusive, value assigned to humans, too often uniform value.
What are being contested are received distributions of values, and the heavy concentration of
value in humans and things and features human, the relative importance of which has been
grossly exaggerated. 36
Be in no doubt: many humans have positive value, some remarkable value. That is one
reason why it matters that humans should not vanish off the planet (for all that many of they
have sinned against it), to leave an impoverished earth, for instance a microbe planet. For that
would involve a huge reduction in value. Nor is it enough, adequate compensation, that
something like humans would evolve again at some remote future time. For, even if it
happened (in fact the probability of such replacement looks rather small), there would still be
a huge and extended dip in value. Similar points tell against a range of similar arguments to
the effect that it does not matter what happens to, or is done to, the Earth, because evolution
will eventually restore richness. 37 Even if richness were to return (much evidence indicates
36

37

Moral consideration and intrinsic value are not limited to humans; similarly these are not confined
to any other favoured or "improved" class closely overlapping humans, such as (it is supposed)
persons or rational creatures. Moral principles can be applied to all species and to the natural
environment in general. (A corollary concerns the characterisation of morality. ) Evolutionary
space is thereby afforded for other species, other systems other things.
An associated feature is stereotyping. Stereotyping is characteristic of speciesism/chauvinism as it
is in exploitation. To stereotype an item is to see it purely as a member of a class and as having
conventional feature of the class as a whole.
Recently there have been some attempts to have things ethical both ways: a special role for
humans without privilege or prejudice. There is a latent incoherence in Rachel's text, between his
initial and final proposals regarding ethics and morals-which are essentially human intricatedand regarding morals without hubris (MWH)-where human hubris is supposed to be removed.
Such an argument has been advanced by, among others, William Grey in 'Anthropocentrism and

18

that extinction and destruction is for ever, permanent), there would still be serious loss of
value. So it does matter.
6. Philosophy without humans.

It is hard to move and operate philosophically without encountering humans and human
chauvinism. Chauvinism is written deep into all prevailing Western (and Eastern) ideological
forms, common to what, at a more superficial level, are rival positions. But while human
chauvinism transcends parochial differences, it is more conspicuous and brazen in some
philosophical locales than others, notably idealism and empiricism, existentialism and
phenomenology. In short, it is particularly prominent where matters answer back to subjects,
those who have the ideas, do the observing, assemble the phenomena, do the living, and so
on-back to subjects that are invariably assumed to be human. Thus it is human existence,
human Being, human ideas and impressions, that count, those and none others. Such
chauvinism, nauseatingly strong, pervades not only Continental philosophy (esp. French and
German varieties)-but also Anglo-American empiricism and pragmatism (esp. anti-realist
varieties). 38
Once the main strategies of ethics-without-humans have been grasped, it is easy to see
how analogous moves can be made the deanthropize other reaches of philosophy, notably
some of the more chauvinistic enterprises. In general there are two stages: Firstly, as with
morality, replacing humans and human subjects by agents and ideal subjects. And secondly,
as with ethics, delineating significant reaches-philosop hical wildernesses-wh ere agents are
removed, not just off-stage but altogether.
While a few examples of each stage only will be given, it will become evident that the
procedures are general. Consider as an example of the first stage, existentialism, a philosophy
celebrating humans, and their exclusive freedom, and shot through with human chauvinism.
Existentialism is (to quote a convenient caricature)
a philosophy which emphasises man's freedom to act independently of any
laws, natural or otherwise, and according to his own choice. It is a free will
philosophy which can be seen as 'a protest against views of the world and
policies ... in which humans are regarded as the helpless playthings of
historical forces, or as wholly determined by the regular operation of natural

38

Deep Ecology', Australasian Journal of Philosophy vol.71, No 4: December 1993.
There is a residual serious problem here, as to why existence is so important. Why do actual
humans and existent tigers matter, not merely virtual ones or possible ones. What is it about
existence? There are many items which it would be better did not exist, such as devils, helicopters
(for the most part), pollution, erosion and so on. Existence, of favoured sorts, makes for richness,
which is a high (if defeasible) virtue.
Sartre's philosophy is rendolent with human chauvinism: e.g. Critique of Dialectical Reason p.8.
as regards destruction and destroy, is an amazing piece of human chauvinism. While humans
may have a greater potentiality for production of value than most other animals, many humans
also have a far greater potentiality for evil than most other animals. Historically, the evil
producing capacity has dominated. Another example of Sartre's anthropocentism is his
"philosophy of the present".
Marx's philosophy is similarly rendolent. Productivity is human productivity... . For almost
random examples from anti-realism, see DP.

19
processes' (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1978). This anti-determinist
perspective is, again, connected with the question of objectivity.
Existentialists hold that the only objective external fact independent of the
control of human beings is the fact of their being brought into existence, and
that death will one day come to terminate that existence. In all other
respects it is they who are in control. There are no outside independent
laws, of economics, history, nature or whatever, which they cannot deny or
shape for themselves. Thus we are all free to choose how we will behave
and develop and how we will shape society and nature. It follows that the
consequences of our actions are down to us, and therefore if they are
unpleasant that is our fault-not the fault of outside forces or external laws.
There are no excuses for our not thinking and acting for ourselves and we
are 'condemned' to be free because everything is theoretically permitted to
us and we therefore carry a heavy burden of responsibility for what we do.
As Sartre put it, 'Man is responsible for what he is. The first effect of
existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and
places the entire responsibility for existence squarely on his shoulders' ....
We have a duty to face up to this, and not to base our actions thoughtlessly
on what is said to be prescribed/or us ('laws' of society, of economics, of
nature). That is abdicating responsibility.39
Note the heavy concentration throughout on humans, variously appearing as human beings,
we, us, they, and (in singular musculine form) man and he. But, as before 40 , on the one
boundary, many humans are incapable of what is presumed, the heavy burden of
responsibility and so forth; and, on the other, other agents are, in principle at least, capable of
achieving those relevant sorts of freedom that humans can obtain. It is already apparent that
once the synthetic setting of highly competent humans is exceeded, notions invoked by
existentialism begin to fall apart. For instance, some "wild" animals may enjoy considerable
levels of unreflective unagonised freedom while lacking capacity to bear much responsibility.
Conversely, there are fairly responsible agents, such as some trapped in determined or
deterministic situations, who have no opportunity to exercise freedom.
Accordingly too, though human should be replaced by agent of appropriate sort in
dechauvinized existentialism, it would hardly suffice to substitute for 'human' any of
'responsible agent', 'freedom exercising agent' or similar-though these substitutions effect
some of what was intended, such as exclusion of children, many animals, dementeds and so
on. What sort of agent is appropriate? That existentialism can be seen as trying to explain.
And for the present we can leave it at that, replacing human throughout by the dummy term,

existential agent. This is existentialism partly rectified.
At the same primary stage of dechauvinizing existentialism, connected improvements
could well be sought in existentialism, such as reducing the driven and elitist ethos. In part
this ethos is encouraged by the response of existentialism to what motivates and shapes it,
deterministic arguments; for it sees only such "strong" agents as evading deterministic forces.
The whole business is rather ironic, as the first driven feature is incompatible with full
39
40

Pepper (Roots) pp.118-9; itals in original. Pepper refers to Sartre 1943 and 1946.
As at the beginning of EE, where standard privileged treatment for humans is reviewed and found
wanting.

20

freedom, while the second elitist feature is incompatible with the stress on things human, as
(like elitist religions) only exceptional agents escape. A promising alternative tries direct
confrontation with deterministic arguments, undercutting their scope and grip, and thereby
making room for free action in a range of situations (not everywhere between birth and
death!) for a wide variety of agents, including lesser, less elite, less stressed and sensitive
agents. For the arguments prove vulnerable to selective undermining by careful logical and
analytic procedures, 41 methods existentialism itself is loath to deploy (for all that its approach
rests upon past entrenched argumentation). Insofar as a main motivation for existentialism in
its prevailing ironic form is undiscriminating antideterminism, that motivation too is thereby
collapsed, and room is made for a less demanding more relaxed dechauvinized existentialism.
As for existentialism, so for a range of other subjects inclined to intrude humans as
central to world functioning or intelligibility, a range as apparently diverse as phenomenology
and quantum theory, empiricism and theology, pragmatism and cosmology. Quantum theory
fits into this range because of its received Copenhagen interpretation, cosmology because of
its return to anthropocentrism through adoption of anthropic principles. Both are however
readily freed of human shackles, first by replacing humans by "observers" (which for the most
part can simply be recording devices), and better, secondly to deagentize completely, by
amending interpretation s to dislodge both Copenhagen phenomenolo gy and anthropic
principles. 42 For a larger illustration, consider a popular mixture of versions of
phenomenology (a fuller elaboration again would disentangle versions, all of which however
require similar detoxification).
Phenomenol ogy to which existentialism is related .. .is summed up by
Nietzsche, who said, 'Objectivity is the main enemy of understanding. It
means the myth that there are hard observable facts ... but all the concepts we
employ in describing the world and predicting its behaviour are imposed on
it by ourselves. We have a choice about what view of the world we adopt.'
... Phenomenology is not just a philosophy which implies that we are not
subject to external laws, imposed by and through forces independent of
ourselves. It holds that there actually is no world external to and separate
from ourselves. There is no 'reality' in the sense of there being an external
'real world' divorced from our own consciousness and capable of existing if
we did not exist. Nature cannot exist without ourselves also existing-if we
ceased to be, so would it cease, and vice-versa. Therefore what 'the
environment' is, and is like, is a function of our own subjective construction
of it. The very use of such terms as 'ourselves' and 'human consciousness'
in opposition to terms like 'nature' and 'the environment' is inappropriate
and shows the extent to which we are immersed in positivist science as our
way of seeing the world. For the phenomenologists these terms are
meaningless because there is no separation between ourselves and a 'nature'
or a 'reality'. We and the world are one-a single united entity.
Phenomenology is thus anti-positivist science, opposing ... Cartesian dualism.
It does not deal in laws, or in cause-effect relationships consequent on the
dualism and neither can it be concerned with analysis-brea king the world
into parts ... If we want to know and understand nature we must, as Hume
41
42

For technical details, see Sylvan FWD.
On satisfactory ways of accomplishing this second stage see Sylvan (Cosm. Syn).

21

{

said in his Treatise on Human Nature in 1737, come to full comprehension
of man. For if there is no nature except as structured through human
consciousness, knowledge and truth cannot exist independently of man. 43
As with existentialism, there is a similar enormous exorbitant emphases on humans and things
humans; humans carry everything. But insofar as humans can perform those feats, so better
can a class a appropriate agents, phenomenolo gical agents, who include no incompetents
(who might let this world flicker out of existence, or worse).
Phenomenolo gy is a full immersion human chauvinism. Fashionable contemporary
empiricisms, normally taken as rivals to phenomenolo gy, are incomplete immersion
analogues. While a few properties, primary properties of basic physics, are separated out as
human independent, the rest, the phenomenolo gical mass, are categorised as responsedependent, and treated phenomenologically. 44 Take, for example, aesthetic features, which
include certain ecological features. Nowadays humans can grow up with the assumption that
aesthetic qualities, indeed all "response dependent" qualities, are features of humans, not in
any way objective.

So it can be seriously, if ridiculously, hypothesized that what is
(considered) beautiful, for instance of depends on how the human gene-pool is composed. As
before, humans are readily displaced in favour of appropriate agents. But, for the most part,
these agents too are otiose.
While the first stage 1s the main stage with agentocentric philosophies like
extistentialism, there is a second stage, which comprises significantly more than pointing out
how much, how much of importance, such philosophies leave out by their narrow
concentration. What is left out includes, to begin, all those times and places where there are
no agents, rich worlds, devoid of relevant agents, and the like. But that is only the beginning
of the business. For agents have been infiltrated or inserted in all sorts of settings where they
have no business to be or to transact.
Against the ancient and formerly honorable practice of agent invocation, pushed
primarily for explanatory purposes, 45 agent detachment and agent elimination campaigns have
periodically been mounted (e.g. conspicuously , but not only, in classic Greece, when it
became clearly appreciated that there could be causes without agents, during the
Enlightenmen t, and in Frege' s propositional ization program). Deagentizatio n, typically
coupled with deanthropization, can be, and should be, pushed much further. Agents, often
evidence of immature, even primitive, philosophy, still lurk everywhere in philosophy.
Agent-detach ment themes, still struggling against an unenlightened opposition, include:
objects, including worlds, without perceivers or sensors, nonexistent items without
conceivers, propositions without proposers, assumptions without assumers, values without
43

44

45

Pepper p.199 (where references are supplied). We shall not stop off for expository adjustment or
for any critique of this material. For main elements of such a critique, see however DP chapter 11
and JB.
Thus thesis that all properties are response dependent merges empiricism with European
phenomenology.
Deluded explanatory purposes, for agents themselves have in turn to be explained.

I

22

t

valuers, causation without causers (or intentional agents), organisation without organisers,
wilderness without wilderness managers, land (or property) without owners or stewards,
regulation without regulators, selection without selectors, and purposes without purposers. 46
But without humans who does philosophy? Well, in the old days, God of course, most
gods, the Devil, demiurges, gifted spirits and so on. At any time duly accomplished agents.
While it is easy to see how ethics and philosophy could in principle flourish given only
suitably accomplished agents, and no humans, namely the agents do something like what a
few humans hereabouts do, still it may be less easy for many to see how these subjects can
function without agents. But it is straightforward, is it not? A philosophy stands as a system
of propositions. And propositions do not need agents, proposers, or whatever. Nor do
systems.
It is here that blockage may occur, for two reasons: First, because of the idealistic idea
that there are no statements without staters. Second, because of the mistaken assumption that
a system of propositions standing on its own involves an obnoxious platonism. No such
assumption is made. Third, part of the struggle has been conducted before, in the tussle
between psychologism and its opposite in logic and associated regions (e.g. mathematics,
philosophy of mathematics etc.), in the tussle between Husserl and Frege (to name two
prominent parties). Although the issues have been rejoined more recently, it is still widely
supposed that anti-psychologism triumphed. Its success is, to some extent, mere appearance.
For all that, anti-psychologism is here extended much further, right across philosophy.
Appendix. 1. Examples showing divergence of utilitarianism from consequentialism.
Consider two different actions with some set of consequence s, one (A) done
deliberately, one (B) unintended. Then suppose, for one sort of case, the outcome is
disastrous. Not only is A normally regarded as much worse than B, e.g. arson than a naturally

occurring fire such as lightening strike, but further fuller utility assessments should give
analogous results, e.g. the satisfaction of the arsonist could be given a high negative rating.
Utilitarianism itself is but a well-tempered egoism: egoism extended to substituting
others. That cannot so plausibly be charged of consequentialism.
Utilitarianism has been associated with the "greed is good" ideology of the 1980s. The
association has point (so Singer tries, desperately, to disassociate utilitarianism). Suppose it is
said that the 80s, were a decade of greed (as so depicted in many movies) but the 90s is a
decade of ethics (despite counterevidence). But nothing has changed in underlying ideologies,
in ethics or economics!
Appendix 2. Inadequacy of standard ethics.

The inadequacy of standard ethics for green purposes has been recognised, if obliquely
and perversely, by many critics of the idea of (deep) green ethics (e.g. McCloskey). They

46

The very controversial tlast theme is argued in Sylvan 90 [purpose], where most of these various
detachment themes are assembled. Obviously there are many more such themes.

23
l

have proceeded to argue that there couldn't be such an ethics because none of the standard
ethics would serve. But the argument fails because standard ethics does not exhaust ethics.
There are some prospects of a general proof of inadequacy from what has been
developed so far. Standard forms are restricted to proper subsets of agents, whereas ethics in
full flower applies to all agents. Standard ethics leaves out much of the subject, all the deep
part.
References
William Grey in 'Anthropocentrism and Deep Ecology', Australasian Journal of Philosophy
vol.71, No 4: December 1993.

ON THE VALUE CORE OF DEEP-GREEN THEORY
Deep-green theory is a deep environmental theory, with much in common with deep
ecology. Like deep ecology, it stands in significant ideological opposition to the dominant
technocratic-industrial way. But, even more than deep ecology, deep-green theory aims to
supply a comprehensive alternative environmental philosophy (in the full senses of those
atrophied terms, esp philosophy ). It seeks to accomplish this, furthermore, without
accumulating the amount of philosophical rubbish deep ecology regularly attracts. For, to
insert a key difference between these ecocentric theories in a deliberately prejudical way: deepgreen theory resembles a deep ecology with the pseudo-scientific garbage removed,
reorganised into a tight, coherent and more comprehensive theory. Deep-green theory, which
has roots that stretch back about as far as its much publicized neighbour, accordingly merits
elaboration separate from deep ecology, which in any case lacks a well-thought-through
valuational and ethical basis. This essay aims to uncover the value theory of deep-green
theory, exposing thereby one central area of deep-green theory. Though the value theory is
(inevitably) abstract, it issues in what is more concrete, such as practical ecological directives,
potentially destabilizing prevailing policies and institutions.
At the core of deep-green theory, as of authentic deep ecology, lies a value theory. A
fundamental theme thereof, part of what makes these positions deep, is that a range of
environmental items are valuable in themselves, directly and irreducibly so, so that their value
does not somehow reduce to or emerge from something else, such as features of certain valuers
or what counts for them. Value then does not answer back in some way to humans, or sentient
creatures (or other value-responsive classes), their interests, uses, preferences, or such like.
Many natural items such as forests and rivers, mountains and seashores, are, as it is often put
(without however any commitment thereby to dubious essentialist or absolute objectivist
positions), intrinsically valuable. They are valuable in their own right - irrespective of whether
they are interesting or useful (to any intentional operators, themselves interesting or useful or
not), indeed whether or not there exist any valuers. Value spreads through and reaches across
the natural domain; it is not bounded by mind or linkages with subjective states; nor does it
stop with sentience, or associated pyschological features like satisfaction; nor (pace deep
ecology) does it end at life; it observes no such compromising bounds. Although value is
distributed richly if irregularly throughout nature, and accordingly may be found in nature, it is
not encapsulated in some isolable natural feature, such as life or sentience, or even in defeasible
ecological values such as richness, diversity and variety (and so subject to a different,
naturalistic, reduction). But of course such ecological features afford criteria for value, and
should be represented in recipes (such as "objective functions") for assessing total value.
From the presence of natural things of value, and accordingly of natural values, it is a
short, though controversial, step to the important conclusion that there can be values without
valuers. For valuers are sentient creatures with appropriate capacities, but things of value may

precede and succeed all such valuers; tfiat is, these things can persist, their values intact,
without any valuers. As there can be shapes without any shape-perceivers, and concepts with
conceivers, so there can be values without valuers. (The theme, like others advanced, can be
backed up by more detailed argument and by formal proof, neither attempted here.) In
valuational relations then, relating valuers as subjects with values as objects, both ends of
relations have independent standing; though interrelated, as the descriptions deliberately chosen
suggest, either can stand without the other. It is a fashionable mistake, which cannot however
be got away with, to try to collapse this relation - usually to endeavour to soak up values into a
modification of valuing subjects (e.g. as a predicate 'relation-to-values', in which inconvenient
values are locked away), not to remove valuers, considered unproblematic, from view. The
mistaken procedure is in fact just one important example of an archetypal reduction of
mainstream modern philosophy, of relations to functions; other examples, locking undesired
objects away within functions, are those rendering wholes (such as ecosystems and organised
structures) functions of their parts, and, under functionalism, minds and types of intentionality,
including value direction, as functions of bodies or their parts such as brains. Values are not,
and do not disappear into, functions of valuers.
A connected corollary is that values are not apart from the actual world, something
"projected" or imposed on it by a favoured class of valuers, something colouring (and even
emotionall y clouding) the otherwise valueless physical world, in rather the way that
reductionistic materialism tries (erroneously) to construe colour itself as projected onto a
colourless physical world. Of course this projection effort, never adequately explicated, does
not succeed, on its own, in removing values. For they remain, left as some function of the
valuers. To try to bulldoze through this difficulty, a second reduction is invoked, of evaluative
features of valuers to "natural" features, commonly preferences, desires or such like. The
second reduction runs into obstacles that halt even the naturalistic bulldozers (e.g. naturalistic
and related fallacies), but the first reduction is the critical one in removing key environmental
values, such as those of wilderness and wild things, which become valuable only in the focus
of certain sentient beholders, and not in and for them self. This reduction too is blocked by
insuperable difficulties. On the one side, like the parallel proposed phenomonalist reduction of
material objects to sensations, the reduction never achievers satisfactory support or even a
satisfactory statement. On the other, it is counterexampled by various modellings or thoughtexperiments revealing intuitively-assessed value in situations devoid of valuers (as e.g. in the
well-known Last Person argument). Values are not apart from the actual world, then, merely
projected onto it by valuers, or else locked up in certain valuers (in the fashion of Carterian
intensions ). Values are part of the world; they are objects in the domain of actual and other
worlds. But they are not of course material objects; creatures will not fall over them any more
than they will trip over shadows or shapes.

Value like the shape and taste, is an3attribute, which things have or may lack, and which
furthermore creatures can recognise or may fail to discern. Thus value is, like colour and taste
and their determinate forms (red, acidic, etc), a universa l , distributed across things,
individuals and wholes. Like shape and colour, value is a high-level universal. The
comparison of value with shape is decidedly more helpful than the standard, but exhausted,
comparison of value with colour, or of goodness with colour determinates such as redness or
yellow. For example, shape is not bound by a set of determinates as colour is in the specific
colours, but comes in a spectacular variety of forms, not totally or linearly ordered (as in a
rainbow), or contracted to some primary set (as in colour traingles); shapes like value pertain to
wholes as well as particulars, and links with gestalts rather better than colour; shape
discrimination is more culture dependent and sensitive; shape is, or was, a primary property,
and thereby more immune to reductionist strategies than secondary properties such as colour,
which is, under physicalism, prized off objects and allegedly relocated in creatures or in their
interrelation with colourless physical things. Shapes like values, can be vague, indeterminate;
that does not prevent things, perhaps unique things, exemplifying them. But naturally the
anology can only be extended so far. Shapes can be approximated by polygons, values cannot;
shapes are regularly perceived through sense perception, by vision or touch especially, values
are not, but are differently apprised. Value is its own thing, not something else; it is what it is
and does what is does, and not something else, like some specialised mathematical or economic
thing. It does not contract to some mark of value or to what it comes down to in highly
restricted settings; most important, it does not disappear in the style of modem economics into
(expected) utility or into just two economic forms, value-in-use monetarily and value-inexchange (price). Value means what it means, and has meant: worth; and it ties with general
assessments of merit and demerit, goodness or badness, not an economic or other cut-down
thereof. Price, for example, may fail entirely to reflect worth, it may have little to do with
goodness of product.
The powerful drive to reduce or deny values has several sources. part of the motivation
for reduction of value springs from epistemological worries, concerning how values can be
ascertained and known, so far as they are (subjective translation proposals are than a direct
evaluative counterpart of phenomenalism). Part derives from supposedly problematic cultural
and subcultural relativity (whence the attempt to impose values by identification of value with
some favoured feature, and cultural or economic imperialism). Part of the motivation comes
from more sweeping ideologic al commitments, such as the varieties of materiali sm
(physicalism esp.) or scientism.
As has become apparent, attempted reductions of value come too in a variety of forms subjective, which made use of psychological features, such as desires, interests, emotions, and
the like or subjective aggregations, such as community preferences or utility; or objectiviely
naturalistic, which enrol value-making characteristics such as richness or evolutionary

development as value - consequential, w~ch consider only outcomes, or purely motivational,
which consider only attitudes and ignore leads and outcomes - straightforward, as in translation
proposals for translating value judgements into reducing statements; or oblique, as in
supervenience propositions (no variations in value without underwriting variations in reducing
features), or obscure, as in unarticulated projection claims. Values are not well accommodated
within theses schemes, or accommodated at all. The idea is abroad however that science can
offer a reduction, can sweep up value along with all other knowledge, where philosophy has
conspicuously failed. Unfortunately for such optimistic ideas, fortunately perhaps for deeper
thought, current science, physics especially, does not have much to say at all, or of merit,
about values, and if it did reductions through it would be circular. But, to the contrary, there is
a long-standing pretence that science gets along "well" without values, in appropriate value-free
fashion. Nowadays it is increasingly realised that such value-freedom is a myth, that much of
what passes as science is heavily value-penetrated. While those engaged purely in purer
science may have the illusion of an escape from value, there is no escape.
Though deep-green value theory is thoroughly nonreductive, it does not sacrifice
warranted claims to scientific and logical adequacy thereby. The reductionistic dichotomies are
avoided and repudiated. Value reduces neither in subjective nor objective fashion; it does not
reduce. Evaluative judgements are certainly not subjective; but nor are they objection in an
absolutist sense; they are nonjective, that is, neither. Somewhat similarly, evaluation of an act
does not reduce to assessing consequences; nor does it come down to an assessment of
motives; both may matter.
In any case, reductions do not succeed, as a copious literature, littered with failed
attempts, meanderingly establishes. Nor are they generally desirable, since mostly shallow,
aiming at a reduction to features of some privileged class presented as ideal (i.e. core value is
covertly assumed). Nor are they needed; explanation and assessment do not require reduction.
Evaluations may be arrived at, and value systems expanded, by enhancement methods, which
consists in emotional presentation (as under Meinong's phenomenological account) organised
by coherence methods. The methodology in fact resembles that sometimes proposed for
acquisition of scientific information. As with accumulated empirial information, which can be
extended through presentational input and assessment for overall coherence, so further
evaluations may be arrived at and assessed through a combination of presentational and
coherence procedures. At the (marginal) stage where the next round of evaluations is
undertaken, the following active ingredients figure, in an idealised breakdown:- Firstly, a
background stock of judgements and experience will have been accumulated or inherited; in
principle all of this is revisable, and some may be up for reassessment. Apart from the
background, which enters in assessing overall coherence of system, what is involved is,
secondly, emotional presentation, which corresponds to further perceptional and sense data
input, and, thirdly and not independent, coherence processing , which supplies the

interpretational and rationalisational comp~nents. At bottom, parallelling perception in the case
of empirical information, is emotional presentation, gut or visceral reaction in starker forms of
acceptance or rejection, but more generally comprehending a variety of sentiments, including
overall well-being, and also relational impressions, such as empathy, identification, and so on.
As a perceiver perceives shapes and taster tastes and goodness, so a valuer feels value and
disvalue.

The basis of perceptio n is sensation , the basis of valuation is emotion.
Apprehension of value is seated in emotional, and especially visceral, presentation; but what is
apprehended is not to be confused with its apprehension any more than what is perceived. All
the warnings about sensation as an information source have to be repeated with heavy
emphasis as regards emotional presentation; for example, reliability cannot be guaranteed,
interference with presentation through drugs, alcohol, temporary excitement or other inputs
may render it dubious or unacceptable, conditioning may have occurred, including substantial
cultural conditioning (so that a person is terrified by huntsmen spiders but not sickened by
bloody massacres of dolphins or seals). As with perception, there are checks on emotional
presentation, such as constancy over time and after reflection.
Emotional presentation, supplying in particular inclusions and exclusions or prohibitions,
is but the basis of reflective evaluation and value apprehension. The further critical part,
coherence processing, builds on the basis taking account of other inputs or controls including
background (which supplies relevant components of already adopted judgements, assimilated
subculture and so forth) and constraints (such as substitutional requirements like impartiality,
e.g. whether considered judgements hold for substitute valuers, and uniformity, e.g. whether
similar acts are judged in similar ways). The coherence procedure consists, in essence, of
asking whether the next or a relevant judgemen t fits together with what has been accepted,
while meeting constraints, without leading to what has been rejected or excluded. If it does fit
it is added to the included side, otherwise it is sent to the excluded side. (The familiar ethical
practice of devising cases and comparing them with the cases in hand can be worked in under
this procedure.) Because an aim of this rationalisation procedure is achievement of some sort
of equilibrium - admitting what is included, while excluding what is unsupported, fails to gain
support, is emotionally spoken against - such coherence procedures have gained currency in
North America under the rubric "reflectiv e equilibrium". Observe, however, that any
equilibriu m gained at some stage may be quickly lost, as new types of problems arise and
further information enters. To be sure, the whole methodology (like the parallel methodology
of a coherence theory of truth) is highly idealised, and only practicably usable in rudimentary
parts. It does however surmount a major obstacle for value theory; it reveals how in principle a
nonreduc tionistic value theory can function. Whether that theory is an appropria te
environmental one or not will depend however above all on the presentational input, the extent
to which environmental sensitivity enters and is not dismissed.

Enhancement methods reveal too tRat value systems are not uniquely determined, any
more than other comprehensive theoretical frameworks, such as those intended to reflect truth.
There can be, there evidently are, rival value systems, measuring up to rigorous rationality
requirements, much as there are rival logics, rival physical and biological theories, and rival
coherent religions. Chauvinistic systems, narrow or shallow value systems, which take no
requisite account of many environmental items, likewise cannot be excluded on rational or
straight logical grounds. Unfortunately such systems remain in ascendancy, and tend to
dominate social practices; in recent times economism, a narrow type of utilitarianism, has all
too obviously dominated much terrestial practice. While such value frameworks are open to
severe criticism, for instance as chauvinistic, as violating universality requirements of morality
in the case of economism, they do not succumb to definitive refutation (for the reason that
requirements of morality, of universalizability of principle, impartiality and so on, can be
repudiated; immoral or amoral frameworks are still value systems). Of course a range of
argumentative, educational and persuasive techniques, of varying equality, can be put to work
to move valuers who adhere to other structures, often enough successfully. Emotional
presentation of environmental items, by way of new experience and information, is important
among these. In short, much can be done to shift or alter values, though as usual effectiveness
cannot be guaranteed.
The availability of rival value systems and prospect of yet others, while it implies a
certain desirable (and also troublesome) pluralism, does not mean relativism. Neither deep
green theory nor authentic deep ecology espouse any superficially easy relativism. From their
viewpoint, rival narrower and shallower systems are definitely inferior , and marked down
accordingly, while economism is an onathema which does not even make the moral grade (e.g.
too many principles stop at state boundaries). However a critical pluralism does acknowledge,
and offer a place, in the wider scheme of things for other positions, even if as less favoured or
satisfactory. Politically then, deep positions can allow for, what makes good sense in these
times of numbers, alliances. Hence the point of a green alliance, combining green positions,
against still prevailing anti-environmentalism and economism.
The value system pluralism of deep-green theory interpenetrates not only social and
political domains above, but also metaphysics traditionally placed below. In the underlying
metaphysical pluralism of deep-green theory, value runs very deep - so deep that even truth
depends in part upon it. For not merely selection of a correct comprehensive theory or worldview, but choice of associated actual world, is a value dependent choice. That choice, insofar
as it is consciously made, of world conceptualisation and structure, is a constrained choice,
constrained by informational inputs, such as those of refined perception. But in as much as it
is rationally accomplished, that choice, like other choices of structure, proceeds according to a
standard value-information analysis (regularly oversimplified however to a preference-

information or even desire-belief modellin1); that is, to get to the salient point, it involves value
essentially.
Truth and value are then intertwined. Their relation, not one of identity (for contrary to
idealism, there are many relations not identical with identity), can now be stated more
accurately than the poets have managed. Neither is one; both are plural, and differently so. In
certain significant respects the metaphysics resembles the value theory. For example, as the
value theory is nonreductionistic, so also is the metaphysics; in particular, there is a noreduction theme that neither parts nor wholes reduce eliminably to one another, as opposed to
atomistic and holistic views of environmental interrelations. As the value theory is pluralistic
so also is the metaphysics; what needs to be discerned, in place of absolutism, is a plurality of
worlds and of associated truth characterisations. A main aim of a thoroughgoing
environmental theory is to displace very destructive dominant ideasystems, regularly presented
as absolute, which incorporate both value and truth themes concerning the environment and its
organisation.
Much of deep-green theory devolves then from the abstract value theory, beginning (to
take a more accessible route than the metaphysical way) with a more comprehensive ethical
theory, which includes as well as a specific axiological theory, elaborating environmental
values and virtues, a deontic theory, supplying obligations, rights, taboos, and similar. For
example, given that a certain wild river is intrinsically valuable, as we can verify by on-site
experience and enhancement methods, and given that we duly respect that value, as deontic
principles will tell us we should, then we are not free to do as we like with that river, to dam it
with concrete, to channel it within concrete, stripping it of its riverine ecosystems. But that
does not preclude respectful use of the river, swimming or sailing quitely in its waters, and so
on. Value thus guides action, practice, and use; it is the ground also upon which principles are
formulated, principles that are assessed and validated by way of enhancement methods.
Important among these are non-interference principles, which exclude unwarranted interference
with other preference-havers and unwarranted damage, ill-treatment, or devaluation of items of
value. Such deontic principles circumscribe environmentally-limited freedom of action. Given
non-interference principles, a major shift in onus of proof from homocentricthics takes place.
What is required now is that reasons be givenfor interfering with the environment, rather than
reasons for not doing so.

Also direct responsibility for environmental interference or
modification falls upon those who would interfere or significantly modify, who would tread
heavily on the land. Non-interference does not preclude use, only too much use and use of too
much. What it does lead to is the theme that, where use occurs, it should be careful and
respectful use.
An important respect thesis regarding environmental items is founded on such
interference principles and the no-reduction theme: namely




8

not to put others (other preference havers) into a dispreferred state for no good reason;
not to jeopardis e the well being of natural objects or systems without good reason;



not to damage or destroy items which, while they cannot literally be put into a
dispreferred state, can be damaged or destroyed or have their value eroded or impaired.
These apply to ecosystem s, their surrounds, their parts, and so on. The mere making of
further excess profits, or similar economic excuses, are not good reasons. Such a respect
thesis form part of the ecological outlook of deep-green theory.
As permissib ility, obligatio n and respect principles can be explained through the
valuations reached on the theory, so too can rights and other significant components of morality
be explained and justified through, but again not reduced to, values. For example, a creature
has a right to something if it has a valid title thereto established from correct moral principles.
Candidates for the parameter "something" provide a familiar list: freedom from unnecessary
suffering, respectful treatment, satisfaction of basic needs, and so on. Such rights accordingly
derive from and reinforce corresponding deontic principles.
Deep-gre en ethical theory is much more than just another non-redu ctionist ethical
theory, which highlights ecological values and virtues, and so forth. It changes the character
and shape of ethical enterprise. Perhaps most strikingly, it removes humans as such from the
centre of the ethical stage (or exclusive occupation of the stage). The biological concept of
being human is not, contrary to prevailing humanism, a highly significant ethical category. To
elevate it to such is to fall into human chauvinis m, a type of class chauvini sm which
unwarrantedly discriminates in favour of the human species. The prevailing chauvinis m is
avoided through a natural annular model, which connects ethical characteristics directly with the
categorie s of items that can have them. Relevant categories include those marked out by
features like: having well-being, preference-having, rights-holding, contractual-capability, and
so on, categories not necessarily connected with any particular species. Hitherto virtually all
Western ethical theories have not merely so limited ethical matters predominately to inter-human
affairs, but have been blantantly chauvinistic, exhibiting a substantial, discrimin ately and
unjustifiably bias in favour of humans (of certain privileged humans). These sorts of systems
should be superseded; it is not a matter of simple adjustments or extensions.
Deep-gre en value theory, as developed, implies the inadequacy of prevailing social,
political and economic arrangements and institutions, both those of a mixed capitalistic kind and
those of a more state socialistic cast. They are the (devious) product of inferior value
frameworks which take quite insufficient account of environmental considerations and values.
But explainin g their deficiencies, and indicating more satisfactory green alternatives and
replacements, is another chapter in the elaboration of deep-green theory.

9

*

Richard Sylvan*
RMB 683
B ungendore NSW 2621

For more on deep-green theory and deep ecology, see for instance essays in and work referred to in the
Green Series, i.e. Discussion Papers in Environme ntal Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National
University, Canberra.

Annex
1. Most people inherit their value framework along with their culture. Many never do any
substantial overhaul. Many indeed are not active or responsible valuers. But in these respects,
values are not so different from other things. Some people are poor judges of shape; many
never learn to distinguish plants, or to discriminate among wines.
Likewise for other choices, options, major changes, metaphysical and even political.
Mostly that a choice has been made or inherited and is incorporated in the subculture is not
noticed, along with its not been observed how arbitrary many of the choices and resulting
structures are (in Foucault has emphasized). Of course it is often not in the interests of the
power elite, who control media outlets, etc., that this sort of arbitrariness should be widely
known, and alternative structures considered and perhaps experimented with.
Choices occur where distinctive circumstance prevail. For instance, there is serious
scarcity; food supplies in particular are threatened (e.g. with being out of reach is price, with
pollution, etc.). Differently, circumstances lead to conversions, as when a new ideology
sweeps through, enthusiam generated by some charismatic figures.

/

bits from chapter 2
There is another important elasticity. In contemporary ethical theory there is a concerted
attempt to build on universalizability requirement or the equivalent into the very motion of ethics.
The evident result is that selfish systems of induction and conduct, systematic egoisms for
instance are refused the title of ethics, and as an important corollary questions like Why be
ethical? become vexed. 1 Given, in particular, that any such "universality" requirement is
problematic in this formulation, and typically limited, chauvinistically to persons, a superior
course proceeds to distinguish: between ethics as already characterised (reportively) and its
subclass, universalizable ethics. As impartial ethical do have much to recommend them, let us
coin a convenient portmonteau term condensing the chancy "universalerable ethics", namely
euthics. (Conveniently then an euthical supports unethical, which is what from a properly
ethical stance it is!)
There is undoubtedly some pressure to have ethics and morality extend beyond a single or
isolated individual (even so, a Causal ethics is understood, as is egoisticmorality). But that
pressure does not extend very far; and such notions as those of a tribal morality and an
upperclass ethics are not defective on significance grounds, even if they are objectional on
substantive grounds.
Such restricted ethics are not however immediately ruled out by such requirements as that
like cases be assessed alike, and that differences of assessment be based on relevant
differences. 2 For a tribalist or racist can respond that a foreigner is not like a Greek, or that there
are relevant differences between whites and blacks (intelligence has been proposed as such a
difference, when skin pigmentation appeared a merely superficial difference). These sorts of
responses, which were longer accepted, are no longer acceptable, because the differences put up
are not considered ethically relevant differences (correctly enough, though ethical relevance itself
lacks an adequate explanation).
Singer's main argument for a much wider point of view, universality, commits in a
extensive appel to authority (p.11).
What is offered: an appeal to usage.
'the notion of ethics carries with it the idea of something bigger than the individual'. [It
often does, but it may not.] 'If I am to defend my conduct in ethical grounds, I cannot point
only to the benefits it brings me. I wont address myself to a larger audience' (p.10). That

On both, narrowing and vexing, see Singer lmpractual ethics (Singer aquates moral with

ethical). Singer does not really have an answer to Why be moral? though he thinks it not a bad idea; mainly he
tries to put down shuffles that have been presented or decisive.
2

These requirements are presented byu Attfield as basic formal requirements of reason (p.6). No

doubt they are, though they appear to figure in no logic of ethics yet formulated.

depends on the conduct concerned. More important the audience does not need to be much
larger, certainly not universal: my family or law will suffice often enough.

J.
From Chap 4
Evaluations may be arrived at, and value systems expanded, by enhancement methods,
which consists in emotional presentation (as under Meinong's phenomenological account)
organised by coherence methods. The methodology in fact resembles that sometimes proposed
for acquisition of scientific information. As with accumulated empirial information, which can
be extended through presentational input and assessment for overall coherence, so further
evaluations may be arrived at and assessed through a combination of presentational and
coherence procedures. At the (marginal) stage where the next round of evaluations is
undertaken, the following active ingredients figure, in an idealised breakdown:- Firstly, a
background stock of judgements and experience will have been accumulated or inherited; in
principle all of this is revisable, and some may be up for reassessment. Apart from the
background, which enters in assessing overall coherence of system, what is involved is,
secondly, emotional presentation, which corresponds to further perceptional and sense data
input, and, thirdly and not independent, coherence processing, which supplies the
interpretational and rationalisational components. At bottom, parallelling perception in the case
of empirical information, is emotional presentation, gut or visceral reaction in starker forms of
acceptance or rejection, but more generally comprehending a variety of sentiments, including
overall well-being, and also relational impressions, such as empathy, identification, and so on.
As a perceiver perceives shapes and taster tastes and goodness, so a valuer feels value and
disvalue. The basis of perception is sensation, the basis of valuation is emotion. Apprehension
of value is seated in emotional, and especially visceral, presentation; but what is apprehended is
not to be confused with its apprehension any more than what is perceived. All the warnings
about sensation as an information source have to be repeated with heavy emphasis as regards
emotional presentation; for example, reliability cannot be guaranteed, interference with
presentation through drugs, alcohol, temporary excitement or other inputs may render it
dubious or unacceptable, conditioning may have occurred, including substantial cultural
conditioning (so that a person is terrified by huntsmen spiders but not sickened by bloody
massacres of dolphins or seals). As with perception, there are checks on emotional
presentation, such as constancy over time and after reflection.
Emotional presentation, supplying in particular inclusions and exclusions or prohibitions,
is but the basis of reflective evaluation and value apprehension. The further critical part,
coherence processing, builds on the basis taking account of other inputs or controls including
background (which supplies relevant components of already adopted judgements, assimilated
subculture and so forth) and constraints (such as substitutional requirements like impartiality,
e.g. whether considered judgements hold for substitute valuers, and uniformity, e.g. whether
similar acts are judged in similar ways). The coherence procedure consists, in essence, of
asking whether the next or a relevant judgement fits together with what has been accepted, while

meeting constraints, without leading to what has been rejected or excluded. If it does
fit it is
added to the included side, otherwise it is sent to the excluded side. (The familiar ethical
practice
of devising cases and compari ng them with the cases in hand can be worked in under
this
procedure.) Because an aim of this rationalisation procedure is achievement of some
sort of
equilibr ium - admitting what is included, while excluding what is unsupported, fails
to gain
support, is emotionally spoken against - such coherence procedures have gained currency
in
North Americ a under the rubric "reflect ive equilibr ium". Observe , howeve r, that
any
equilibr ium gained at some stage may be quickly lost, as new types of problem s arise
and
further information enters. To be sure, the whole methodology (like the parallel methodo
logy of
a coherence theory of truth) is highly idealised, and only practicably usable in rudimentary
parts.
It does howeve r surmou nt a major obstacle for value theory; it reveals how in principl
e a
nonredu ctionist ic value theory can function . Whethe r that theory is an appropr
iate
environmental one or not will depend however above all on the presentational input, the extent
to
which environmental sensitivity enters and is not dismissed.

end
The availability of rival value systems and prospect of yet others, while it implies a certain
desirabl e (and also troublesome) pluralism, does not mean relativism. Neither deep
green
theory nor authenti c deep ecology espouse any superficially easy relativism. From
their
viewpoint, rival narrowe r and shallow er systems are definitely inferior , and marked
down
accordingly, while econom ism is an onathema which does not even make the moral grade
(e.g.
too many principles stop at state bo':lndaries). However a critical pluralism does acknow
ledge,
and offer a place, in the wider scheme of things for other positions, even if as less favoured
or
satisfactory. Politically then, deep positions can allow for, what makes good sense in
these
times of numbers, alliances. Hence the point of a green alliance, combining green position
s,
against still prevailing anti-environmentalism and economism.
The value system pluralis m of deep-green theory interpenetrates not only social and
political domains above, but also metaphysics traditionally placed below. In the underly
ing
metaphysical pluralis m of deep-green theory, value runs very deep - so deep that even
truth
depends in part upon it. For not merely selection of a correct comprehensive theory or
worldview, but choice of associated actual world, is a value dependent choice. That choice,
insofar
as it is conscio usly made, of world conceptualisation and structure, is a constrai ned
choice,
constrained by informational inputs, such as those of refined perception. But in as much
as it is
rationally accomplished, that choice, like other choices of structure, proceeds accordin
g to a
standard value-in formati on analysis (regular ly oversim plified howeve r to a preferen
ceinformation or even desire-belief modelling); that is, to get to the salient point, it involves
value
essentially.

Truth and value are then intertwined. Their relation, not one of identity (for contrary to
idealism, there are many relations not identical with identity), can now be stated more accurately
than the poets have managed. Neither is one; both are plural, and differently so. In certain
significant respects the metaphysics resembles the value theory. For example, as the value
theory is nonreductionistic, so also is the metaphysics; in particular, there is a no-reduction
theme that neither parts nor wholes reduce eliminably to one another, as opposed to atomistic
and holistic views of environmental interrelations. As the value theory is pluralistic so also is
the metaphysics; what needs to be discerned, in place of absolutism, is a plurality of worlds and
of associated truth characterisations. A main aim of a thoroughgoing environmental theory is to
displace very destructive dominant ideasystems, regularly presented as absolute, which
incorporate both value and truth themes concerning the environment and its organisation.
Much of deep-green theory devolves then from the abstract value theory, beginning (to
take a more accessible route than the metaphysical way) with a more comprehensive ethical
theory, which includes as well as a specific axiological theory, elaborating environmental values
and virtues, a deontic theory, supplying· obligations, rights, taboos, and similar. For example,
given that a certain wild river is intrinsically valuable, as we can verify by on-site experience and
enhancement methods, and given that we duly respect that value, as deontic principles will tell
us we should, then we are not free to do as we like with that river, to dam it with concrete, to
channel it within concrete, stripping it of its riverine ecosystems. But that does not preclude
respectful use of the river, swimming or sailing quitely in its waters, and so on. Value thus
guides action, practice, and use; it is the ground also upon which principles are formulated,
principles that are assessed and validated by way of enhancement methods. Important among
these are non-interference principles, which exclude unwarranted interference with other
preference-havers and unwarranted damage, ill-treatment, or devaluation of items of value.
Such deontic principles circumscribe environmentally-limited freedom of action. Given noninterference principles, a major shift in onus of proof from homocentricthics takes place. What
is required now is that reasons be given for interfering with the environment, rather than
reasons for not doing so. Also direct responsibility for environme ntal interferenc e or
modification falls upon those who would interfere or significantly modify, who would tread
heavily on the land. Non-interference does not preclude use, only too much use and use of too
much. What it does lead to is the theme that, where use occurs, it should be careful and
respectful use.
An important respect thesis regarding environme ntal items is founded on such
interference principles and the no-reduction theme: namely

not to put others (other preference havers) into a dis preferred state for no good reason;


not to jeopardise the well being of natural objects or systems without good reason;



not to damage or destroy items which, while they cannot literally be put into a
dispreferred state, can be damaged or destroyed or have their value eroded or impaired.
These apply to ecosystems, their surrounds, their parts, and so on. The mere making of further
excess profits, or similar economic excuses, are not good reasons. Such a respect thesis form
part of the ecological outlook of deep-green theory.
As permissibility, obligation and respect principles can be explained through the
valuations reached on the theory, so too can rights and other significant components of morality
be explained and justified through, but again not reduced to, values. For example, a creature
has a right to something if it has a valid title thereto established from correct moral principles.
Candidates for the parameter "something" provide a familiar list: freedom from unnecessary
suffering, respectful treatment, satisfaction of basic needs, and so on. Such rights accordingly
derive from and reinforce corresponding deontic principles.
Deep-green ethical theory is much more than just another non-reductionist ethical theory,
which highlights ecological values and virtues, and so forth. It changes the character and shape
of ethical enterprise. Perhaps most strikingly, it removes humans as such from the centre of the
ethical stage (or exclusive occupation of the stage). The biological concept of being human is
not, contrary to prevailing humanism, a highly significant ethical category. To elevate it to such
is to fall into human chauvinism, a type of class chauvinism which unwarrantedly discriminates
in favour of the human species. The prevailing chauvinism is avoided through a natural annular
model, which connects ethical characteristics directly with the categories of items that can have
them. Relevant categories include those marked out by features like: having well-being,
preference-having, rights-holding, contractual-capability, and so on, categories not necessarily
connected with any particular species. Hitherto virtually all Wes tern ethical theories have not
merely so limited ethical matters predominately to inter-human affairs, but have been blantantly
chauvinistic, exhibiting a substantial, discriminately and unjustifiably bias in favour of humans
(of certain privileged humans). These sorts of systems should be superseded; it is not a matter
of simple adjustments or extensions.
Deep-green value theory, as developed, implies the inadequacy of prevailing social,
political and economic arrangements and institutions, both those of a mixed capitalistic kind and
those of a more state socialistic cast. They are the (devious) product of inferior value
frameworks which take quite insufficient account of environmental considerations and values.
But explaining their deficiencies, and indicating more satisfactory green alternatives and
replacements, is another chapter in the elaboration of deep-green theory.
Deep-green theory is a deep environmental theory, with much in common with deep
ecology. Like deep ecology, it stands in significant ideological opposition to the dominant
technocratic-industrial way. But, even more than deep ecology, deep-green theory aims to
supply a comprehensive alternative environmental philosophy (in the full senses of those

atrophied terms, esp philosophy ). It seeks to accomplish this, furthermore, without
accumulating the amount of philosophical rubbish deep ecology regularly attracts. For, to insert
a key difference between these ecocentric theories in a deliberately prejudical way: deep-green
theory resembles a deep ecology with the pseudo-scientific garbage removed, reorganised into a
tight, coherent and more comprehensive theory. Deep-green theory, which has roots that stretch
back about as far as its much publicized neighbour, accordingly merits elaboration separate from
deep ecology, which in any case lacks a well-thought-through valuational and ethical basis.
This essay aims to uncover the value theory of deep-green theory, exposing thereby one central
area of deep-green theory. Though the value theory is (inevitably) abstract, it issues in what is
more concrete, such as practical ecological directives, potentially destabilizing prevailing policies
and institutions.

ETHICS AND METAPHYSICS:
their relevance to one another
There is rich range of incompatible claims about the mutual interelations of the two
ancient subjects. Most of these claims appear mistaken. Sorting out something of what looks
right is a daunting task, a small beginning on which is attempted here.
Initial severe difficulties derive from the vagueness, in determinacy and problematicality
of the relata, both of which are ill-understood by philosophers metaphysics especially. Many
there are who think that metaphyscis coincides with ontology, the study (description,
explanation and understanding) of what exists. 1 The general study of what there is, sistology,
which includes ontology as a very proper part, is only one facet of metaphysics (unless it is
presumed that items somehow supply also all propositions concerning them). For sistology is
the totality of things side of metaphysics, there is also the totality of true propositions side
(propositionology, for a nice term). Metaphysics also comprises the study of the very general
attributes of this and other universe and of what accounts for these attributes (or propositional
functions). In technical terms, then, a metaphysics amount to a very general and
comprehensi ve constrained model; and metaphysics to the plural assembly of these
metaphysics. 2 Each metaphysics will be constrained (as will become clear through examples
given below) through modelling conditions or postulates (which delimit how "altimate reality"
is according to that system).
Metaphysics is sometimes construed more comprehencisvely to include some or all of
epistemology (knowledge of "ultimate reality" for instance), some of or all of other branches of
philosophy, perhaps all of philosophy. Plainly, if metaphysics, so expansively construed,
includes ethics, then their relation is straightforward, metaphysics includes ethics. But we shall
not adopt such construals.
Whereas metaphysics concerns features of universes, ethics is a study of moral values and
principles, and of rules and practices of conduct. A case can be made out that an ethic is
outlined through its distributions of values, in terms of which both deontic features (rights,
obligations, etc) and axiological features (goodness, etc) can be discerned. (Utilitarian can
afford a crude exemplar). So, without loss of generality, I can concentrate on the relation of
value theory to metaphysics.
Now a value theory does not derive from a purely naturalistic metaphysic, by virtue of a
rectified naturalistic fallacy. But, firstly even is a value theory may be influenced or even
construed by such a metaphysics. For example if the theory rules out all but primary qualities

2

What there is according to most Western philosophers, still labouring under the probleminducing Ontological Assumption. For such a confusion of ontology with metaphysics see
Forrest p.3.
For the bsis of this large (and estrageous) technical leap, see DP.

2

as some sort of constructs, the value qualities will have to be explained as constructs,
projections or similar. Secondly, a metaphysics is unlikely to be purely naturalistic.
Metaphysics is not a value-free enterprise; a metaphysics typically presumes a range of
presumptions, including archivative ones (deeper examples include assumptions of primary,
e.g. of certain sorts of objects, of importance, e.g. of what exists, of implicit world selection,
e.g. the world is Newtonian, Copenhagen quantum, or obitives).
An ethics does not determine a meta-ethics or therefore a metaphysics. Nor does the
converse hold. A metaphysics does not in general determine an ethics, but is compatible with
many.
Against the stock determination and priority claims, I want to oppose interaction and no
priority themes. Determination claims are commonplace in philosophers who wish to wield the
big stock of dominant science to settle ethics (or mataethics). For instance Collicott asserts that
"intrinsic value in nature ... remains ... painfully inconsistent with the ... modern scientific
world-view' (Celbration of Robton p.14, similarly p.22, whence
CD 1. Modern scientific metaphysics entails there are no intrinsic values in nature.
This is not a lapse (though soon Collicott will weaken his determination claims) because almost
immediately Collicott goes on to assert
CD2. 'A value neutral nature is ... an immediate inference from the institutionalised
metaphysical foundations of modern science' (p.15).
Given some large assumptions, most conspiciously that the metaphysics involved is that of
British empiricism, the claim CD2 become incontestable. For under that empiricism, as
elaborated by Locke and Hurve, non primary qualities like value and colour are not part of or in
nature, but substantially subjective in character. However insitutionalized those foundations an important issue -

it has since become apparent that there are at least several parts of
operative sciences, such a classical and quantum; namely a core calculus or formalism;
operational rules for connecting the formalism with testable data and making in ..... applications;
and layers of interpretation. It is in these separable, and variable, larger of interpretation that
metaphysical and elaborative princi;es begin to enter conspicuously.
The "institutionalized" interpretation is but one among the interpretations that can be
fitted to classical formalism. It is an interpretation incorperating some major and controverisial
philosophical theories, such as the reference theory and verificationism. Rival interpretations
are feasible and were developed, for instance by the Scottish comon-sense school. Such rival
foundations do not yield a value-free value neutral nature. Collicott calls upon Rolston 'to
provide a persuasive alternative to the integral set of Carterian-Gohblein-Humean assumptions
that render the subjective provenance of value so fundamental to the modern scientific outlook'
(p.16). But Rolston hardly needs to do any such thing 3 : it has already been done, in various
3

Rolston makes giving an appropriate interpretation for more difficult than he need by conceeding
"seconddoary" qualities to the reductionistic opposition.
Thus, regressively: 'the greenness of the tree is in my hand, but it looks as though the tree is

3

ways, and, in any case, as Collicott soon observes, 'the modern scientific worldview is
obsolete' (p.19). The property for a full value-in-nature theory are little better under postmodern quantum theory, Collicott however insinuates, then they were before. Under a
Copenhagen interpretations, which he adopts, prospects look worse.
Abruptly too Collicott switches from a determination thesis, such as CD, to a slacker and
more plausible if vaguer linkage. The linkage appears in different nonequivalent forms:
CL 1. A science, such as 'the new physics might play an architectonic role in our eventual
thinking about nature (and human society)' (p.23 itals added).
Subsequently, 'architectonic role' is replaced through the as vague 'inspired by' and more
specific 'mapped out'.
CL2. 'A value thoery [may be] inspired by, and mapped on, ... quantum physics (p.25, where
reduction and derviation are now explicitly repudiated!).
Such a value theory is, it is claimed, 'particularly congenial to an ecologically informed
environmental ethics' (p.25). Whether it is, or not, depends on other-things, such as the sort of
interpretation of quantum theory, the congeniality of that with ecology. No doubt values in
nature without values is excluded under the Copenhagen interpretation, so is much else that
makes good sense. Fortunately there are congenial alternatives.
REFERENCES

P.R.H. Forrest, Speculation and Experience the New Metaphysics, Inaugural Public Lecture,
University of New England, N.S.W., 1987.
J.B. Callicott, 'Ralston's Environmental Ethics: A critical celbration', critical response at APA,
Oakland, March 1989.
R. Sylvan, Deep Plurallism, Australian National University, Research School of Social Science,
1993.

green. OUt there are only ....... waves... . The greenness is projected, more factural in my head
and apparently hung on the tree'. What a ridiculous idea.

'

,,.

ON THE VALUE CORE OF DEEP-GREEN THEORY
This essay aims to uncover the value theory of deep-green theory, exposing thereby a
central area of that theory. Though the value theory is (inevitably) abstract, it issues in what is
more concrete, such as an applicable system and practical ecological directives, potentially
destabilizing for prevailing policies and institutions.
Deep-green theory which stands in significant ideological opposition to dominant
industrial ways, is intended to supply a comprehensive alternative environmental philosophy.
At the core of deep-green theory lies a value theory. A fundamental theme thereof, part of what
makes the structure deep, is that a range of environmental items are valuable in themselves,
directly and irreducibly so, so that their value does not somehow reduce to or emerge from
something else, such as features of certain valuers or what matters for them. Thus value does
not answer back in some way to humans, or sentient creatures (or other value-responsive
classes), their interests, uses, preferences, or such like. Many natural items, such as forests
and rivers, mountains and seashores, are intrinsically valuable. They are valuable in their own
right - irrespective of whether they are interesting or useful (to any intentional operators,
themselves interesting or useful or not), indeed whether or not there exist any valuers. Value
spreads through and reaches across the natural domain; it is not bounded by mind, or linkages
with subjective states; nor does it stop with sentience, or associated pyschological features like
satisfaction; nor does it end at life; it observes no such compromising bounds. Although value
is distributed richly if irregularly throughout nature, it is not then encapsulated in some isolable
natural feature, such as life or sentience, or even in defeasible ecological values such as
richness, diversity and variety (and so open to a different, naturalistic, reduction). But of
course such ecologically important features afford criteria for value, and should be represented
in recipes (such as "objective functions") for assessing overall value.
From the presence of natural things of value, and accordingly of natural values, it is a
short, though controversial, step to the important conclusion that there can be values without
valuers. For valuers are sentient creatures with appropriate capacities, but things of value may
precede and succeed all such valuers; that is, these things can persist, their values intact,
without any valuers. As there can be shapes without any shape.:.perceivers, so there can be
values without valuers. (The theme, like others advanced, can be backed up by more detailed
argument and by formal proof, neither attempted here.) In valuational relations then, which
relate valuers as subjects with values as objects, both ends of relations have independent
standing; though interrelated, as the descriptions are deliberately chosen to suggest, either can
stand without the other. It is a fashionable mistake to try to collapse this relation - usually to
endeavour to soak up values into a modification of valuing subjects (e.g. as a predicate

'relation-to-values', in which inconvenierZt values are locked away). The mistaken procedure
is in fact just one important example of an archetypal modern reduction of relations to
functions; other examples, locking undesired objects away within functions, are those
rendering wholes (such as ecosystems and organised structures) functions of their parts, and,
under functionalism, minds and types of intentionality, including value-direction, as functions
of bodies or their parts such as brains. Values are not, and do not disappear into, functions of
valuers.
A connected corollary is that values are not apart from the actual world, something
"projected" or imposed on it by a favoured class of valuers, something colouring (and even
emotionally clouding) the otherwise valueless physical world, in rather the way that
reductionistic materialism tries (erroneously) to construe colour itself as projected onto a
colourless physical world. Of course this projection effort, never adequately explicated, does
not succeed, on its own, in removing values. For they remain, left as some function of the
valuers. To try to bulldoze through this difficulty, a second reduction is invoked, of evaluative
features of valuers to "natural" features, commonly preferences, consumer desires or such like.
The second reduction runs into obstacles that halt even the naturalistic bulldozers (e.g.
naturalistic and related fallacies), but the first reduction is the critical one in removing key
environmental values, such as those of wilderness and wild things, which become valuable
only in the focus of certain sentient beholders, and not in and for themselves. This reduction
too is blocked by insuperable difficulties. On the one side, like the parallel proposed
phenomenalist reduction of material objects to sensations, the reduction never achieves
satisfactory support or even a satisfactory statement. On the other, it is counterexampled by
various modellings or thought-experiments revealing intuitively-assessed value in situations
devoid of valuers (as e.g. in the well-known Last Person argument). Values remain then part
of the still rich actual world; they are objects in the domain of actual and other worlds. But
they are not of course material objects; creatures will not fall over them any more than they will
trip over shadows or mere shapes.
Value, like shape, is an attribute, which things have or may lack, and which furthermore
creatures can recognise or may fail to discern. Thus value is, like shape and colour and their
determinate forms (round, red, etc), a universal , distributed across things, individuals and
wholes. The comparison of value with shape is decidedly more helpful than the regular, but
exhausted, comparison of value with colour, or of goodness with colour determinates such as
yellow. For example, shape is not bound by a set of determinates as colour is in the specific
colours, but comes in a spectacular variety of forms, not totally or linearly ordered (as in a
rainbow), or contracted to some primary set (as in colour triangles); shape which pertains to
wholes as well as particulars, links with gestalts better than colour; shape discrimination is
more culture dependent and sensitive; yet shape is, or was, a primary property, and thereby

more immune to reductionist strategies thJn secondary properties such as colour. Again shapes
like values, can be vague, indeterminate; that does not prevent things, perhaps unique things,
exemplifying them. But naturally the analogy can only be extended so far. Shapes can be
approximated by polygons, values cannot; shapes are regularly perceived through sense
perception, by vision or touch especially, values are not, but are differently apprised. Value is
its own thing, not something else; it is what it is and does what is does; it is not something
else, like some quantitative mathematical or economic function. Nor does it contract into some
mark of value, or to what it comes down to in highly restricted settings; most important, it does
not disappear in the style of modern economics into (expected) utility, or into just two
economic forms, value-in-use monetarily and value-in-exchange (price), neither of which may
reflect worth. Value means what it means, and has meant: worth ; and it ties with general
assessments of merit and demerit, goodness or badness, not an economic or other truncation
thereof.
The powerful drive to reduce or deny values has several sources. Part of the motivation
for reduction of value springs from epistemological worries, concerning how values can be
ascertained and known, so far as they are (subjective translation proposals are then a direct
evaluative counterpart of phenomenalism). Part derives from supposedly problematic cultural
relativity (whence the attempt to impose values by identification of value with some favoured
assessible feature, and with it cultural or economic imperialism). Part of the motivation comes
from more sweeping ideological commitments, such as varieties of materialism or scientism,
which leave no space for immaterial values.
As already apparent, attempted reductions of value come in a dazzling variety of forms • subjective, which make use of psychological features, such as desires, interests, emotions,
and the like; or more objective aggregations of these, such as community preferences or utility;
or objectively naturalistic, which enrol single track value-making characteristics such as
richness or evolutionary development as value;
• consequential, which consider only outcomes; or purely motivational, which consider only
attitudes and ignore leads and outcomes;
• straightforward, as in translation proposals for translating value judgements into reducing
statements; or oblique, as in supervenience propositions (no variations in value without
underwriting variations in reducing features); or obscure, as in unarticulated projection claims.
Values are not well accommodated within these reductionistic schemes, or accommodated at all.
Deep-green value theory, which is thoroughly nonreductive, repudiates all these reductionistic
options. They are not so difficult to avoid, as the options are neither exhaustive nor exclusive.
In particular, value reduces neither in subjective nor objective fashion; it does not reduce.
Evaluative judgements are nonjective, that is, neither subjective nor objective (in any absolutist

4

fashion). Obversely, evaluation of an act does not reduce to assessing consequences; nor does
it come down to an assessment of motives; both may matter.
The virulent idea is abroad however that science can offer a reduction, can sweep up
value along with all other information, where philosophy has conspicuously failed.
Unfortunately for such optimistic ideas, fortunately perhaps for deeper thought, current basic
science does not have much to say at all, or of merit, about values, and if it did reductions
through it would be circular. But, to the contrary, there is a long-standing pretence that science
gets along "well" without values, in appropriate value-free fashion. Nowadays it is
increasingly realised that the positivistic assumption of such value-freedom is a myth, that
much of what passes as science is heavily value-penetrated. While the residual ideal of pure
engagement in pure science may offer the illusion of an escape from value, there is no escape.
For, in any case, reductions do not succeed, as a copious literature, littered with failed
attempts, meanderingly establishes. Nor are they generally desirable, since mostly shallow,
aiming at a reduction to features of some privileged class presented as ideal (i.e. core value is
covertly assumed, so there is no real reduction). Nor are they needed; explanation and
assessment do not require reduction. Evaluations may be arrived at, and value frameworks
expanded, by enhancement methods, which organise and expand emotional presentation by
coherence methods.
The enhancement methodology in fact resembles that sometimes proposed for further
acquisition of scientific information. As accumulated empirical information can be further
extended through presentational input and assessment for overall coherence, so further
evaluations may be arrived at and assessed through a combination of presentational and
coherence procedures. At the (marginal) stage where the next round of evaluations is
undertaken, the following active ingredients figure, in an idealised breakdown:- Firstly, a
background stock of judgements and value experience will have been accumulated or inherited;
in principle all of this is revisable, and some may be up for reassessment. Apart from the
background, which enters in assessing overall coherence of system, what is involved is,
secondly, emotional presentation, which corresponds to further perceptional and sense data
input, and, thirdly and not independent, coherence processing, which supplies the
interpretational and rationalisational components. At bottom, parallelling perception in the case
of empirical information, is emotional presentation, gut or visceral reaction in starker forms of
acceptance or rejection, but more generally comprehending a variety of sentiments, including
overall well-being, and also relational impressions, such as empathy, identification, and so on.
As a perceiver perceives shapes, so a valuer feels raw value and disvalue. The basis of
perception is sensation, the basis of valuation is emotion. Apprehension of value is seated in
emotional, and especially visceral, presentation; but what is apprehended is not to be confused
with its apprehension any more than what is perceived. All the warnings about sensation as an

information source have to be repeat~d, with heavy emphasis, as regards emotional
presentation; for example, reliability cannot be guaranteed, interference with presentation
through drugs, alcohol, temporary excitement or other inputs may render it dubious or
unacceptable, conditioning may have occurred, including substantial cultural conditioning (so
that a person is terrified by harmless spiders but not sickened by bloody massacres of dolphins
or seals). As with perception, there are checks on emotional presentation, such as constancy
over time and after reflection.
Emotional presentation, supplying primarily inclusions and exclusions or prohibitions, is
but the basis of reflective evaluation and value apprehension. The further critical part,
coherence processing, builds on the basis taking account of other inputs or controls including
background (which supplies relevant components of already adopted judgements, assimilated
subculture and so forth) and constraints (such as moral substitutional requirements like
impartiality, e.g. whether considered judgements hold for substitute valuers, and uniformity,
e.g. whether similar acts are judged in similar ways). Essentially, the coherence procedure
consists in asking whether the next or a relevant judgement fits together with what has been
accepted, while meeting constraints, without leading to what has been rejected or excluded. If
it does fit it is added to the included side, otherwise it is sent to the excluded side. Because an
aim of this rationalisation procedure is achievement of some sort of equilibrium such coherence
procedures have gained currency under the rubric "reflective equilibrium". Observe, however,
that equilibrium reached at some stage may be lost as new types of problems arise and further
information enters. No doubt the whole methodology (like the parallel methodology of an
empirically-based coherence theory of truth) is highly idealised, and only practicably applicable
in rudimentary parts. It does however surmount a major theoretical obstacle for environmental
value theory; it reveals how in principle a nonreductionistic value theory can function, and
deliver a tenable value system. Whether what results is however an appropriate deep
environmental system will depend above all on the presentational input, the extent to which
environmental sensitivity enters and is not suppressed.
Enhancement methods reveal too that value systems are not uniquely determined, any
more than other comprehensive theoretical frameworks. There evidently are rival value
systems measuring up to rigorous rationality requirements, much as there are rival logics and
rival physical and biological systems. In particular chauvinistic systems, narrow or shallow
value systems, which are unresponsive to and take no account of environmental items and
values, cannot be excluded on rational or straight logical grounds. Unfortunately such systems
remain in ascendancy, and tend to dominate social and political practice; in recent times
economism, a narrow type of utilitarianism, has all too obviously dominated much terrestial
practice. While such value frameworks are open to severe criticism, for instance as
chauvinistic, as violating universality requirements of morality in the case of economism, they

do not succumb to definitive refutatiog (for the reason that requirements of morality,
universalizability of principle, impartiality and so on, can simply be repudiated; immoral or
amoral frameworks are still value systems). Even so, much can be done to shift or alter
values, though as usual effectiveness cannot be guaranteed. A range of argumentative,
educational and persuasive techniques, of varying quality, can be put to work to move valuers
indoctrinated in old damaging structures, often enough successfully. Important among these
are positive presentations of environments, their habitats and creatures, by way of new
information and experience.
The availability of rival value systems, while it implies a certain desirable (and also
troublesome) pluralism, does not mean relativism. From a deep-green viewpoint, rival
narrower and shallower systems are definitely inferior, and criticised accordingly, while
economism is an anathema which does not even make the moral grade (e.g. too many
principles stop at class or state boundaries). However a critical pluralism does acknowledge
and offer a place in the wider scheme of things for other systems, even if as less favoured or
satisfactory. One political upshot is evident; deep-green theory promotes, what matters in these
irrational times of numbers, alliances - in particular, a green alliance, organising green
positions, against prevailing forces of environmental degradation.
The systematic pluralism of deep-green value theory interpenetrates not only social and
political domains above, but also metaphysics traditionally placed below. In the underlying
metaphysical pluralism of deep-green theory, value runs very deep - so deep that even truth
depends in part upon it. For not merely selection of a correct comprehensive theory or worldview is a value dependent choice, but choice of associated actual world is also. That choice,
insofar as it is consciously made, of world structure and conceptualisation, is a constrained
choice, constrained by informational inputs, such as those of refined perception. But inasmuch
as it is rationally accomplished, that choice, like other choices of structure, proceeds according
to a standard value-information analysis (regularly oversimplified however to a preferenceinformation or even desire-belief modelling); that is, to extract the salient point, it involves
value essentially.
Truth and value are then intertwined; truth, though naturally different from value, is value
dependent. Both are plural, and differently so. So, unremarkably deep-green metaphysics
resembles the value theory in significant respects. For example, as the value theory is
nonreductionistic, so also is the metaphysics; in particular, there is a no-reduction theme that
neither parts nor wholes reduce eliminably to one another, as opposed to atomistic and holistic
views of environmental interrelations. As the value theory is pluralistic, so also is the
metaphysics; in place of established absolutism, a plurality of worlds, with associated truth
definitions is discerned. Indeed a main aim of deep-green theory is to dislodge dominant

destructive ideologies, which (each of th]m) assume an absolute truth, from their positions thereby providing intellectual living-space for natural environments.
Much of deep-green theory devolves then from the abstract value theory. As with the
metaphysical way sketched, so it is with the fuller ethical theory, which includes as well as a
specific axiological system, elaborating deep environmental values and virtues, a deontic
framework, supplying obligations, rights, taboos, and similar. For example, given that a
certain wild river is intrinsically valuable, as we can verify by on-site experience and
enhancement methods, and given that we duly respect that value, as deontic principles will tell
us we should, then we are not free to do as we like with that river, to dam it with concrete, to
channel it within concrete, stripping it of its riverine ecosystems. But that does not preclude
respectful use of the river, swimming or sailing quietly in its waters, and the like. Value thus
guides action, practice, and use; it is the ground also upon which principles are formulated,
principles that are assessed and validated by way of enhancement methods. Important among
these are non-interference principles, which exclude unwarranted interference with other
preference-havers and unwarranted damage, ill-treatment, or devaluation of items of value.
Such deontic principles circumscribe environmentally-limited freedom of action. Given noninterference principles, a major shift in onus of proof from homocentricethics takes place.
What is required now is that reasons be givenfor interfering with the environment, rather than
reasons for not doing so. Also direct responsibility for environmental interference or
modification falls upon those who would seriously interfere or significantly modify, who
would tread heavily on the land. Non-interference does not preclude use - only too much use
and use of too much. What it does lead to is the theme that, where use occurs, it should be
careful and respectful use.
An important respect thesis regarding environmental items is founded on such non-interference
principles and the no-reduction theme: namely,
• not to put others (other preference havers) into a dispreferred state for no good reason;
• not to jeopardise the well-being of natural objects or systems without good reason;
• not to damage or destroy items which, while they cannot literally be put into a dispreferred
state, can be damaged or destroyed or have their value eroded or impaired.
These apply to ecosystems, their surrounds, their parts, and so on. The mere making of
further excess profits, or similar economic excuses, are not good reasons. Such a respect
thesis forms part of the ecological outlook of deep-green theory.
Deep-green ethical theory amounts to much more than just another non-reductionist
ethical theory, which highlights ecological values and virtues, and so forth. It changes the
character and shape of ethical enterprise. Perhaps most strikingly, it removes humans as such

from the centre of the ethical stage (or :xclusive occupation of the stage). The biological
concept of being human ceases to be a significant ethical category. To elevate it to such is to
fall into human chauvinism, a type of class chauvinism which unwarrantedly discriminates in
favour of the human species. The prevailing chauvinism is not inevitable; it is very logically
avoided by directly connecting ethical characteristics with the categories of items that can have
them. Relevant categories include those marked out by features like: having well-being,
preference-having, rights-holding, contractual-capability, and so on, categories not necessarily
connected with any particular species. Hitherto virtually all Western ethical theories, and the
institutional arrangements they help support, have not merely limited ethical matters to interhuman affairs, but have been blatantly chauvinistic, exhibiting substantial and unjustifiable
discrimination in favour of humans (or certain privileged humans).
Deep-green theory thus implies the inadequacy of prevailing social, political and
economic arrangements and institutions. These structures are the defective products of inferior
value frameworks which take quite insufficient account of environmental desiderata and values.
Richard Sylvan*
RMB 683
Bungendore NSW 2621

*

Thanks to David Bennett for comments on an earlier draft. For more on deep-green theory, see
essays in and work referred to in the Green Series, i.e. Discussion Papers in Environmental
Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National University, Canberra.
This compressed essay was solicited by and written for Island Magazine (Tasmania). Upon receiving
it however, the editors decided that it was too dense, and insufficiently journalistic and popular (not
features they had at any time requested), for their magazine.

Collection

Citation

Richard Sylvan, “Box 16, Item 1223: Drafts of Deep-green ethics chapters, and short version of On the value core of deep-green theory,” Antipodean Antinuclearism, accessed March 28, 2024, https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/show/123.

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