Nature’s Intrinsic Value: A Forgotten Philosophy of the Environment

Although the concept has faced relative neglect in recent decades and withered under a well-deserved critique, one major goal of this book is to advocate for the intrinsic value of nature as the best foundational principle in a genuinely ecocentric moral philosophy. This is the principle that nature is valuable according to its own essence and attributes, whether or not a subject recognizes it as valuable (Taylor, 1986, p. 73). This principle has been critiqued as practically unworkable and even conceptually unsound. And those critiques are correct: the problems of what has this value property and what does not, whether value is a property of a body itself or derived from some other property, and the chronic inability of a principle of nature’s intrinsic value to provide us any guidance in conflicts between human and nonhuman priorities and projects are all valid and inescapable. This chapter discusses how previous articulations of the principle of nature’s intrinsic value are limited, and offers my own remix of the idea that avoids these problems. Instead of nature itself, the object of intrinsic value is natural diversity. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.